History’s Most Significant Jews
It started as sort of a joke. Maybe it was because we had recently heard the Adam Sandler Hanukkah song. Or maybe we had been talking about Dylan (no surprise: Mitch is obsessed), born Robert Zimmerman.
And that led us—two non-observant Jews—to think of other prominent recent members of the tribe. But we like to think big here at Writing About Our Generation, and we’ve already done a number of Top 10 lists here (the top ten athletes of our generation; the top changes in the U.S. in our lifetime). So this little idea about prominent modern Jews grew. And instead of recent Jews, we decided to delve into history and do all Jews; and instead of 10, we decided to do 20. (Hey, history is long, you know).
However, we decided we’d only choose Jewish people here for whose actual existence historians have found some contemporary evidence—beyond the oral tales eventually collected in the Tanakh or other religious texts. Because of the scarcity of such records before the common era, that excludes, alas, such fascinating and inspiring Hebrews—or imaginings of Hebrews—as Abraham, Joseph, David, Solomon and Esther.
It even excludes—a particular disappointment to us, since we wrote this mostly during Passover—Moses. (Historians have found no evidence even that Hebrews were wandering through the Sinai Desert at a time when a Moses might have existed or even that there had been a lot of Hebrews in Egypt.) Two Jews for whom we and most of our fellow Jews may feel less positively lived when Romans controlled Israel and do make the cut: Paul (Hebrew name, Saul) and Jesus.
Yes, we are aware that the list of History’s Most Significant Jews we came up with is biased a bit toward Americans, but that is indeed who we are. And we are confident there will be something in this list to annoy almost everyone. A list of “honorable mentions” will appear tomorrow.
Let us know in the comments whom we ranked too high or low, and whom we missed.
So, in ascending order:
20. Betty Friedan
While she had been a left-leaning journalist in the 1940s, a decade later Friedan found herself, a mother of three, as a suburban housewife. She still did some freelance magazine writing but became increasingly frustrated with how narrowly those magazines defined women’s roles.
In reaction, she surveyed her Smith College classmates for a 15-year reunion project and the massive discontent she found led her to write the groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan went on to co-found the National Organization for Women. She also helped launch NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and spearheaded 1970’s Women’s Strike for Equality.
While her book and her work focused on middle class white women, and overlooked issues of race and class, Friedan’s legacy, as the acknowledged mother of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, endures. She reshaped attitudes about women’s lives and rights and ignited a conversation about gender roles that certainly continues 60 years later.
19. Bob Dylan
“God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’/Abe said, ‘Man you must be putting me on.’” That is hardly the most profound of Biblical interpretations, but young Mr. Zimmerman does gain points for working them into the then-contemporary vernacular.
And Although Dylan’s various album-length flirtations with Christianity weaken his case, this was a Jew whose influence upon what was arguably the dominant art form of the 20th century certainly stands up against those of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, and is also probably greater than that of non-Jews like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, John Lennon or Paul McCartney.
Or maybe it’s just that we are big fans.
18. Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Louise Potowska—the least well-known person on this list—was born in Warsaw in 1810, the daughter of a rabbi. Her father soon tired of her constant questions about religion. "A young girl does not want to understand the object of her creed, but to accept and believe it," she said he said—turning her, more or less at once, into a freethinker and a feminist.
She eventually ran off to Berlin to escape her father and a marriage he had arranged for her. After making her way across Europe, she met and married William Rose in England. They moved to New York in 1836.
And Ernestine Rose began speaking in favor of women’s suffrage. She went on a number of speaking tours with Susan B. Anthony: Anthony handled the arrangements; Rose delivered the speeches. Rose gave three formal speeches at the first national woman’s rights convention.
She spoke, too, in favor of abolition—sometimes sharing the stage with Frederick Douglass. She was quick to call out antisemitism, but also quick to dismiss religion—all religion. “I cannot believe in your God, whom you have failed to demonstrate….”
Walt Whitman described Rose as “big, rich, gifted, brave, expansive—in body a poor sickly thing…but with a head full of brains—the amplitude of a Webster.”
17. Hank Greenberg
Sandy Koufax was probably a better baseball player. But Hank Greenberg—nickname: the Hebrew Hammer—was a cultural hero for Jews, when they really needed one.
As the first major Jewish superstar in American sports, Greenberg was the target of widespread antisemitism, pitchers intentionally threw at him and fans and opponents hurled slurs at him. But unlike many Jewish athletes of his era, he embraced his heritage and refused to change his name.
Decades before Koufax, Greenberg‘s decision not to play on the Yom Kippur holiday during a tight pennant race—despite pressure from teammates and fans—had already made him a hero with Jews. Then in 1938, when he chased Babe Ruth’s home run record, the pursuit was seen as symbolic resistance to Hitler’s rise.
