Winifred Meiselman

Winifred ("Win") Meiselman (1934-December 18, 2021) was the founder of the media accuracy group CAMERA, a historian of the American Civil War and specifically of Confederate spy Laura Ratcliffe, social worker, art therapist, poet, and artist.

Personal life

Born in Brighton, a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts to Louis Charm, an electrical engineer who later worked on the particle accelerator for the United States' Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Maybelle Charm. Meiselman attended Brighton High School.

Meiselman's older half-brother was Stanley E. Charm, founder of Charm Sciences Inc. in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She married David I. Meiselman, an important American economist and prominent monetarist, in 1965; he was then working at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

Education and early career

Meiselman attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was president of The Poetry Group; she met with prominent American poets such as Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Penn Warren. She later graduated with a BS in Early Child Development from the University of Minnesota and an MS in art therapy from George Washington University.Meiselman, Win: I Would Live and other poems (Merrybrook Press: 2017)

While living in St. Paul, Minnesota, Meiselman was first introduced to politics through protests of the Vietnam War on the campus of the University of Minnesota. Meiselman subsequently worked on the campaign of Eugene McCarthy in his 1968 challenge against President Lyndon Johnson.

Meiselman worked as a child psychologist and art therapist in Washington, DC following her move there with her family to Merrybrook in Herndon, Virginia in July 1971.

Meiselman first worked at the Northern Virginia Family Services in Oakton, Virginia and subsequently worked as the coordinator for outpatient services for the Department of Behavioral and Mental Health at Sibley Memorial Hospital in The Palisades neighborhood in Washington, D.C.

Founding of CAMERA

Win and David Meiselman were active in fundraising for Jewish and Israel causes, and hosted a major fundraiser for Israel immediately following the 1973 Yom Kippur War at Merrybrook.

Meiselman was active in Jewish and Israel causes early on in her career, and met and became inspired by William R. Perl and his wife, Lore, who were instrumental for the idea and inspiration for her creating CAMERA through their active friendship.

During this time, Meiselman was also active in fundraising for other social causes, including the Jewish Family Services of Northern Virginia and Russian-Jewish immigrants in the United States, as well as Vietnamese-Cambodian immigrants following the war.

The initial inspiration for the creation of CAMERA was the invasion of Lebanon in 1981 by Israel and reporting on the subject by the Washington Post. The investigations into media bias continued to newspapers such as the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and outlets such as NPR, PBS, and ABC News. Andrea Levin agreed with Meiselman to open CAMERA's Boston branch in 1988 following Levin's publishing of a rebuttal of The Boston Globe's Israel reporting in a Newton, Massachusetts newspaper. Under Meiselman's leadership, CAMERA grew and opened branches in Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. CAMERA was to later expand to other languages as well, such as Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic.

Meiselman formed the Advisory Board to CAMERA with prominent Washingtonians such as Saul Stern and Bernard S. White, who were active in the charities in the D.C. area. Meiselman also recruited Senators Rudy Boschwitz and Chuck Grassley, Congressman Tom Lantos, journalist M. Stanton Evans, Ambassador Charles Lichenstein, Pastor Roy Stewart, and Rabbi David Yellin. Other personalities were close to Meiselman and the organization, such as Tom Lantos and Charles Krauthammer.

Meiselman assisted the Boston chapter (under Andrea Levin) to organize a major event in the history of CAMERA, the 1989 CAMERA conference in the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. The conference drew a crowd of more than 1000 attendees, and featured speakers Norman Podhoretz, Alan Dershowitz, Ruth Wisse, Jerold Auerbach, and David Wyman

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