Overview
- Her family said she died on Jan. 1 at her home in San Francisco at age 91.
- Born in Berlin in 1934 to Latvian Jewish parents, her six-month portrait ran on the 1935 cover of the pro-Nazi magazine Sonne ins Haus as the regime’s model Aryan baby.
- Photographer Hans Ballin later told her parents he submitted the image deliberately to expose the absurdity of Nazi racial ideology, leading the family to keep her indoors for fear of discovery.
- The Levinsons left Germany in the late 1930s and, after time in Latvia, France and Cuba, settled in New York City in 1949.
- Taft earned chemistry degrees from Barnard and Columbia, spent decades at Educational Testing Service, later taught at St. John’s University, and in 2014 told Yad Vashem the episode felt like “good revenge.”