And then he was the first major-league baseball star to enlist in World War II, and was one of the few baseball executives to support Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier.
16. Steven Spielberg
He didn’t invent Hollywood, as No. 11 on this list helped do. But you could say he re-invented it.
The architect of modern film storytelling, Spielberg reshaped global culture with blockbuster hits, innovative techniques and profound thematic explorations. He redefined Hollywood’s culture and also its business practices with “Jaws,” the first summer blockbuster, establishing the model for mass appeal films. He was also responsible for such worldwide megahits as the Indiana Jones series and the Jurassic Park series.
Spielberg brought a series of technical innovations to movies and has inspired generations of filmmakers. As the critic Roger Ebert noted, “The movies we’re now seeing are made in his image.” Still.
15. Moses Maimonides
Works by this medieval Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar profoundly influenced not just Judaism but also philosophy, medicine and other religions.
He was the author of “The Guide for the Perplexed,” which reconciled Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology, arguing that faith and reason could coexist. He was a major influence on both Christian (Aquinas frequently cited him) and Islamic thinkers.
He also wrote the first comprehensive guide to all aspects of Jewish practice and, as physician to Egypt’s Sultan Saladin, authored medical treatises on asthma, depression and healthy living.
Maimonides’ writings remain essential to Jewish scholarship and to interfaith dialogue.
14. Groucho Marx
For millennia, Jews have dealt with persecution, oppression, victimization and occasional success with humor. No one did it better than Groucho Marx, who starred on stage, film, radio and television for many decades.
Groucho’s fantastical wordplay and absurd takes on a world that made little sense both paved the way for generations of Jewish comics, but also showed that Jewish humor was the only realistic way to confront modern life.
13. Franz Kafka
No one better captured the alienation, guilt, existential dread and absurdity of modern life. Indeed, that led to the creation of a now-familiar adjective: Kafkaesque.
Franz Kafka, was born into a German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague in 1883. He had a legal education and worked in law and insurance.
Kafka wrote a lot in his spare time. But 90 percent of what Kafka wrote he burned, because he thought it wasn’t good enough. The little he published, including the novella, “The Metamorphosis,” received little attention. Before he died of tuberculosis at the age on 40, Kafka instructed his literary executor to burn his unfinished work. He didn’t.
And Kafka would become recognized, entirely posthumously, as one of the greatest writers of the modern era. With his ability to capture the new-found anxieties of modernity, he inspired generations of writers and had significant impact as well on philosophy and popular culture.
And his themes of bureaucratic dehumanization remain eerily timely.
12. Mark Zuckerberg
Over the last couple of decades, no tech innovation has changed the world as much as social media, and Zuckerberg is the person primarily responsible for that. He co-founded FaceBook, led it to domination and purchased competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp.
It may be, as the film “The Social Network” suggested, that he is a careless, ego-driven dick, and his recent transformation into a Trump supplicant buttresses that view, but there is no denying his significance—even if he recently acknowledged that the era of FB domination is over.
11. Louis B. Mayer
Hollywood, which transformed entertainment and culture worldwide, was a Jewish invention. And prime among the Jews who invented one of the most influential industries in the world was Louis B. Mayer. Born Eliezer Meir, Mayer was eager to be perceived as an assimilated American, adopting the 4th of July as his birthday.
Along with fellow Jews the Warner Brothers, Adolf Zukor, William Fox and others, Mayer shaped the film industry, creating the studio system, the star system and the rigid moral code that Hollywood followed for decades. He also established the Oscars.
Mayer famously said, “Hollywood brings the world to the United States and the United States to the world.“ He was clearly right.
10. Marcel Proust
Along with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Kafka, Proust invented modern literature.
In his multi-volume “In Search of Lost Time” he broke from traditional storytelling, instead using stream of consciousness narration, psychological insight and fragmented memory to tell his story.
His style, with its long, elaborate sentences, mirrored the fluidity of human thought, and he was among the first to argue that art transcends fleeting life.
A closeted gay man, Proust was among the first to portray openly queer characters, allowing those who followed to break new ground.
His themes of self-discovery inspired not just writers, but philosophers and psychologists.
9. Theodor Herzl
Herzl came out of Vienna when it was in the process of giving birth to the 20th century. He was a journalist, lawyer, playwright and political activist, but Herzl is most remembered as the father of modern political Zionism. He formed organizations, he wrote about reclaiming the Holy Land for Jews. He had the idea of promoting Jewish immigration to Palestine, in an effort to form a state for the Jewish diaspora after two millenia.
Due to his Zionist work, he is known in Hebrew as Chozeh HaMedinah, literally “Visionary of the State.” Israel doesn’t exist without him.
