Curated playlist
Jews from New York (state)
- 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. Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in the Bronx on the 30th of November 1935, he has written for film,…
- 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 train wreck with his Lionel set. That eight-millimeter camera, borrowed from his…
- 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 a private screening of his final film for his family and its stars. Between those…
- 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…
- 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 himself. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell watched him grow tenser as the final…
- 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 grew from $56 billion to $231 billion. That arc, from entry-level grunt work to…
- 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…
- 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. His father, Robert Downey Sr., was a filmmaker who introduced him to marijuana before he was ten…
- 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 photographer exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a keyboardist in one of…
- 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 suicide in April 1949, turned that epitaph into a chart-topping song. "To Know Him…
- J. J. AbramsJ. J. Abrams wrote his first film score at age 16 for a low-budget horror movie called Nightbeast. That was 1982, and it was not the work of a film student or an intern. It was the work of a teenager from Los Angeles who had already…
- Janet YellenJanet Yellen grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a row house where her father Julius, a family physician, ran his practice out of the ground floor. The daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher who gave up her career to raise children,…
- Dolph SchayesAdolph Schayes practiced so relentlessly at New York University that his coach, Howard Cann, once said, "He was in the gym practicing every spare minute. We had to chase him out." That habit turned into a professional career spent entirely…
- 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. By the time he was forty, he had helped build one of the most watched television series in history.…
- 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 that made millions laugh. But from 1989 to 2014, he sat in a room with the host,…
- 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 company he had run for 33 years. That proximity was fitting. Hammer spent his life…
- 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…