JEWISH HISTORY MONTH Postings
mark.r.leeper
JEWISH HISTORY MONTH Postings
November, 1991
This is this year's set of postings for Jewish Heritage Month. They are
copyright free. Please feel free to post them at your locations. No,
let me take that a step further. We would appreciate it if you would
post them in your location. Thank you.
Mark R. Leeper att!mtgzy!leeper
Evelyn C. Leeper att!mtgzy!ecl
--------------------------- Nov_01 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Hans Albrecht Bethe
There is an old song that goes, "Tell me why the stars do
shine." The man who found out was Hans Albrecht Bethe
(pronounced "Beta" like the Greek letter). Bette was born
in Strassburg, Germany (Bas-Rhin, France, since the Alsace-
Lorraine went over to the French) in 1906. At 22 he had his
PH.D. from the University at Munich. He taught at Munich
and Tubingen until 1933; then Hitler came to power and by
mutual consent the Jewish physicist and Hitlers' Germany
company. Bethe went to England where he worked out the
mathematics of how high-energy particles emit radiation in
electromagnetic fields. In 1935 he joined the faculty of
Cornell University. There in 1938 he worked out the
mechanism that drives the stars. Fusion turns hydrogen into
helium. In doing so, it converts about one percent of its
mass into energy. That one percent turned into energy is
sufficient to power the stars. Four hundred million tons of
hydrogen becomes helium in the sun every second. Four
million tons becomes energy every second. That is the power
source of the sun. During the war he became the director of
the theoretical physics division of Los Alamos Atomic
Scientific Laboratories and remained director until 1946.
He then served on the American delegation in the
negotiations with the U.S.S.R. to control nuclear bomb
tests. Bethe was awarded the Fermi Prize in 1961 and the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967. [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_04 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Arnold Schoenberg
In 1933, during a controversy over a student composition,
the President of the Prussian Academy of the Arts announced
that the "Jewish influence" in music must be broken. "You
don't have to say that to me twice," responded Arnold
Schoenberg, who walked out on the meeting and left Berlin
within two months for Paris. There, in resistance to the
new influence in Germany, Schoenberg recoverted to the
Jewish faith he had abandoned many years earlier. Within
another few months, he was in America. Drawing on his
background, he wrote the opera Moses und Aron, but is best
known for his introduction of twelve-tone composition into
music. [-ecl]
--------------------------- Nov_05 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Hyman Rickover
During World War II the United States Bureau of Ships'
electrical boat division was headed by a Jewish Russian
immigrant, Hyman Rickover. When the war ended, Rickover's
knowledge of electrically propelled boats and his interest
in the newly demonstrated nuclear energy combined into the
idea that an electric boat could by powered by a nuclear
reactor. In 1946 Rickover went to Oak Ridge to work on the
project to build a nuclear-powered submarine. Among his
new-found responsibilities was to sell the United States
Navy on the future of nuclear sea power. Rickover directed
the design and building of the first nuclear powered
submarine, the Nautilus. Even before it was complete,
Rickover was promoted by the Navy to the rank of Rear
Admiral. The Nautilus was launched in 1954. In 1958
Rickover was again promoted, this time to Vice Admiral, and
later became the chief of the Nuclear Reactors branch of the
Atomic Energy Commission and the nuclear propulsion division
of the Bureau of Ships. Rickover was also deeply concerned
with what he saw as problems in American education, writing
the books Education and Freedom (1959) and American
Education (1963). [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_06 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Danny Kaye
David Daniel Kaminski was born January 18, 1913, in
Brooklyn. His father was a tailor in the garment district.
In years to come Kaminski would be known to us as a very
erudite man, but at the age of 13 he dropped out of school
to be a comic busboy at Jewish resorts in the Catskills.
