Curated category
21st-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.
- Simon KinbergSimon David Kinberg arrived in Hammersmith, London, on the 2nd of August 1973. His parents were American citizens who moved him to Los Angeles when he was…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- Bryan BurkBryan Burk was born on the 30th of December 1968 into a Jewish family. He grew up hearing stories that shaped his identity and later influenced his creative…
- 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…
- Mark ZuckerbergMark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on the 14th of May 1984 in White Plains, New York, and by his mid-twenties he had built the largest social network in human…
- 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…
- Seymour DrescherSeymour Drescher was born in 1934 in the Bronx, New York. His parents were Polish Jewish immigrants who brought their history to American soil.
- 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…
- 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.
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before.
- 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…
- Robert Downey Jr.Robert Downey Jr. was born on the 4th of April 1965 in Manhattan, into a world already saturated with film sets and controlled substances.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- Sam Bankman-FriedSamuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried was born on the 5th of March 1992, in Stanford, California. His parents were Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors…
- 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…
- Jonathan KasdanJonathan Peter Kasdan was born on the 30th of September 1979 in Los Angeles. His father Lawrence Kasdan worked as a writer and director while his mother Meg…
- Gabor BorittGabor Boritt was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. The Nazis forced his family into a single room within a hospital on the edge of the…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- David ChaumDavid Lee Chaum, born in 1955, sketched the blueprint for digital privacy long before most people had an email address. In 1982, the same year he finished…
- 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…
- Donald SterlingDonald T. Sterling was born Donald Samuel Tokowitz on the 26th of April 1934, in Chicago. His family moved to the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles when he…
- D. B. WeissD. B. Weiss was born on the 23rd of April, 1971, in Chicago, Illinois, and the career he eventually built would become one of the most celebrated and then…
- David BenioffDavid Benioff was born David Friedman on the 25th of September, 1970, the youngest of three children in a Jewish family in New York City.
- 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.
- Hubert DreyfusHubert Dreyfus walked into the RAND Corporation in 1964 with a commission that seemed routine: review the latest work in artificial intelligence.
- Sam AltmanSam Altman got his first computer at age eight: an Apple Macintosh. Within a few years he was disassembling it to examine the hardware inside.
- Gary BeckerGary Stanley Becker was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and by the time he died in Chicago on the 3rd of May 2014, he had done…
- Bruce VilanchBruce Vilanch is the man behind the jokes you heard at the Oscars for a quarter century. His name never appeared on the screen during those telecast moments…
- Jonathan TropperJonathan Tropper grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York City, in a liberal observant Jewish household, attending a co-ed Modern Orthodox…
- Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt once recalled the moment he realized the term "New Historicism" had taken on a life of its own. When he heard that American universities…
- Gerald HoltonGerald James Holton was born on the 23rd of May 1922, in Berlin, Germany. He grew up in a Jewish family where his father worked as an attorney specializing…