8. Anne Frank
She wasn’t Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel. She was just a 13-year-old Jewish girl living and then hiding in Amsterdam. By the time she was 16, she had perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
But the diary this young woman kept during those years, documenting how she lived in hiding from the Nazis with her family in an Amsterdam attic, has outlived her. It has become the most enduring and affecting document of the holocaust.
Anne Frank’s diary put a human face on the catastrophe—one of the most terrible events in human history. She captured both the horror and the resiliency of the human spirit in the most dire of circumstances: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” Anne Frank memorably wrote in her diary.
7. David Ben-Gurion
Theodor Herzl (No. 9) had the idea first and was the founder of modern political Zionism. But Ben-Gurion made the idea of a Jewish national homeland a reality.
Born David Grün in what was then-Poland, Ben-Gurion was the head of the Jewish Agency beginning in 1935, the de facto leader of the Jewish community in British-mandate Palestine and was the primary national founder and first prime minister of the State of Israel.
He was prime minister from Israel’s birth in 1948 until 1963, serving longer in the post than anyone has since. He helped build state institutions, presiding over national projects aimed at the development of the country and negotiated a reparations agreement with West Germany for Nazi confiscation of Jewish property during the Holocaust.
6. Baruch Spinoza
In 1656 a synagogue in Amsterdam announced “we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza”—a 23-year-old man from a good Jewish family. That was Spinoza. It is not clear what his sin then was, but Spinoza would go on to write two books—one published anonymously, one not published until after his death—that could be read, indeed were designed to be read, as explaining away the existence of miracles and of prophecy.
If Jews introduced the idea of a monotheistic god to the world, Spinoza played as much of a role as anyone in disabusing the world of that idea.
In so doing he cleared a path into the modern world. Quite a few of the individuals on this list, including the person who tops the list, were deeply influenced by his writings.
5. Karl Marx
While Marx’s father converted to Christianity, likely due to professional pressures, and Marx himself was baptized as a Lutheran, each of his parents came from a long line of rabbis.
Marx’s denunciation of capitalism profoundly shaped politics, economics and social theory. He argued that societies evolve through stages as class conflicts lead to revolutions. Indeed, he called for the working class to revolt.
These ideas, ultimately expressed in the Communist Manifesto, inspired revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere and shaped anti-colonial struggles.
At one point, a third of the world’s population lived in countries that proclaimed themselves Marxist. But in practice those nations that followed his idealistic theories often ended up with authoritarian governments and unsuccessful economies.
4. Sigmund Freud
He was an explorer of what was, before Freud began writing at the end of the 19th century, relatively unexplored territory: our minds. Freud introduced or rethought such concepts as the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, transference and the id, ego and superego. And he developed a method for peeking inside ourselves: psychoanalysis.
Freud wasn’t always right. But he was early and original, and he opened a still very much ongoing inquiry into consciousness. We are probably still at the beginning of our exploration, but Freud opened the door.
3. Jesus
He probably existed. He probably was crucified by the Romans. He does seem to have been born a Jew and to have died a Jew.
It is not for us to evaluate the religions founded in his name or at least in the name of the role he is said to have fulfilled.
But some of the ideas attributed to Jesus in the “Sermon on the Mount,” in particular, are indeed lovely: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth….Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy…. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
Many too many pogroms have been launched and wars fought in the name of Jesus and some of what he preached.
But in the dark and violent history of the human species, the nonviolent code attributed to Jesus in the “Sermon on the Mount”—"If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also"—is a ray of light.
2. Paul
Born a Greek-speaking Jew, Paul, a tentmaker by trade, had apparently played a role in persecuting early believers in Jesus. Paul—his Hebrew name was Saul—only “encountered” Jesus, after Jesus’ death—in a vision while Paul was on the road to Damascus. That proved sufficient.
For, as Paul, he spent the second half of his life spreading the gospel: that Jesus was the Messiah, as well as the son of God, that He lived on after his death and that such an afterlife was available to those who believed in Him.
Paul’s specialty was convincing non-Jews to believe in Jesus, and he accomplished this with some success on his travels in Asia Minor, in Greece and, ultimately, to Rome. And those Paul converted would convert others—long after his death, on through the generations.
And, of greater significance, about half of the books of the New Testament were either written by Paul or said to have been written by Paul.
Only 0.2 percent of the population of the world today are Jews. Almost a third are Christians. Paul deserves a significant amount credit for that—probably, we are arguing, more credit than Jesus himself.
1. Albert Einstein
In the first two decades of the 20th century Einstein transformed the way light, gravity and space were understood. That might make him not just the most significant Jew ever but the most significant human ever.