Philoine was the daughter of labor pioneers Sidney Hillman & Bessie Abramowitz Hillman. She and her sister Selma (Sally) were "union kids" who accompanied their activist parents as they built the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America into one of the country's most progressive and influential unions. Throughout her life she remained dedicated to the labor movement and to progressive causes.
Philoine grew up in Lynbrook, Long Island, before the family moved to an apartment on East 20th Street in Manhattan. She was a student athlete who loved and excelled at basketball. She attended Oberlin College for two years before transferring to and graduating from New York University. It was at NYU that she met her future husband, Milton, "in church" as she liked to tell it. (They met at a classical music concert at a church on lower Fifth Avenue.) For three eventful years from 1940 to 1943, traveling between New York and Washington, DC, Philoine served as her father’s Executive Assistant after Sidney Hillman was appointed by President Roosevelt to the Office of Production Management and its successor, the War Production Board.
Philoine Hillman and Milton Fried were married on May 31, 1943. The newlyweds moved into a small Washington Heights apartment. Milton was an economics instructor at NYU while doing graduate work at Columbia University. In 1945 he joined the United States Foreign Service and together Philoine and he began a decade-long adventure abroad, with postings in post-World War II Paris; then in Prague, Czechoslovakia; and finally in Tel Aviv during the first six years of the new State of Israel. Their first son, Michael, was born in 1948, and Geoffry was born in 1952. The family returned to the U.S. in 1954, and settled in the Bronx, bringing stories from their travels that would last a lifetime. In 1962 Philoine supervised the family's move to the Penn South Cooperative in Manhattan. There she would spend the next 57 years of her life, serving on the board of the cooperative, and involving herself in local politics and community board activities.
After Milton passed away in 1969, with the courage, grace, and strength that were her hallmarks, Philoine reinvented herself. She worked for Blue Cross/Blue Shield for ten years as a correspondent, and she began her own life of community activism, with service to many non-profit organizations, and love of the arts in New York City. She volunteered with the Jewish Labor Committee, and organized their historic materials (including records of the JLC’s heroic efforts rescuing refugees from the Nazis) for preservation in the Wagner Labor Archives. She also volunteered for many years at the Jewish Museum, and was a founding member of the New York Labor History Association and served as its Treasurer until her “retirement” at age 100. As a life-long New Yorker, she loved attending concerts at the NY Philharmonic and the New School, the fall and spring seasons of the New York City Ballet, the New York City and Metropolitan Opera and visiting museums. Throughout her life, and even more so in later life, she was an avid reader.
Philoine made friends and lifelong associations wherever she went. In May 2019 she was a recipient of a 2019 Claira Lemlich Award given by LaborArts and the Museum of the City of New York. Her citation read "honoring a lifetime of effort for the public good." Loving wife and mother, dedicated to family and friends, she spent her life bringing people together and working for social justice.
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