Curated category
American people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent
- Bill WeisbandBill Weisband carried a secret that may have set back American codebreaking by years, and he carried it to his grave. Born in Odessa in 1908, he arrived in…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- Paul KrugmanPaul Krugman grew up in Merrick, a hamlet on Long Island, and traces his interest in economics not to a professor or a recession, but to science fiction.
- Norm DruckerNorm Drucker was born on the 4th of July, 1920, in New York City, and died on the 6th of February, 2015. In the span of those 94 years, he became one of the…
- 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.
- Irvin KershnerIrvin Kershner was born Isadore Kershner on the 29th of April 1923 in Philadelphia. His parents were Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants who filled his early years…
- Wilhelm ReichWilhelm Reich was born on the 24th of March 1897 in Dobzau, Galicia, a corner of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Ukraine, and he died on the 3rd of…
- Harold BloomHarold Bloom was, by the time he died in 2019, probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world. He grew up at 1410 Grand Concourse in…
- Armand HammerArmand Hammer died in Los Angeles in December 1990, aged 92, and was buried directly across the street from the headquarters of Occidental Petroleum - the…