 Her father's family, the Rosenblums, were proud of their Hungarian background and considered themselves Austro-Hungarians rather than Jews.Her mother's family, on the other hand, were Orthodox Jews, with her maternal grandfather serving as a "shokhet", a supervisor of the ritual slaughter of animals to ensure that they were kosher.Healey was a so-called "red diaper baby," and her mother was won over to socialism as a teenager after hearing a lecture on the subject delivered by J. Stitt Wilson in 1900 and later took part in helping to establish the Communist Party of America.