Drifting from job to job, he was for a while a soda jerk and
an insurance salesman. But he longed to return to show
business and appeared in vaudeville and nightclubs. He was
on Broadway in the "Straw Hat Revue," taking the
professional name Danny Kaye. In 1943 he was hired for
films by Samuel Goldwyn. He made a film a year from 1944 to
1949, making Up in Arms, Wonder Man, The Kid from Brooklyn,
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, A Song Is Born, and
Inspector General. In the 1950s he made Hans Christian
Andersen, Knock on Wood, White Christmas, The Court Jester
("The vessel with the pestle has the pellet with poison; the
chalice from the palace has the brew that is true"), Merry
Andrew, and The Five Pennies. Kaye did extensive work for
UNICEF. In his later years he became a respected Chinese
chef, would often be a comic conductor for the New York
Philharmonic, and owned half interest in the Seattle
Mariners. Many of his best lyrics were written by his wife,
Sylvia Fine, and Kaye called himself "a wife-made man." He
was awarded a special Oscar in 1954 for his unique talents,
and for his service to the industry and to the American
people. Danny Kaye was Jewish. [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_07 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Arno Penzias
Arno Penzias was born in Germany in the 1930s. Because his
father was a Polish citizen, the family was rounded up in
October of 1938 and deported to Poland. But they were
turned back at the Polish border because it was after
midnight of the last day Poland was accepting Jews. (This
turned out to be lucky, since the people who were allowed
into Poland were then taken off the trains and left in open
fields where many died of exposure in the cold weather.)
Given six months to leave Germany or be deported to a
concentration camp, his parents sent Arno and his brother to
England and managed to get out to join them just before the
borders closed completely. Determined to make a living,
Penzias gravitated toward technology, first chemistry and
later physics. When Penzias got his Ph.D. from Columbia in
1961, his thesis had been with Charles Townes of Bell Labs.
Townes had taken some of his students to visit Bell Labs,
and so Penzias thought to apply for a job there. Working
with communications satellites and radio-astronomy, he
eventually met Robert Wilson and the two of them produced
the work on background radiation that eventually won them
the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. Arno Penzias is Jewish.
[-ecl]
--------------------------- Nov_08 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Anti-Semitism in the Bell System
[In the 1930s, when Harry Warner] and Western Electric were
locked in another dispute over sound, the president of the
Bell System invited him to air their grievances together.
"As he [Harry] walked into the office," recalled producer
Milton Sperling,
he said, "Mr. Gray, this can be a very short
meeting. I will give you all rights to our
patents. I will withdraw all our suits. ...
I'll do it immediately and at no cost to you,
if you'll do one thing. If you'll give me
the name of one Jew who works for your
company."
And the man looked horrified. "What do you
think--it's the policy of our company to be
anti-Semitic?"
He said, "No. Just give me the name of a Jew
working for your company."
Gray said, "Realistically, I don't think I
can produce one."
Harry said, "It's a policy of your company
not to employ Jews. It's a policy of my
company not to do business with you." And he
walked out of the room.
Apparently Gray was so embarrassed that he ordered his
lawyers to work out a settlement the very next week.
[Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, p. 137]
--------------------------- Nov_11 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Levi Strauss
In 1849 the Gold Rush beckoned and thousands flocked west.
Among them was a sailmaker, Levi Strauss, who decided that
he could make a good living doing ship repairs in the
booming West Coast ports. He discovered, unfortunately,
that there was little need for a sailmaker and was left high
and dry (so to speak) with the large supply of sailcloth he
had brought with him. Casting about, he realized that the
gold prospectors and miners wore out their trousers very
quickly under the rugged conditions in the mountains.
Strauss had the solution: he made strong, durable trousers
out of his sailcloth (a saddlemaker reinforced the seams).
Or so the story goes. What is more likely is that it was a
different man, a Russian Jewish tailor, who invented "blue
jeans"; he offered to go into partnership with Strauss, who
at the time had a successful store in San Francisco, and a
joint patent was taken out by the two of them. In any case,
these trousers were so successful that their use spread to
cowboys and then other workers who needed strength and
durability in clothes. Now, of course, "Levi's" are worn by
many people who have never panned for gold or ridden a
horse. Levi Strauss was Jewish. [-ecl]
--------------------------- Nov_12 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Franz Kline
Franz Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1910.
He studied art in the United States and in England before
finally becoming part of the New York City art community.
In New York prior to 1950 most of his art was composed of
urban scenes of social realism. In 1949 and 1950 his art
underwent a great transformation. Projecting some of his
old sketches on the wall, he was struck by the possibilities
of large abstract images of lines and curves. Creating
large and dynamic black and white abstract designs, he
became one of the leading artists of the New York school of
art. This school concentrated on abstract expressionism.
Among his better-known pieces were his 1950 painting
"Nijinski" and his 1956 "Mahoning." The latter may be found
at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. He died in 1962.
