Jane Katz

Jane Katz (born 1943) is an educator, author, and world-class former Olympic competitive and long-distance swimmer. She has been awarded the Federation Internationale de Natation Amateur Certificate of Merit and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the US President's Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition (2014), and inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame (2011) and the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (2014).

Early life, personal life, and education Katz was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and raised on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York, and is Jewish. Her parents were Leon and Dorothea Katz. Her father coached the Lower East Side Neighborhood Association swim and track team, was a professor of electrical engineering technology, and with her mother wrote the electrical engineering book Transients in Electric Circuits.

She went to Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side, and then attended City College of New York in Manhattan, studying physical education and receiving a bachelor's degree in 1963. Katz earned a master's degree in Education Administration from New York University in 1966, and a master's in Therapeutic Recreation for Aging in 1972 and a Doctor of Education degree in Gerontology in 1978 from Columbia University. Erlanger died in 2007.

Swimming career Katz's father taught her how to swim at age two, and she competed in her first swim meet at age seven. At the 1961 Maccabiah Games, she won the gold medal in the 100 m butterfly, and a gold medal in the 400 m relay.

Katz was awarded the Ballinger Award as the outstanding senior woman swimmer in the Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union in 1959, 1960, and 1961.

As a member of the 1964 Olympics United States Synchronized Swimming Performance Team in Tokyo, In 1994, she won the 400-m freestyle in the 50 to 54 age group at the Fifth World Masters Championship in Montreal. for her pioneering athletic contributions to the field of aquatics. From this experience she began creating a series of instructional books and videos. Among them is the DVD, "Swim Basics – Aquatics for Lifetime Fitness" (2005), and the books, Your Water Workout: No-Impact Aerobics and Strength Training From Yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi and More (Broadway Books, 2003) and Swimming For Total Fitness, co-authored by Nancy P. Bruning (Broadway Books, 1993). She is the author of 14 books on swimming, fitness, and exercising in the water.