Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Vera Katz, Jewish Mayor Of Portland Who Made It A Hipster Heaven, Dies At 84

Vera Katz, the dynamic, three-term mayor of Portland, Oregon who helped give the city its reputation as a haven for hipsters, died this week at 84, the Oregonian reported. The cause was leukemia, her third cancer diagnosis since 2000.

Katz was remembered in Portland as a warm yet outspoken political force who often advocated for women. Her parents escaped from Europe in 1940 with Katz and her older sister Zena. Her son, Jesse Katz, said that his mother’s political career was motivated by “an obligation to pay back her adopted home.”

“America … rescued her when she was a little girl,” Katz said.


Katz began her political climb in Oregon in the 1980s, and took inspiration from Robert F. Kennedy and Cesar Chavez. She was the first female Speaker of Oregon’s House of Representatives.

Elected mayor of Portland in 1992 and serving until 2005, Katz led the city through its reinvention as a hub of progressivism, bike lanes and craft beer.

All through her career, Katz tried her best to rule by consensus, a practice she called the “feminization of power.”

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.