Franz Kline was Jewish. [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_13 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Max Perutz
During World War II the United States interred citizens of
Japanese origins. England imprisoned some Jewish refugees
as "enemy aliens" and transported others to Australia for
imprisonment there. One of the imprisoned Jews was Max
Perutz. Perutz was born in Vienna in 1914. He attended the
University there, but when the Nazis started exerting
pressure on Austria, Perutz fled to England. At Cambridge
he studied the diffractional patterns made by bouncing X-
rays off of proteins, getting his Ph.D. in 1940, only to be
interned by the British government as a threat to Britain in
wartime. When the war was over he was back at Cambridge
where he organized the molecular biology lab and began
studying the molecular structure of hemoglobin. In 1953 he
hit on the idea to add a single atom of a heavy metal to
each molecule of hemoglobin and measure the difference in
diffraction. This approach gave him the clue he needed to
complete the task. Part of the task, determining the
structure of myoglobin, he assigned to John Kendrew and the
two shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962. [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_14 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Do You Know Me?
Match the names in private life (in column one) with the
professional names (in column two) of the following famous
Jews:
1) Joyce Bauer a) Bob Dylan
2) Howard Cohen b) Dr. Joyce Brothers
3) Danilovich Demsky c) Kirk Douglas
4) Beatrice Frankel d) Beverly Sills
5) Julius Garfinkle e) Simone Signoret
6) Melvin Israel f) Yves Montand
7) Simone Kaminker g) Bea Arthur
8) Isaiah Leopold h) Howard Cosell
9) Ivo Levi i) Mike Wallace
10) Jill Oppenheim j) Mike Nichols
11) Michael Orowitz k) Michael Landon
12) Michael Peschkowsky l) Laurence Harvey
13) Shirly Schrift m) Mel Allen
14) Belle Silverman n) Leslie Howard
15) Laurence Skikne o) Jill St. John
16) Leslie Stainer p) Shelley Winters
17) Mike Wallach q) John Garfield
18) Robert Zimmerman r) Ed Wynn
Answers: 1-b, 2-h, 3-c, 4-g, 5-q, 6-m, 7-e, 8-r, 9-f, 10-o,
11-k, 12-j, 13-p, 14-d, 15-l, 16-n, 17-i, 18-a
--------------------------- Nov_15 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Hermann Minkowski
One often hears it said, rather loosely in fact, that time
is a fourth dimension, that it is another dimension like the
three spatial dimensions. The observation is usually
attributed to the Jewish mathematician, Albert Einstein. As
Einstein himself readily admitted, it was certainly observed
by a Jewish mathematician, but not Einstein. Hermann
Minkowski (1864-1909) was born in Russia and got his
Ph.D. from the University of Konigsberg in 1885. He
taught there, at the University of Zurich, and at the
prestigious University of Gottingen. When his former
student Albert Einstein published the "Special Theory of
Relativity" in 1905, Minkowski became fascinated with the
geometrical aspects of relativity. In 1907 he published his
findings in a book called Time and Space, in which he showed
that in relativity time plays as if it were itself a spatial
dimension. Space and time are intimately connected in a
single entity he called "space-time." Einstein recognized
the truth of Minkowski's observations and they became the
foundation for his "General Theory of Relativity." [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_18 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Georg Cantor
Georg Cantor (1945-1918) is responsible for some of the most
astounding and yet deceptively easily-proved results in
modern mathematics. It was Cantor who showed that in
counting members of sets you have not just one but many
different infinities. Two sets have the same number of
elements if you can match up their elements one for one. So
there are as many integers as even integers, because you can
map each integer n to 2n. Cantor also showed you can even
match up integers one for one with rational numbers. So the
same infinity is the number of even integers, the number of
all integers, and the number of rationals. However, in a
beautiful and simple "diagonalization" proof, Cantor showed,
that you cannot match up integers with the set of real
numbers. So there is a larger infinity that is the size of
the set of real numbers. A still larger infinity is the
number of possible curves you can draw in a plane. Cantor
called these three numbers aleph-zero, aleph-one, and
aleph-two, designating them with aleph, the first letter of
the Hebrew alphabet. Cantor was born in Russia of Danish
parents who took him to Germany when he was eleven, and
Georg Cantor was a Jew. [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_19 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Giacomo Meyerbeer
Born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer in 1791 in Germany, he tried
his hand first at writing German operas. Those were
unsuccessful, so he moved to Italy and produced five operas
in the style of Rossini. Then he moved to Paris and began
his most successful venture, writing French grand operas.
