List of Most Important Americans Includes 16 Jews
Page 3-THE NEWS-October 1990
By Debra Nussbaum (JTA)
Bet you didn’t know that
Robert Allan Zimmerman from
Duluth, Minn., is one of the
most important Americans of
this century.
Zimmerman even beat out
such luminaries as John
Kennedy, Justice Louis Brandeis
and Greta Garbo for a place on
Life magazine’s list of “The 100
Most Important Americans of
the 20th Century,”
Zimmerman, better known to
most as Bob Dylan, is hailed by
Life as being the “electric min
strel of times that were a-chan-
gin’,” He’s in good company,
listed alongside great minds like
Albert Einstein and J. Robert
Oppenheimer.
Of Life’s list of 100, 16 are
Jews. That’s quite a few nota
bles, considering that at best
Jews account for only three
percent of this country’s popu
lation.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, his
torian and author, was not
surprised. “This list is not un
precedented,” he said. “If you
had looked at a similar list in
the 1920s, from Polish, German,
or French culture, you would
also have seen an outsized pro
portion of Jews.
“Jews have been part of the
urban educated class because
education has been the way that
Jews have gotten ‘in’ to society,
much like Asians are doing right
now in this country,” Hertzberg
explained.
Steven Cohen, a professor of
sociology at Queens College,
pointed out that a feeling of
insecurity within American so
ciety as a whole has spurred Jews
to success.
This has led to an “overrepres
entation in groups of elites,” he
said. “One-third of multi-mil-
lionaries are Jews, and Jews are
40 to 50 percent of elites in
professions such as medicine,
law and the media,” he noted.
The creation of the motion-
picture studios, for example, was
founded mostly by Jews: Para
mount, by Adolph Zukor;
MGM, by Louis Mayer; Twen
tieth Century-Fox, by William
Fox; Warner Brothers, by Al
bert, Sam, Jack and Harry
Warner; Columbia, by Harry
Cohen; and Universal, by Carl
Laemmle.
This can be credited to the fact
that the industry didn’t exist
before — it was not something
from which Jews could be ex-
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eluded, Hertzberg pointed out,
because they started it them
selves.
Life magazine explained how
they compiled, out of an original
roster of 536 names, their list of
100 Americans, native-born or
naturalized.
“The people we are calling
important are not necessarily
great — in fact, a couple might
be on our list of villains,” Life
writes in its special issue just
published. “Rather, their impor
tance is measured by their influ
ence: How would our lives have
been different had these people
not lived?”
Besides Bob Dylan, Life’s list
includes:
• Leonard Bernstein, who
paid for his own piano lessons
and fought his Russian immi
grant parents to follow his
musical dream. He joins Richard
Rodgers and Irving Berlin (both
Israel Baline in Russia) as the
other musicians on the list.
• Albert Einstein, whose the
ory of relativity led to the atomic
bomb. Einstein wrote it in 1905,
while working as a $675-a-year
patent clerk in Switzerland.
• Abraham Flexner, the ed
ucator who brought about a
complete reformation of the
American medical education
system, and founded the Insti
tute for Advanced Study at
Princeton, N.J., in 1930.
• Betty Friedan, born Betty
Goldstein, one of 12 women on
the list. She realized that “in
seeking identity through home
and husband, women lost them
selves.” Friedan gave “the prob
lem that has no name,” as she
called it, a name with her rev
olutionary 1963 book, “The
Feminine Mystique.” Three
years later, she went on to
become the founding president
of the National Organization for
Women.
• Milton Friedman, who be
lieves in economies untethered
by government restrictions. The
Nobel Prize-winning economist,
who was an adviser to President
Reagan, is opposed to Social
Security, welfare and Medicare,
instead favoring the notion that
the private sector should take
care of society’s problems.
• William Levitt, who in the
years following World War II
mass-produced row after row of
concrete and wood boxes on
what had been Long Island
potato fields. Levitt’s approach
allowed Gls to move into a
$6,900 Cape Cod-style home in
Levittown for $65 a month, no
money down. Now the 83-year-
old developer has plans for
Florida.
• Louis Mayer, who built the
first movie studio on big names
showcased in even bigger pic
tures. By 1937, he was America’s
highest-salaried employee, earn
ing almost $1.3 million.
• J. Robert Oppenheimer,
who oversaw the development of
the world’s first atom bomb.
After he witnessed its detona
tion, he became an ardent ad
vocate of nuclear arms control.
• William Paley, who created
a $4.6 billion entertainment
empire built on CBS by master
ing mass-audience comedy, va-
ri'ety and quiz shows, and bal
ancing them with more serious
news programming.
• Jonas Salk, who created a
vaccine derived from monkey
kidney tissue in 1955 and ended
the polio scourge that had killed
a million Americans since the
turn of the century.'The 75-year-
old scientist is now testing an
AIDS vaccine in a study due to
be completed in 1994.
• Alfred Stieglitz, who made
Georgia O’Keefe his model and
his wife and turned photogra
phy, a 19th-century technolog
ical phenomenon, into a 20th-
century art form. Also on the list
in the field of photography is
Edwin Land, who made picture
taking an immediately gratifying
art form by creating the world’s
first instant camera.
• Walter Winchell, who had
started out as a vaudeville hoofer
before making high society’s
private life a public show for the
masses in his daily newspaper
column and weekly radio show.
OcPR;
Our apologies concerning the inadvertent omission last
month of the writer's name of the “Letters to the Editor”
column entitled “Jewish Community Needs PR Person.” It
was written by Rabbi Israel J. Gerber.
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