* Has served as president of the International Peace Bureau and the Hague Appeal for Peace
* Was a representative of the Peace Action Network
* Was a steering committee member of the Peace and Security Funders Group.
* Served as a financier and board member of the Institute for Policy Studies
* Directed the Disarmament Program at New York’s Riverside Church in the late 1970s and early 1980s
* During the Vietnam War, Weiss attempted to coerce the families of American POWs to make pro-communist propaganda by promising them contact with their loved ones in Hanoi.
Born to Jewish communist parents in Harlem, New York on October 2, 1934, Cora Weiss came into the world as Cora Rubin. Her mother was Vera D. Rubin, a prominent anthropologist who specialized in Caribbean studies and was connected to such academic institutions as Brandeis University, Columbia University, New York University, Hunter College, and Cornell University Medical School. Cora’s father was Samuel Rubin, who earned a vast fortune with the Fabergé corporation. That fortune subsequently served as a major source of seed money for the creation of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a think tank that consistently support Communist and anti-American causes around the world throughout the Cold War.
When Cora was young, her family relocated from harlem to the town of Croton-on-Hudson in Westchester County, New York, where, according to The New York Times, the girl “was exposed to animated political discussions with guests like Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady, who would drop by to chat and help with fund-raising.”
In 1952 Cora enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM), where she met a newspaper editor who was leading an effort to recall the famous anti-Communist U.S. Senator, Joseph R. McCarthy. Cora’s association with that editor prompted her to help establish the Madison headquarters for “Joe Must Go,” a door-to-door campaign to gather signatures for a petition calling for McCarthy’s ouster.
While serving as chairwoman of UWM’s international speakers club, Cora invited attorney Peter Weiss — because of his position as head of the International Development Placement Association, a precursor to the Peace Corps — to speak on the Wisconsin-Madison campus. The pair ended up forming a relationship that led to their marriage in 1956, the same year Cora graduated with a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology.
Cora Weiss went on to become an activist who devoted her entire adult life to the antiwar, civil rights, and feminist movements. She also became president of the Samuel Rubin Foundation at its inception in 1959.
From 1959-63, Weiss was executive director of the African-American Students Foundation (AASF), whose mission was to raise money to help African students attend colleges in the United States. Among the noteworthy recipients of AASF education grants were Wangari Maathai and Barack Obama Sr., the father of future U.S. President Barack Obama.
In 1961, Weiss received an honorary doctorate from Adelphi University.
In 1961 as well, Weiss became a leader of the Riverdale, New York chapter of Women Strike for Peace (WSP), an anti-nuclear/anti-war group that, according to one congressional study, “enjoyed the complete support of the Communist Party.”
Shortly after joining WSP, Weiss read copious materials about the potentially deadly after-effects of atmospheric atomic bomb tests, and she had her children’s baby teeth tested for the presence of radioactive isotopes resulting from nuclear fission. According to The New York Times: “Many of the teeth were found to have elevated levels of strontium-90, a carcinogenic element associated with nuclear testing that had also been detected in food. That finding boosted [WSP’s] visibility, attracting attention to its campaign to ban nuclear tests. By October 1963, President John F. Kennedy had signed an agreement with Britain and the Soviet Union to prohibit atomic testing in the atmosphere, space and under water.”
In 1963 Weiss played a key role in the Samuel Rubin Foundation’s decision to create the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Her husband, Peter Weiss, served as the first chairman of IPS’s board of directors. Together, the Weisses selected Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin to be the initial co-directors of the new think tank.
By the late 1960s, Weiss and WSP shifted the focus of their activism to protesting America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. At one demonstration in Washington, D.C., Weiss and a number of fellow protesters used their high-heeled shoes to bang on the doors of the U.S. Defense Department headquarters. At another demonstration, in New York City, Weiss and a host of women lay down on the pavement of Park Avenue while displaying signs that bore the names of Vietnamese dead.
