Curated playlist
Jewish American military personnel
- 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, New York. His father had been a horse trader in Russia and became a ragman in…
- Jack L. WarnerJack Leonard Warner ran Warner Bros. Studios for more than half a century, longer than any other pioneering Hollywood mogul. His career began with a pawned horse and a borrowed chair, and it ended with an estate valued at $15 million and a…
- 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. The budget had ballooned from $7 million to $15 million, and everyone on the lot knew that if the picture failed,…
- 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. He had grown up in Fürth, Bavaria, watched Hitler Youth gangs beat him and his…
- Stan LeeStan Lee signed off his monthly column with a single word: "Excelsior!" It is also the New York state motto, which suited a man born Stanley Martin Lieber on the 28th of December 1922, in Manhattan. He started his working life filling…
- 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. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at a drawing table in his home, turning out four to five…
- 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. That distinction alone would earn a place in the record books. But the fuller story of Alpert is…
- 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 himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to…
- 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 the shadow of great American literature. He died on the 21st of July 2015, and when…
- Shelby FooteShelby Dade Foote Jr. was born on the 17th of November 1916 in Greenville, Mississippi. His father worked for Armour and Company, moving the family from Greenville to Jackson and then Vicksburg before settling in Mobile, Alabama. When…
- Saul ZaentzSaul Zaentz won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, a feat almost no one else in Hollywood has matched. Born on the 28th of February 1921, in Passaic, New Jersey, he was the youngest of five children of Polish Jewish immigrants. He…
- Red AuerbachRed Auerbach lit a cigar on the bench while the game was still being played. It was his signal to the opposing team, to the crowd, to anyone watching: this one is over. The habit became so iconic that Boston restaurants in the 1960s posted…