Granted, with "several dozen" chipping a ten-spot each, the gift basket and stuff would have added up to a couple of hundred dollars (on their website, gift packages from Russ & Daughters range from $160 to $485; high-end stuff), but it's still not anywhere near the "gifts" the conservatives have accepted. But Kagan stressed over it and turned them down.
https://forward.com/fast-forward/546201/elena-kagan-clarence-thomas-bagels-and-lox/
A group of women who went to high school with Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wanted to send her bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters, the legendary deli on the Lower East Side. But they scrapped the plan after Kagan expressed concerns about the court’s ethics rules for reporting gifts.
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Schulman, a novelist, playwright, gay activist and historian, was one of several dozen Hunter alumnae who chipped in $10 apiece toward the proposed order — which also was meant to include babka. (“I was never sending a Russ and Daughters gift basket without the babka!” Starer said.) A few women also sent personal tchotchkes to pass along to Kagan, Starer said — including a bag of chocolates and a handmade work of crochet. The linguist Deborah Tannen, who graduated from Hunter in 1962, sent an autographed copy of her memoir.
Before shipping anything, though, Starer got in touch with Kagan because she “didn’t want to send it without having her OK.” Once Kagan expressed concerns that the gifts might pose issues under the Supreme Court’s rules on gifts and disclosures, Starer decided against following through with the package. The money and tchotchkes were returned to the contributors.
“It was creating more stress for her than it was worth,” Starer said. Although Kagan “was incredibly touched, she was definitely not comfortable with it.” “Elena was always a very solid, trustworthy person,” Schulman, a professor at Northwestern University, said by phone. “She was the president of student government at Hunter, and just a very normal Jewish girl from Manhattan. And we were all very proud of her, but very concerned about her having to be on the front lines with these scoundrels. We thought it would be a sign of support to send her some lox, but she was too ethical to take the lox.”
Russ & Daughters' gift page:
https://russanddaughters.goldbelly.com/categories/gifts-and-easy-ordering
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