Weiss also participated in numerous meetings with Vietnamese Communist officials in Paris and Hanoi. After one particular trip to Hanoi in December 1969, during which she had visited the infamously barbaric prison dubbed as the “Hanoi Hilton,” Weiss returned to the U.S. and reported that American prisoners were being held in “excellent living conditions” in Hanoi’s “immaculate” jails. When U.S. Navy Lieutenant Robert Frishman, a returning prisoner of war (POW) who had suffered a severe arm injury while in Hanoi’s custody, subsequently contradicted Weiss’ portrayal of North Vietnamese prison conditions, Weiss quipped: “Since [Frishman] was caught as a war criminal, he was lucky to have an arm at all.”
During that same trip to Hanoi, Weiss voiced her desire to collect letters written by American POWs and bring them back to their families in the United States. That idea led to the formation of the Committee of Liaison With Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam, which was co-chaired by Weiss and eventually transported thousands of letters and packages back and forth between prisoners and their loved ones back home.
As co-chairr of the Committee of Liaison, Weiss, who made it plain that she knew the names of many American POWs, attempted to coerce relatives of those captives to intone pro-Communist propaganda by promising them, in return, the possibility of making contact with—or even winning the release of—their loved ones in Hanoi. None of the families accepted that arrangement.
In the early 1970s, Weiss was a sponsor of Medical Aid For Indochina (MAI), a new organization whose mission was to aid the Communist forces in Southeast Asia (North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). She continued to support the Communists not only until the war’s end in 1975, but afterward as well, channeling material aid to Hanoi through the Church World Service and the National Council of Churches.
Once the North Vietnamese Communists had conquered South Vietnam, Weiss founded and served on the Interim Committee of Friendshipment, an organization whose purpose was to send aid to Hanoi and propagandize against the U.S. embargo.
Following the war, Weiss worked to have Vietnam admitted to the United Nations; she later served as chairwoman of the committee celebrating Vietnam’s ultimate admission in 1977. On that historic occasion, Weiss — ignoring Hanoi’s long record of egregious human-rights violations and its torture of American POWs — shouted to the Vietnamese delegation: “Welcome in the name of the American people!” That same year, Weiss was among the signers of an advertisement defending Hanoi’s abysmal human-rights record.
Also in the aftermath of the war, Weiss criticized the South Vietnamese refugees who chose to flee from their Communist conquerors. On May 29, 1978, the Washington Post quoted Weiss saying: “Every country [i.e., including Vietnam] is entitled to its people. The people are a basic resource that belongs to the country.”
As a trustee of Hampshire College in the 1970s, Weiss started a campus campaign to divest from companies that were conducting business in apartheid South Africa.
In 1976 Weiss was an Executive Board member of a hardcore Marxist organization known as the July 4th Coalition, which was formed to protest the 200th anniversary of America’s founding.
In 1978 Weiss was invited by William Sloane Coffin, the activist left-wing minister at Manhattan’s Riverside Church — situated across the street from the headquarters of the National Council of Churches — to direct Riverside’s Disarmament Program, which, in the name of “peace,” sought to help consolidate Soviet nuclear superiority in Europe. The program’s inaugural event was attended by three IPS luminaries: Peter Weiss, Marcus Raskin, and Richard Barnet. Cora Weiss and Rev. Coffin also invited Yuri Karpralov and Sergi Paramonov, two KGB officers who were members of the Soviet Embassy.
In her role as head of the Disarmament Program, Weiss helped organize the largest pro-disarmament demonstration ever held, drawing some 1 million attendees in New York’s Central Park on Saturday, June 12.
During her decade-long tenure at Riverside, Weiss regularly received Cuban intelligence agents, Russian KGB agents, and Sandinista friends. She tried to make the case that the perceived Soviet threat was nothing more than a “hereditary disease,” a figment of the American imagination.
Also during the Cold War, Weiss attended women’s disarmament summits in the Soviet Union. In 1983 she was a delegate to an American-Soviet disarmament conference sponsored by IPS. Moreover, she was active with the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), which later merged with the Nuclear Freeze Campaign and eventually (in 1993) became Peace Action, for which Weiss acted as an international representative.
