Curated category
20th-century American Jews
- Bob DylanBob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on the 24th of May, 1941, at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. His Hebrew name was Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham.
- Woody AllenWoody Allen has made 50 feature films. That single fact sits at the center of a career so long and so productive it resists easy summary.
- Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a…
- Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was born on the 26th of July 1928 in the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, and he died on the 7th of March 1999, just a few days after hosting…
- Marilyn MonroeMarilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on the 1st of June 1926, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, at a city hospital.
- Kirk DouglasKirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on the 9th of December 1916, the only son among seven children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Amsterdam…
- Elizabeth TaylorElizabeth Taylor was born on the 27th of February 1932 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, northwest London, in a family home called Heathwood.
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer stood in a control bunker near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of the 16th of July, 1945, holding a post to steady…
- Amy FinkelsteinAmy Nadya Finkelstein was born on the 2nd of November 1973 in New York City. Her parents were both biologists who earned doctorates at The Rockefeller…
- Howard Marks (investor)Howard Stanley Marks was born in 1946 and raised in Queens, New York. His family was ethnically Jewish, yet he grew up as a Christian Scientist.
- George GershwinGeorge Gershwin's last words were "Fred Astaire." He spoke them on the night of the 9th of July 1937, as he collapsed in a borrowed house in Beverly Hills…
- Natalie PortmanNatalie Portman was born on the 9th of June 1981, in Jerusalem, at Hadassah Medical Center. She has spent most of her life navigating two worlds: the…
- William WylerWilliam Wyler walked away from the set of Ben-Hur in 1959 having just overseen a chariot race that took six months to film.
- Ralph BakshiRalph Bakshi was born on the 29th of October 1938 in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, into a Krymchak Jewish family, and by the time he was a teenager in Brooklyn…
- Bob IgerBob Iger started his career earning $150 a week doing menial labor on television sets. Decades later, he would oversee a company whose market capitalization…
- Aaron CoplandAaron Copland grew up above a Brooklyn shop at 628 Washington Avenue, in a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had traveled through Scotland just to…
- Arthur MillerArthur Miller died on the evening of the 10th of February 2005 - the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman.
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those…
- Adam SilverAdam Silver was born on the 25th of April, 1962, into a family already shaped by the law. His father Edward Silver was a senior partner at the prominent firm…
- Larry LieberLawrence D. Lieber arrived in Manhattan on the 26th of October 1931 to parents Celia and Jack Lieber, Romanian-Jewish immigrants who had built a life in New…
- Linda McCartneyLinda McCartney was born Linda Louise Eastman in Manhattan on the 24th of September 1941, and by the time she died on the 17th of April 1998, she had been a…
- Carl LaemmleKarl Lämmle was born on the 17th of January 1867 in Laupheim, Germany. He grew up in a Jewish family living in poverty on Radstrasse street.
- Nathan RosenNathan Rosen was born on the 22nd of March 1909 into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. The Great Depression shaped his early years as he attended…
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement.
- Phil SpectorPhil Spector's father chose three words for his own gravestone: "To Know Him Was To Love Him." His son Harvey, nine years old when Benjamin Spector died by…
- Jack KirbyJack Kirby drew at least 20,318 pages of published art and another 1,385 covers across his career. In 1962 alone he published 1,158 pages.
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed.
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day.
- J. J. AbramsOn a day in 1982, Jeffrey Jacob Abrams composed the music for a horror movie called Nightbeast. He was only sixteen years old when he wrote that score.
- Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was born on the 1st of May, 1923, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to poor Jewish immigrant parents from Russia.
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and…
- Paul SamuelsonPaul Samuelson stood at a lectern in a University of Chicago classroom on the 2nd of January, 1932, and later said that was the exact moment he was born as…
- Alan GreenspanAlan Greenspan stood before the United States Senate in February 1997 and told the assembled lawmakers that growing worker insecurity was, in his view, a…
- Daniel YerginDaniel Howard Yergin was born on the 6th of February 1947 in Los Angeles, California, and by the time he finished his fourth book, he had written what would…
- Al AronowitzAl Aronowitz was the man in the room when two of the most consequential musical forces of the twentieth century first met each other.
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee…
- David SternDavid Joel Stern was born on the 22nd of September 1942 in Manhattan, and he died on the 1st of January 2020 - New Year's Day - after a brain hemorrhage he…
- Herb AlpertHerb Alpert is the only musician in history to reach number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 as both a vocalist and an instrumentalist.
- Joe ShusterJoe Shuster was born in Toronto in 1914, too poor to afford drawing paper, so he wandered from store to store collecting whatever scraps merchants threw out.
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about…
- Jerry FodorJerry Fodor walked into philosophy at a moment when the mind was considered either a black box of behavioral inputs and outputs, or a tangle of neurons best…
- Terry WinogradTerry Allen Winograd was born on the 24th of February 1946, and he would go on to become one of computing's most quietly influential figures.
- E. L. DoctorowEdgar Lawrence Doctorow was born on the 6th of January 1931 in the Bronx, named after Edgar Allan Poe by parents who ran a small music shop and dreamed in…
- Lorne MichaelsLorne Michaels once offered The Beatles $3,000 to reunite on live television. He made the offer in front of a studio audience, on a brand-new NBC show…
- Dolph SchayesAdolph Schayes arrived in the world on the 19th of May 1928, within the Bronx borough of New York City. His parents were Romanian-Jewish immigrants who…
- Maurice PodoloffMaurice Podoloff was born to a Russian Jewish family in the Russian Empire on or about the 18th of August 1890. Doubt remains about his exact birthplace and…
- David X. CohenDavid Samuel Cohen was born on the 13th of July 1966 in New York City. Both of his parents were biologists, and he grew up planning to be a scientist himself.
- Ernest BeckerErnest Becker died on the 6th of March 1974, at age 49, in Burnaby, British Columbia. Two months later, the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded him their…
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)Walter Kaufmann arrived at Princeton University in 1947 as a young philosopher with a freshly minted Harvard doctorate, a dissertation completed in under a…
- Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam was a philosopher who changed his mind for a living. He arrived at Harvard in 1965, organized campus protests, taught courses on Marxism, and…