Though he briefly returned to Germany where he wrote yet
another German opera, it was for his French operas that he
was best known and most remembered: L'Africaine, Les
Hugenots, Le Prophete, and Robert le Diable. These were
crucial in determining the direction of opera, with their
emphasis on spectacle, dramatic writing, and innovative
orchestration. Though his popularity eventually waned
(purportedly because of attacks upon his style by Richard
Wagner, motivated as much by Wagner's anti-Semitism as by
any aesthetic criteria), his influence lives on in the works
of such well-known composers as Berlioz, Puccini, and Verdi.
Giacomo Meyerbeer was Jewish. [-ecl]
--------------------------- Nov_20 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Jewish Cowboys
When Levi Strauss went out to California during the Gold
Rush, he probably didn't find many other Jews there. But
that changed rapidly. Jews who had come to America from
small European towns found that their skills as wagoneers or
blacksmiths were held in higher esteem out on the frontier
than in the established Eastern cities. And the other
pioneers showed far less anti-Semitism towards Jews than did
the Easterners. On the frontier, everyone started off on an
equal footing. The result was that by 1875 San Francisco
had a higher percentage of Jews than New York City, and
every major city west of the Mississippi River had had a
Jewish mayor by 1900. (New York City didn't have one until
Abraham Beame). Western states also had Jewish governors
long before the Eastern states. So with all this background
and history, perhaps it's only poetic justice that of the
four actors who portrayed the owners of television's most
famous ranch, Bonanza's Ponderosa, two (Lorne Greene and
Michael Landon) were Jewish. [-ecl]
--------------------------- Nov_21 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: What Is the Yiddish Language?
In the late 11th or early 12th Century the ghettoes of
central Europe were populated by Jews speaking several
German dialects. These blended into a single language
phonetically much like German but written right-to-left with
letters very close to those of the Hebrew alphabet. Under
the pressure of anti-Semitism, Jews from these ghettoes
migrated to eastern Europe, carrying the language with them.
In the new environment Slavic elements entered the language.
Over the years Hebrew, Old French, and Old Italian, and even
some English have also become part of the language. Still,
about 85% of the vocabulary comes from Medieval German. The
language can be broken into three dialects: a western
dialect spoken in central Europe, a north-eastern dialect
spoken around Lithuania, and a south-eastern dialect spoken
in Poland, Ukraine, and Romania. There were about
11,000,000 Yiddish speakers prior to the Holocaust.
Afterward only about 4,000,000 remained. Most of the
difference were murdered, though many Yiddish speakers who
escaped Europe learned new languages. The western dialect
is nearly dead and most Yiddish speakers in the United
States know the southern variant of eastern Yiddish. A rich
literature survives in Yiddish with popular writers
including the recently deceased Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac
Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem (on whose "Tevye" stories
Fiddler on the Roof was based). There is also a popular
Yiddish theater. [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_22 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Star Trek
Did you know that the two main officers of the original
starship Enterprise were Jewish? Well, not the officers,
but the actors who play them: both William Shatner and
Leonard Nimoy are Jewish. Nimoy has even used his
background to help develop his character of Spock. For
example, his "Live long and prosper" gesture--an upraised
hand with the fingers in a "V", two on either side, and
thumbs outstretched--is taken from the gesture used by
rabbis to bless the congregation, forming their hands into
the Hebrew letter "shin." Nimoy has also been in other
shows that have drawn more directly on the Jewish
experience. Recently he starred in Never Forget, the story
of Mel Mermelstein who took a historical revisionist group
up on its 1980 challenge to pay $50,000 to anyone who could
prove that Jews were killed in Auschwitz gas chambers.
Mermelstein--whose entire family had been killed in the
concentration camps--provided proof, they refused to
accept it. In the court case that followed, a Federal Court
ruled in Mermelstein's favor and ordered the organization to
pay, thereby officially recognizing the Holocaust. [-ecl]
--------------------------- Nov_25 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Rosalyn Yalow
Dr. Yalow received a B.A. in Physics and Chemistry from
Hunter College in 1941 and an M.S. (1942) and Ph.D. (1945)
in Nuclear Physics from the University of Illinois. Upon
finishing school she found many doors were closed to her
because she was a woman and because she was Jewish. She
took a job with the Veteran's Hospital in the Bronx, where
she did all of her research. In 1977 she was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of
radioimmunoassay (RIA), a methodology which is used in
thousands of laboratories around the world to measure
hundreds of substances of biologic interest in blood and
other body fluids. The power of this technique lies in the
fact that it produces accurate measurements of substances
present in very small concentrations. RIA uses minute
amounts of radioactive substances to take the measurements,
and was originally developed to measure the amount of
insulin in the blood of diabetics. Rosalyn Yalow is Jewish.