In 1984 Weiss was part of a U.S. delegation whose members were guests of the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
In 1995 Weiss participated in the United Nations Conference on Women, held in Beijing. The following year, she was named president of The Hague Appeal for Peace.
In 1999 Weiss was honored by the Phelps Stokes Fund for the Africa-related work she had done over the years, most notably as executive director of the African-American Students Foundation in the early Sixties.
A lifelong supporter of the United Nations, Weiss was especially proud of the role she played in helping to draft United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which affirmed the important role that women could play in promoting peace and security around the world. Adopted unanimously on October 31, 2000, the Resolution read, in part, as follows:
“The resolution reaffirms the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace-building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and in post-conflict reconstruction and stresses the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security. Resolution 1325 urges all actors to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspectives in all United Nations peace and security efforts. It also calls on all parties to conflict to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, in situations of armed conflict.”
Eight days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, Weiss lent her name to a Statement titled “Justice Not Vengeance,” which said that a military response by America would only “spark a cycle of escalating violence,” and that bringing the perpetrators “to justice under the rule of law—not military action—is the way to end the violence.” Among the other signatories were such notables as Harry Belafonte, John Cavanagh, Danny Glover, Ziad Asali, Medea Benjamin, Ben Cohen, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mike Farrell, Jerry Greenfield, Randy Hayes, Steve Kirsch, Saul Landau, Michael Lerner, Rosa Parks, Bonnie Raitt, Marcus Raskin, Michael Ratner, Mark Ritchie, Edward Said, Martin Sheen, Alice Slater, Gloria Steinem, and Alice Walker. To view a more comprehensive list of names, click here.
From 2000-2006, Weiss served as president of the International Peace Bureau. She also continued her duties as president of the Hague Appeal for Peace throughout this period, and served as a steering committee member of the recently formed Peace and Security Funders Group.
Asserting that war constituted “the greatest environmental crime” imaginable, Weiss in 2003 was a signatory to a letter entitled “Global Warming: An Interfaith Call for Repentance and Renewal,” which specifically blamed the U.S. for the proliferation of global greenhouse-gas emissions and advocated the creation of “a sustainable economy” that might help to heal “earth’s wounds.” Other signers included William Sloane Coffin, Robert Edgar, and Ingrid Mattson.
Addressing the UN Department on Disarmament Affairs in October 2006, Weiss rationalized North Korea’s ongoing quest to build nuclear weapons as a development that was “no more dangerous than” the fact that the United States possessed such weapons.
Weiss was a strong supporter of the Center for Constitutional Rights, to which she donated $40,000 in 2008. Her husband, Peter, was a vice president with that organization for many years.
In 2008, Cora Weiss supported Democrat Barack Obama for U.S. President.
In June 2010, Weiss addressed a “Disarm Now!” conference at Riverside Church in New York City.
Below is a partial list of Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Socialist Workers Party, and other communist “united front” organizations and causes in which Weiss participated at various times from the 1960s onward:
Over the years, Weiss donated money to the campaigns of numerous political candidates, all of them Democrats and Independents. Among the more notable recipients were Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Tom Harkin, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Maxine Waters, and Jesse Jackson.
In 2016, the Nobel Women’s Initiative asked Weiss how she managed to remain passionately committed to the cause of peace after so many years of activism. “All you have to do is look at the children and grandchildren, your own and everyone else’s,” she replied. “They deserve a sane and safe world to live in, and it’s our job to give it to them!”
Weiss died of lymphoma in a New York City hospital on December 8, 2025.
Further Reading: “Cora Weiss” (WomenInPeace.org, DCTVNY.org, KeyWiki.org, Adelphi.edu, Peace.ca); “Red Queen of “Peace” (by Michael Tremoglie, 12-11-2002); “Cora Weiss Papers, 1960-” (Swarthmore.edu); Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, the Global New Left, and Radical Islam (by Robert Chandler, pp. 191-202); “Presentation at the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs on ‘The United Nations and Security’” (10-11-2006); “Affiliations” (KeyWiki.org, re: Cora Weiss’s ties to Communist and “united front” organizations).