[-ecl]
--------------------------- Nov_26 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Richard Feynman
Dr. Richard Feynman was famous around the world not only for
his brilliance in physics but also for the playful approach
he brought to science and nearly everything else in life.
Before he was born his father predicted to his mother that
the child, if he was a boy, would be a scientist. Born May
11, 1918, in New York City, he got his B.S. from M.I.T. in
1939. Within a year he became known for developing the new
field of "quantum electrodynamics," which mathematically
modeled the behavior of electrons to unprecedented
precision. By 1942 he had his Ph.D. from Princeton. As
were many of his brightest contemporaries, he was drafted to
the atomic bomb project. In the interest of showing holes
in security, he would break into the safes of fellow
workers, leave notes, and re-seal the safes. When the war
was over, he accepted a professorship at Cornell. There he
developed Feynman Diagrams, which describe the actions of
particles in space and time. In 1950 he became a professor
of theoretical physics at the California Institute of
Technology. Working with Murray Gell-Man he co-developed
the theory of weak nuclear forces and of the quark. In 1965
Feynman was one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize in
Physics. After the Challenger tragedy he gained national
recognition for his independent investigations into the
causes of the shuttle disaster. Feynman died of cancer on
February 15, 1988. He is remembered for the Feynman
Lectures in Physics, a series of lectures on "The Character
of Physical Law," and two books of his reminiscences (Surely
You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other
people Think?). He is also remembered as a great bongo
player. Richard Feynman was Jewish. [-mrl]
--------------------------- Nov_27 ---------------------------
Jewish Heritage Month: Christopher Columbus
Most of these articles describe the achievement of some
person and say at the end that the person was or is Jewish.
In this case we will only bring to light that there is and
probably will remain heated controversy about Christopher
Columbus's background, and that there are respected
historians today who believe Columbus was Jewish. I have
heard these rumors for a long time from both Jewish and
non-Jewish sources. The October 1991 World Press Review
translates an article by Argentinian author Ernesto Sabato,
writing in the Spanish journal El Pais, in which he says,
"It is not idle to recall that the voyage of Columbus--who
was almost certainly Jewish--was made possible by the
mathematicians, geographers, and astronomers who were the
product of that remarkable era of Arab-Jewish civilization."
The case for Columbus being Jewish that is usually made is
1) his contemporaries accused him at the time of being
Jewish, 2) there is good evidence that he tried to hide his
own background by fabricating another, and 3) in his time
the people most likely to try to hide their background would
be Jews and Jews recently converted to Catholicism, hiding
from what was then the height of the Spanish Inquisition. I
personally find the first point dubious. I suspect that in
Inquisition Spain it could not have been uncommon to accuse
political enemies of being Jewish. Then again, a lot of
Jews were probably also accused of being Jewish. Somewhat
more substantial is the second point. There is a fair body
of evidence that Columbus was covering his past. There is
only one note remaining that Columbus wrote in the supposed
language of his youth. It is poorly written and has the
grammatical errors of a recent learner. Yet in Spanish, a
language he supposedly did not learn until many years later,
he appears to have been extremely eloquent. If he was
actually Spanish (as seems likely), he would very probably
be of Jewish descent. It very likely will never be
determined for certain one way or the other. It is
documented and commonly accepted that much of his crew was
Jewish, including the man who first sighted land. Very
likely part of their purpose and perhaps even Columbus's was
to find a safe haven for Jews fleeing from the Inquisition.
And, in a sense, perhaps that is what they found. [-mrl]
Lazer Danzinger
>
> JEWISH HISTORY MONTH Postings
> November, 1991
>
>Nimoy has even used his
>background to help develop his character of Spock. For
>example, his "Live long and prosper" gesture--an upraised
>hand with the fingers in a "V", two on either side, and
>thumbs outstretched--is taken from the gesture used by
>rabbis to bless the congregation, forming their hands into
>the Hebrew letter "shin."
Actually, the "Kohanim" bless the congregation, not the
"rabbis." And I'm curious as to source for saying that the
hands are formed into the letter "shin."
--
Rabbi Lazer Danzinger
tse!lazer
la...@tse.uucp
(Internet) lazer%tse....@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca