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Your mission is to select two Jewish changemakers to research.

One Jewish changemaker should be from the biblical/post biblical time period and the other from the modern period.  (You can consult the changemaker chart for ideas!)

Your research should lead you to answering the questions on the worksheet.

Learn about your changemaker’s accomplishments and identify the Jewish Sensibilities they demonstrated.

Keep in mind that you will present your learning and share about your heroes.  The way you do that – the project you do - is up to you!  Have fun and be creative!

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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AcgRNUVs2fuRu4bs_FKiz73Qp4I8ybGH9tELQpxpnC8/edit?usp=sharing

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QBx1C5SgkVOe4SfxUZ9XCduQ0CFQrzQG/view?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/15UUMV7ZVyB4npwznZqqLVRUNhJdZfNQUga4M_gcSwfc/edit?usp=sharing

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January 24

Pick two Jewish Heroes (One hero from biblical/post-biblical period and one modern/contemporary)

January 31

Fill out google form with the Jewish Heroes that you have selected

February 7th

Research Heroes

February 28th

Research Heroes

March 7th

Research Heroes and start projects

March 14th

Work on Projects

April 11th

Work on Projects

April 18th

Final Touches on Projects

April 25th

Presentations

May 2nd

Presentations

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1spvN7Z9dWVcR2WMONy-8f7YqkaxW_N0rFl1fntcqHyQ/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vaZm79vpJGoCCiLQ_nOPwUMYJKwDuhD1jMBvXqmNRJc/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W6KR6mZ3G6075Iayon30_d2ZShNhMN4ZqQJLbxQ2yvM/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UUzbleIFJr870_bRIVXzmtYrVa0aaFaK2vPiGplkZOM/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o6xQeQaj1V6hXBboaX2NvZQ6jsfeXUTwWPeQVTzVsTQ/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xaCMCAvBG4AE7vaCQywqot2DqUy5pTrqhkvs2UvVvgM/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wrSVkN0DM_3Eu3TXnUf76Y8yr5E_GZNEKCFnvOX3CA/edit?usp=sharing

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My biblical changemaker will be Queen Esther.  Modern changemaker: RBG

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Moses
Gal Gadot

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Erik Weisz (Harry Houdini)
Albert Einstein

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Molly Picon
Bella Abzug

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Abraham and Menachim Begin

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You  may want to check out this article about Queen Esther

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You  may want to check out this article about Queen Esther

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Esther (named for the goddess, Ashtar) was a Persian Jew who was orphaned at a young age. The Israelites had been exiled to Babylonia in 586 B.C.E. and still remained there. Esther's cousin, Mordecai, was older than she and he raised Esther. Esther was still a young woman when her presence was requested at the palace of King Ahasuerus.

Ahasuerus had recently "disposed of" his wife, Queen Vashti. Vashti had displeased the king by refusing to strip down for his guests. Ahasuerus needed a new wife and he called upon all of the virgins in Persia to present themselves at the palace.

Esther was an extremely beautiful woman and Ahasuerus chose her to be his queen. Esther moved away from her Jewish community and into the palace. Mordecai advised her not to admit to her Jewish heritage because he was unsure of the king's sentiments towards the Jews.

Meanwhile, Haman, an anti-Semitic advisor to the king, was plotting a day of execution for all of the Jews in Persia. He brought his proposal to King Ahasuerus and the king signed it, without realizing that his own bride would be affected by this mass slaughter.

Esther did not know about his agreement between Ahasuerus and Haman, but Mordecai came to the palace to inform her. He demanded that she speak to the king and beg him to revoke the decree. Esther knew that no one, not even the queen, could approach the king without first being called. Fearing for her own life, she told Mordecai that she wanted to simply stay out of the entire ordeal.

Mordecai explained to his cousin that when the 14th of Adar came upon them, even she, the queen, would not be spared. Esther quickly changed her mind and called upon the king to come to a dinner with herself and Haman. Luckily, Ahasuerus cared very much for his new queen, and was receptive of Esther's invitation.

When she, Haman, and Ahasuerus sat down to their meal, Esther began to plead with the king not to kill his own queen. Ahasuerus, of course, was very surprised by Esther's outburst. Esther revealed Haman's plan in its entirety, and then admitted to her own past as a Jew from Shushan. Ahasuerus, a proud (and rather hot-tempered) king, decided to hang Haman for treason and for threatening the life of his queen. Haman and his ten sons hanged on the 14th of Adar, the day set for the execution of the Jews.

Esther, while she needed some convincing, was able to save the Jewish population in Persia. She is considered one of the most heroic women in Jewish history. Her story is read every year on Purim.

Telushkin, Joseph. Sources: Biblical Literacy: The Most Important People, Events, and Ideas of the Hebrew Bible. NY: William Morrow and Co., 1997.

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Esther (named for the goddess, Ashtar) was a Persian Jew who was orphaned at a young age. The Israelites had been exiled to Babylonia in 586 B.C.E. and still remained there. Esther's cousin, Mordecai, was older than she and he raised Esther.

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Another good article about the Queen....

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Another good article about the Queen....

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The heroine of the book named for her, Esther is a young Jewish woman living in exile in the Persian Lit. (Greek) "dispersion." The Jewish community, and its areas of residence, outside Erez Israel. diaspora , who through her youth and beauty becomes queen of the Persian Empire, and then by her wits and courage saves the Jewish people from destruction. The message of the Book of Esther, a work of historical fiction written in the diaspora in the late Persian-early Hellenistic period (fourth century b.c.e.), gives encouragement to the exiled Jews that they, although powerless in the Persian Empire, can, by their resourcefulness and talents, not only survive but prosper, as does Esther.

Esther first appears in the story as one of the young virgins collected into the king's harem as possible replacements for Vashti, the banished wife of King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I, reigned 485-465 b.c.e.). She is identified as the daughter of Avihail (Esth 2:15) and the cousin and adopted daughter of Mordecai, from the tribe of Benjamin (Esth 2:5-7). Not much is revealed about her character, but she is described as beautiful (2:7) and obedient (2:10), and she appears to be pliant and cooperative. She quickly wins the favor of the chief eunuch, H egai, and, when her turn comes to spend the night with the king, Ahasuerus falls in love with her and makes her his queen. All this takes place while Esther keeps her Jewish identity secret (Esth 2:10, 20).

After Esther becomes queen, her cousin Mordecai becomes involved in a power struggle with the grand vizier Haman the Agagite, a descendant of an Amalekite king who was an enemy of Israel during the time of King Saul (1 Sam 15:32). Mordecai refuses to bow before Haman, and this so infuriates Haman that he resolves not only to put Mordecai to death, but also to slaughter his entire people. He secures the king's permission to do this, and a date is set, Adar 13 (this episode determines the date of the festival of Holiday held on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Adar (on the 15th day in Jerusalem) to commemorate the deliverance of the Jewish people in the Persian empire from a plot to eradicate them. Purim , a popular Jewish festival). When Mordecai learns of Haman's plot, he rushes to the palace to inform Esther, weeping and clothed in sackcloth (Esth 4:1-3).

At this point in the story, Esther's character comes to the fore. When she first learns of Haman's plot and the threat to the Jews, her reaction is one of helplessness. She cannot approach the king without being summoned, on pain of death, and the king has not summoned her in thirty days, implying that she has fallen out of favor (Esth 4:11). However, following Mordecai's insistent prodding, she resolves to do what she can to save her people, ending with the ringing declaration "After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish" (Esth 4:16). The pliant and obedient Esther has become a woman of action.

She appears unsummoned before King Ahasuerus, who not only does not kill her, but promises to grant her request (the text here, as throughout, does not mention God, but God's providence is clearly in the background). In a superb moment of understatement, Esther asks the king to a dinner party (Esth 5:4)! The king, accompanied by Haman, attends Esther's banquet and again seeks to discover her request, which she once more deflects with an invitation to another dinner party. Only at the second dinner party, when the king is sufficiently beguiled by her charms, does she reveal her true purpose: the unmasking of Haman and his plot. She reveals, for the first time, her identity as a Jew and accuses Haman of the plot to destroy her and her people. The volatile king springs to the defense of the woman to whom he was indifferent three days earlier, Haman is executed, and the Jews receive permission to defend themselves from their enemies, which they do with great success (Esther 7-9). The book ends with Mordecai elevated to the office of grand vizier and power now concentrated in the hands of Esther.

Esther and her book have suffered much at the hands of interpreters through the centuries. Although very popular among the Jewish people, it was one of the last books to be accepted into the canon, and was accepted only because of its connection with the festival of Purim. The book has been taken to task for irreligiosity: God is not mentioned, and the only Jewish religious practice referred to is fasting (Esth 4:16). The rabbis were troubled by Esther's failure to live as a Jew: she has sexual intercourse with and marries a Gentile, lives in the Persian court, and does not follow Jewish dietary laws (the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, tries to remedy this by adding prayers and repeatedly invoking God, as well as having Esther declare that she loathes her present lifestyle). In addition, Esther has been taken to task by both female and male commentators for her apparent willingness to participate in Persian harem customs, and by Christian commentators for her evident bloodthirstiness in destroying Gentiles (Esth 9:1-15). All these criticisms, however, fail to grasp the true purpose of the book.

The purpose of the Book of Esther is to demonstrate to Jews living in exile that it is possible to achieve success in the country of one's exile without giving up one's identity as a Jew. In this, the Book of Esther is similar to books such as Daniel or Tobit, or, in fact, to the historical character Nehemiah. However, the Book of Esther is unique in two important respects. First, the protagonist of the book, and the one with whom the audience should identify, is a woman, Esther (Mordecai is, of course, the other leading character and finishes the story at a very high rank, but this is basically because of his relationship to, and through the efforts of, Esther). This choice of a female hero serves an important function in the story. Women were, in the world of the Persian diaspora, as in many other cultures, essentially powerless and marginalized members of society. Even if they belonged to the dominant culture, they could not simply reach out and grasp power, as a man could; whatever power they could obtain was earned through the manipulation of the public holders of power, men. In this sense the exiled Jew could identify with the woman: he or she too was essentially powerless and marginalized, and power could be obtained only through one's wits and talents. But, as the actions of Esther demonstrate, this can be done. By astutely using her beauty, charm, and political intelligence, and by taking one well-placed risk, Esther saves her people, brings about the downfall of their enemy, and elevates her kinsman to the highest position in the kingdom. Esther becomes the model for the Jew living in exile.

The second unique aspect of the Hebrew Book of Esther is the absence of any overt religious element. (God is not mentioned in the book. There are no religious practices observed, with the minor exception of fasting.) Many commentators have argued that religious beliefs, such as a belief in God's protection of the chosen people, are present (Esth 4:14). This argument may be valid; however, it remains true that the presence of God is conspicuously absent. Jewish identity seems to be primarily ethnic, not religious. It is who Esther is that makes her Jewish, rather than what she practices or believes. This indicates that the audience for the book was primarily in the diaspora, where certain religious practices, such as worship in the temple, were simply not possible, and Jewish ethnic identity was in danger of disappearing in the great melting pot of the ancient Near East. The Book of Esther shows that this does not have to happen; in fact, Jews can thrive as Jews (although the danger they may live in is also clearly acknowledged).

The character of Esther serves as a positive role model for Jewish women and men living in diaspora, both in the time the book was written and down through the centuries to the present day. The contemporaneity of the message helps to account for the enduring popularity of the book, and Esther herself, in the Jewish community.

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The heroine of the book named for her, Esther is a young Jewish woman living in exile in the Persian Lit. (Greek) "dispersion." The Jewish community, and its areas of residence, outside Erez Israel.diaspora, who through her youth and beauty becomes queen of the Persian Empire, and then by her wits and courage saves the Jewish people from destruction.

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There is lot to discover about RBG - perhaps check out this link

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There is lot to discover about RBG - perhaps check out this link

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I am ... a first generation American on my father's side, barely second generation on my mother's. Neither of my parents had the means to attend college, but both taught me to love learning, to care about people, and to work hard for whatever I wanted or believed in. Their parents had the foresight to leave the old country, where Jewish ancestry and faith meant exposure to pogroms and denigration of one's human worth." (U.S. Congress, p. 49)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the first Jewish woman (and only the second woman) appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Although not a religiously observant Jew, she is very conscious of her Jewish roots, as evidenced by the statement quoted above and by her reply to Senator Edward Kennedy at the confirmation hearings. When he suggested that her personal experience and pioneering work with gender discrimination would also sensitize her to racial discrimination, she said:

Senator Kennedy, I am alert to discrimination. I grew up during World War II in a Jewish family. I have memories as a child, even before the war, of being in a car with my parents and passing a place in [Pennsylvania], a resort with a sign out in front that read: "No dogs or Jews allowed." Signs of that kind existed in this country during my childhood. One couldn't help but be sensitive to discrimination living as a Jew in America at the time of World War II. (U.S. Congress, p. 139)

I first heard about Ruth Ginsburg in my third year at Columbia Law School , when Professor Gerald Gunther invited me to his office to discuss the possibility of a judicial clerkship. Professor Gunther told me that based on my record he would recommend me to Justice Felix Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court, but added that when Ginsburg was recommended to Justice Frankfurter two years earlier, Justice Frankfurter had replied that he would not be the one to break the tradition of male clerks only.

I met Ginsburg about a year later, as I was starting and she was completing a clerkship with Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, one of the few federal judges who hired female law clerks at that time. Her ability and tact became evident very quickly. It was motion day, and Judge Palmieri was about to rule on a motion that had just been argued. Ruth sent him a note, asking whether he could reserve decision, because she thought there was a Supreme Court case on point. She was, of course, right. There was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that was dispositive and that, amazingly, neither lawyer had mentioned.

Years later, I learned from Professor Gunther that even though Judge Palmieri was impressed by Ginsburg's record, he was very reluctant to appoint her and did so only after a great deal of urging by Gunther, who knew him personally, and a written promise by a male student that if the appointment of Ginsburg did not work out he would leave his law firm job to take over the clerkship. That, of course, was not necessary. Palmieri was delighted with her work, and they remained lifelong friends.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, the child of a Jewish immigrant father and a native-born Jewish mother. Her father, Nathan, came to the United States from Russia when he was thirteen. Her mother, Celia (Amster), was born in the United States, her parents having emigrated from a small town near Cracow, Poland, four months before she was born. Neither of her parents had the financial means to go to college. Her father worked as a furrier and later in a men's clothing store.

Some of Ruth's earliest memories are of going to the public library with her mother, trips that imbued her with a desire to read and a love of learning. She also remembers her mother shopping for bargains to save money for Ruth's college education. Although her mother did not work outside the home, she impressed upon Ruth the need to be independent and to develop her own ideas to the fullest. It was her mother who most influenced her life. "I think of her often when I am in challenging situations that compel a top performance" (Swiger, p. 55). She wore her mother's pin and earrings when arguing cases before the Supreme Court because, she thought, her mother would have liked that. Her mother, she said in her acceptance speech in the Rose Garden, was "the bravest and strongest person I have known, who was taken from me much too soon. I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons" ( NYTimes).

Ruth attended P.S. 238 and Madison High School in Brooklyn and edited the school newspaper, the Highway Herald, for which she wrote articles on the Magna Carta and on the Bill of Rights. In high school, she was also an active member and officer of the Go-Getters, a pep club for sporting and social events; she wore its black satin jacket, sold tickets to football games and other functions, and chipped her tooth twirling a baton when Madison played Lincoln High School (Ayer, p. 16).

Upon graduation from high school, she received various awards and a New York State scholarship. Cornell University, which she chose, provided additional financial assistance, and she also worked at part-time clerical jobs to earn extra money (Swiger, p. 56). She majored in government and credits Professor Robert E. Cushman, with whom she studied and for whom she worked as a research assistant, with arousing her interest in a career in law. It was, she said, "[the] heyday of McCarthyism [and Cushman defended] our deep-seated national values-freedom of thought, speech and press. ... The McCarthy era was a time when courageous lawyers were using their legal training in support of the right to think and speak freely. ... That a lawyer could do something that was personally satisfying and at the same time work to preserve the values that have made this country great was an exciting prospect for me" (Gilbert and Moore, p. 156).

She credits another professor at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov, with influencing her reading habits and writing style. "He loved words ... the sound of words. ... Even when I write an opinion, I will often read a sentence aloud and [ask,] 'Can I say this in fewer words-can I write it so the meaning will come across with greater clarity?'" (Swiger, p. 55).

Ruth graduated from Cornell with high honors in government and distinction in all subjects and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In her freshman year at Cornell, she met Martin David Ginsburg, whom she married in June 1954, shortly after her graduation. Martin, who had been a year ahead of her at Cornell, had just completed his first year at Harvard Law School when they married. Although she, too, was accepted by Harvard Law School, they moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Martin was sent by the army.

Ginsburg took a job with the Social Security Office in Lawton, Oklahoma. When she disclosed that she was pregnant, her superior decided that she could not travel to a training session required for the position for which she had qualified and gave her a lower position at less pay. On July 21, 1955, she gave birth to a daughter, Jane, now a professor of law at Columbia Law School and a leading authority on copyright and trademark law.

The following year, Ginsburg started Harvard Law School. There were only nine women in a class of five hundred. At a dinner he hosted for the women students, Dean Erwin Griswold asked each to explain how she justified taking a place in the class that would otherwise have gone to a man. A room in the Lamont Library was closed to women, making it impossible for Ginsburg to get a periodical she needed to do a cite-checking assignment for the law review. Professors sometimes called on women students "for comic relief" (Gilbert and Moore, p. 158). Even though she was married, had a small child, and gathered notes for her husband's classes as well as her own (while he was seriously ill), she succeeded in getting elected to and carrying on her work for the Harvard Law Review.

In 1958, Martin graduated from Harvard Law School and accepted a position with a prominent New York law firm. Ruth transferred to Columbia Law School, where she was also invited to join the Columbia Law Review and tied for first in the class.

Harvard Law School refused to give her a degree, as is routinely done nowadays for a student who transfers after the second year. However, Columbia Law School gave her a degree, even though she had studied at Columbia only her last year. Years later, when she had become prominent, Harvard offered to give her a degree, on condition that she give up her Columbia degree. She declined to do so.

Based on her outstanding record, Professor (later Dean) Albert Sacks of Harvard Law School recommended her as a law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter, but he was not willing to take a woman. Indeed, notwithstanding her impressive credentials, she had great difficulty getting any job. "Not a single law firm in the entire city of New York," she said, offered her a position (Carlson, p. 38). As she explained in a 1993 interview, "In the fifties, the traditional law firms were just beginning to turn around on hiring Jews. ... But to be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot, that combination was a bit much" (Gilbert and Moore, p. 158). Finally, through the efforts of Professor Gerald Gunther, she was hired as a law clerk by Judge Edmund L. Palmieri.

Following her clerkship with Palmieri, Ginsburg did have offers from law firms, but decided to join the Columbia Project on International Civil Procedure. The purpose of the project, financed by the Carnegie Foundation, was to do basic research on foreign systems of civil procedure and to study and propose improvements of U.S. rules on transnational litigation. Professor Hans Smit, originally from Holland, with law degrees both from Amsterdam University and Columbia, joined the Columbia Law School faculty to direct the project. Truly egalitarian, he not only appointed women (Ginsburg and the writer of this article) to work on the project, but paid them and the men the salary that men were being paid by the major law firms at the time. Ginsburg learned Swedish and worked in Sweden with a Swedish judge on a book on Swedish civil procedure, for which she was later awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Lund.

When she completed work on the project and indicated her interest in pursuing an academic career, Smit urged her appointment to the Columbia Law School faculty, but to no avail. On the recommendation of Professor Walter Gellhorn, a member of the Columbia faculty and at the time the president of the American Association of Law Schools, Ginsburg accepted a position at Rutgers, one of the few law schools willing to accept women on its faculty at that time. She taught at Rutgers from 1963 to 1972.

While at Rutgers, Ginsburg became pregnant with her second child. Afraid that if the pregnancy were discovered she might lose her position, she concealed it by wearing loose-fitting clothes borrowed from her mother-in-law. The Ginsburgs' second child, a son, whom they named James, was born in September 1965, shortly before the fall semester began.

It was at Rutgers that Ruth Ginsburg first became involved in women's rights. In the late 1960s, sex discrimination complaints began "trickling" into the New Jersey affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). They were referred to her, Ginsburg said, "because, well, sex discrimination was regarded as a woman's job." Her students prodded her "to take an active part in the effort to eliminate senseless gender lines in the law" (Gilbert and Moore, p. 153), and she was inspired to do so by the women referred to her by the ACLU. In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court decided Reed v. Reed, unanimously overturning a state law that gave men preference over women for appointments as administrators of decedents' estates. Although Ginsburg did not argue the case, she was the principal author of the brief. Following the Reed victory, the ACLU voted to establish a Women's Rights Project, and Ginsburg became its codirector. Columbia finally offered her a position, and in 1972 she became the first tenured woman on the Columbia Law School faculty.

Ruth Ginsburg divided her time between Columbia and the Women's RightsProject. From the numerous sex discrimination cases brought to the project, she carefully selected those that raised issues she considered "ripe for change through litigation." These were mainly employment-related cases that, in her words, "lent themselves to the strategy of sequential presentations leading to incremental advances" (Cowan, pp. 390-393).

In determining whether a statute violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court has applied three tests: (1) the "rational basis" test, i.e., whether there is a rational basis for the law; (2) "intermediate scrutiny," whether the law is "substantially related" to the achievement of an "important government purpose"; and (3) "strict scrutiny," applied to laws that draw a distinction based on race, which is considered a "suspect" classification. Ginsburg argued that laws that draw a distinction based on gender should also be subjected to strict scrutiny. The problem, as she explained at her confirmation hearings, was that while "race discrimination was immediately perceived as evil, odious, and intolerable," laws discriminating against women were often justified as protecting women (U.S. Congress, p. 122). She therefore chose cases that would show that using gender as a basis for different treatment was harmful not only to women but also to men.

Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975) was perfect for that, "a gem of a case" (Cowan, pp. 396-397). Wiesenfeld's wife had died in childbirth, and he wanted to care personally for their infant son but was denied Social Security benefits. The Social Security Act provided survivor's benefits to women with children, but not to men with children, even though men and women paid Social Security taxes at the same rate. Ginsburg argued that while this regulation appeared to protect women, its effect was to deny women workers and their families the protection provided to male workers. A unanimous Supreme Court held the regulation unconstitutional. The Court did so, however, without holding that gender-based distinctions were, like race-based distinctions, suspect and subject to strict scrutiny. A majority of the Court has still never held gender a suspect classification subject to strict scrutiny.

In 1996 the United States Supreme Court decided another gender discrimination case, United States v. Virginia. Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion for the Court, which held that the exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Those "who seek to defend gender-based government action," she wrote, "must demonstrate an 'exceedingly persuasive justification' for that action."

Ginsburg was on the Columbia Law School faculty from 1972 to 1980. During that period she directed the ACLU Women's Project, taught courses and seminars in civil procedure, conflict of laws, constitutional law, and sex discrimination, wrote a number of articles, and prepared the first casebook on gender-based discrimination. In 1980 she was appointed by President Carter to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a court that hears some of the most interesting federal cases. Two of the cases on which she sat while on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals are of particular Jewish interest: Goldman v. Secretary of Defense and U.S. v. Pollard. One concerned a Jewish captain in the U.S. Air Force who insisted on the right to wear a yarmulke (head covering) in the military, the other a Jewish man who had been charged with passing classified information to Israel, pleaded guilty, and later sought to withdraw his plea.

On June 14, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated by President Clinton to be an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Some women's groups opposed her appointment because she had spoken and written critically of the Court's rationale in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that there is a constitutional right to abortion, but most women's groups and numerous scholars and academics strongly supported the nomination. She was confirmed by the Senate as an associate justice of the Supreme Court on August 3, 1993.

Ginsburg has experienced great adversity in her life. Her only sister died when she was very young. Her mother became ill with cancer just as Ruth was starting high school and died one day before her graduation, at which Ruth was to speak. During his third year at Harvard, her husband was in a car accident and later was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that few had ever survived and underwent massive surgery and radical radiation while in law school.

She has also had great good fortune: first, in her remarkable intellect, which manifested itself at every stage of her life; second, but perhaps equally important in making it possible for her to reach the pinnacle of her profession, a husband and family who have been wonderfully supportive in every way, as she often notes. At Harvard, Martin assured his friends that she would make law review and later it was he who organized support for her appointments to the U.S. Court of Appeals and to the U.S. Supreme Court. In her own words, he has been her "best friend and biggest booster" ( NYTimes). "A supportive husband who is willing to share duties and responsibilities is a must ...," she says, "for any woman who hopes to combine marriage and a career." (Ayer, 28).

The extent of her family's belief in and support for her is perhaps best symbolized by an entry in her daughter's high school yearbook. Under "ambition," it stated, "to see my mother appointed to the Supreme Court" ( NYTimes).

In an address to the American Jewish Committee after her appointment to the Supreme Court she said, "I am a judge born, raised, and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition. I hope, in my years on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will have the strength and the courage to remain constant in the service of that demand."

Although she is the first Jewish woman on the Court, she follows such outstanding Jewish jurists as Brandeis, Cardozo, and Frankfurter, and will no doubt continue their tradition of greatness.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of complications from pancreatic cancer on September 18, 2020.

NOTE: This entry will be updated soon.

To see video clips from an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the MAKERS project, click here.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Jewish Women's Archive

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I am ... a first generation American on my father's side, barely second generation on my mother's. Neither of my parents had the means to attend college, but both taught me to love learning, to care about people, and to work hard for whatever I wanted or believed in.

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Here's a link to an article to check out about Molly Picon

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Here's a link to an article to check out about Molly Picon

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Molly Picon was a petite woman with many talents in the entertainment sector. Picon was a star of the Yiddish and English-speaking stages, motion pictures, radio and television. She wrote almost 100 songs and skits for the stage. She performed for the sick, the American troops in World War II and the surviving Jews in Europe. Picon also took children into her home through the Foster Parents' Plan for War Children.

Picon was the elder of two daughters of Lewis and Clara (Ostrow) Picon. She was born in a tenement in New York City on June 1, 1898. Her father was from Warsaw, Poland, and worked in the needle trades. Her mother had come from Kiev, Russia, and worked as a seamstress.

The family moved to Philadelphia when Picon was three years old. At the age of five, she sang at an amateur night for children and won five gold dollars. She made the rounds of all children's amateur nights and won many prizes and had coins tossed to her by the audience.

Picon's mother was a dressmaker for actresses. One of the actresses told her about an opening in Mike Tomashefsky's Yiddish stock company. At the age of six, Picon began playing children's parts in Tomashefsky's company. Picon toured with a vaudeville act called "The Four Seasons" in 1919. When members of the act came to Boston, they found the theaters closed due to an influenza epidemic. Out of work and out of money, Picon went to the local Yiddish theater in search of a job or to borrow money. Jacob Kalich, manager of the Grand Opera House, gave her a job. The two were married on July 29, 1919.

Kalich recognized his wife's talents. He took her to Europe to perfect her Yiddish and to star in his operetta Yankele. Picon played the role of a small boy. The tour was very successful. After they returned to the United States in 1923, the theater was sold out. Many Europeans had written to their American relatives about the greatness of Picon in Yankele.

Through the years, Picon starred in many Yiddish plays on Second Avenue. She made a Yiddish film in Warsaw called Yiddle With His Fiddle in 1936. She starred in another Yiddish film, Mamale, in 1938.

She toured the American vaudeville circuit in the early 1930s. Picon's first Broadway English-speaking role was in Morning Star. She completed 19 years of radio with General Foods as its sponsor in 1951.

She starred in a 13-week television show in 1948. Picon and her husband were among the first entertainers to go to Europe after World War II to entertain the surviving Jews. They brought 700 gift packages of cosmetics and costume jewelry for women who had survived the concentration camps and candy for the children.

Picon was a member of: The Jewish Theatrical Guild, Hebrew Actors Union, Jewish Theatrical Alliance, American Actors Association, Yiddish Composers Guild, American Federation of Radio Artists, American Guild of Variety Artists and Actors Equity. She died on April 6, 1992.

This is one of the 150 illustrated true stories of American heroism included in Sources: Jewish Heroes & Heroines of America: 150 True Stories of American Jewish Heroism, © 1996, written by Seymour "Sy" Brody of Delray Beach, Florida, illustrated by Art Seiden of Woodmere, New York, and published by Lifetime Books, Inc., Hollywood, FL.

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Molly Picon was a petite woman with many talents in the entertainment sector. Picon was a star of the Yiddish and English-speaking stages, motion pictures, radio and television. She wrote almost 100 songs and skits for the stage. She performed for the sick, the American troops in World War II and the surviving Jews in Europe.

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Born in the Bronx on July 24, 1920, Bella (Savitzky) Abzug predated women's right to vote by one month. A fighter for justice and peace, equal rights, human dignity, environmental integrity, and sustainable development, Bella Abzug has advanced human goals and political alliances worldwide.

Most recently, as cocreator and president of the Women's Environmental and Development Organization (WEDO), a global organization, Abzug galvanized and helped transform the United Nations agenda regarding women and their concerns for human rights, economic justice, population, development, and the environment. WEDO represents the culmination of her lifelong career as public activist and stateswoman.

Known by her colleagues as a "passionate perfectionist," Bella's idealism and activism grew out of childhood influences and experiences. From her earliest years, she understood the nature of power and the fact that politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. A natural leader, although a girl among competitive boys, she delighted in her prowess at marbles, or "immies. " When the boys tried to beat her or steal her marbles, Abzug defended herself fiercely with unmatched skill. She also played checkers, traded baseball cards, climbed trees, became a graffiti artist, and understood the nuances, corners, and risks of city streets, which were her playground.

In synagogue with her maternal grandfather, Wolf Taklefsky, who was her babysitter and first mentor, Bella's beautiful voice and keen memory delighted her elders with the brilliance of her prayers, and her ability to read Hebrew and daven [pray]. Although routinely dispatched to the women's place behind the mechitzan [curtain separating women from men in a place of prayer], by the time she was eight, she was an outstanding student in the Talmud Torah school she attended, and a community star.

Her Hebrew school teacher, Levi Soshuk, recruited her to a left-wing labor Zionist group, Hashomer Hatzair [the young guard]. By the time she was eleven, Bella and her gang of socialist Zionists planned to go to Israel together as a kibbutz community; In the meantime, they were inseparable and traveled throughout New York City, hiked in the countryside, danced and sang all night, went to free concerts, museums, the theater, picnics, and meetings. Above all, they raised money for a Jewish homeland with Abzug in the lead. At subway stops, she gave impassioned speeches, and people tended to give generously to the earnest, well-spoken girl. From her first gang, Bella learned about the power of alliances, unity, and alternative movements.

Hitler came to power the year her father Emanuel died, and Bella emerged as an outspoken thirteen-year-old girl-child willing to break the rules. Prohibited by tradition from saying Kaddish for her father in synagogue, Bella did so anyway. Every morning before school for a year, she attended synagogue and davened. The congregants looked askance and never did approve, but nobody ever stopped her. She just did what she needed to do for her father, who had no son-and learned a lesson for life: Be bold, be brazen, be true to your heart. She advised others: "People may not like it, but no one will stop you."

Bella never doubted that her father would have approved. Manny Savitzky adored his daughters. The butcher whose shop bore his personal mark of protest during and after World War I —"The Live and Let Live Meat Market" in the Clinton-Chelsea section of Manhattan-had a profound impact on his daughter's vision. Protest was acceptable; activism took many forms. After all, he had learned to tolerate Bella's pack of socialist Zionist friends who kept her out all night from the age of eleven. There was always music in her parents' home. Her father sang with gusto, her sister, Helene (five years older), played the piano-the grand piano that filled the parlor-and Bella played the violin. Every week, the entire family, including grandparents, congregated around music, led in song by her father.

Bella's mother also supported her rebellion — all her rebellions. Esther Savitzky appreciated her younger daughter's talents and encouraged her every interest. By the age of thirteen, a leader in the crusade for women's rights, equal space, dignity, and empowerment for girls was in active training. According to her mother, "Battling Bella" was born bellowing. A spirited tomboy with music in her heart and politics in her soul, beautiful, energetic Bella was vastly popular, and studious.

She continued violin lessons through high school. From Talmud Torah she went to Florence Marshall Hebrew High School after classes at Walton, and to the Teachers Institute at the Jewish Theological Seminary after classes at Hunter College. She earned additional money for her family by teaching Hebrew, and also committed herself to political activities. Elected class president at Walton High School in 1937 and student government president of Hunter College in 1941, Bella made a profound impression on teachers, contemporaries, and history.

As student council president at Hunter College, she opposed the Rapp-Coudert committee, which sought to crush public education and was on a witch-hunt against "subversive" faculty. A political science major, Bella was active in the American Student Union and was an early and ardent champion of civil rights and civil liberties. At Hunter, she was at the center of a permanent circle of friends who remained political activists and lifelong champions of causes for women, peace, and justice. Journalist Mim. Kelber, who first met Bella at Walton, was editor of Hunter's student newspaper the Bulletin, remained a political partner, cofounded WEDO, and now edits its impressive newsletter and publication series.

With her brilliant college record and leadership awards, Bella won a scholarship to Columbia University Law School. (Harvard, her first choice, turned her down-its law school did not accept women until 1952.) Her record at Columbia was splendid. She became an editor of the Law Review, and her reputation as tough, combative, diligent, and dedicated grew. In addition, two new enthusiasms entered Bella's life during law school: poker and Martin Abzug.

She met Martin Abzug while visiting relatives in Miami after her graduation from Hunter. At a Yehudi Menuhin concert for Russian war relief, she saw a young man staring and smiling at her. They met; they dated; he left for the service; they corresponded. Upon his return, he wanted to party. She wanted to study. He would meet her at midnight at the law library. A writer, Martin Abzug knew how to type; she never did. Martin typed her briefs and promised that even when they married and had children she would continue to work-her major hesitation about marriage.

They married on June 4, 1944. The son and partner of an affluent shirt manufacturer (A Betta Blouse Company), who published two novels and later became a stockbroker, Martin encouraged all of his wife's interests and ambitions-including those that were demonstrably dangerous during the McCarthyite years of the Cold War. He admired her integrity, vision, and combative style, and until his death remained her steadfast supporter. For forty-two years, their marriage, based on love, respect, and a generosity of spirit unrivaled in political circles, enabled Bella's activities.

Immediately after law school, Bella joined a labor law firm that represented union locals. Routinely overlooked when she entered an office to represent the United Auto Workers, or the Mine, Mill and Smelting Workers, or local restaurant workers, she decided to wear hats. Hats made all the difference when it came to recognition and even respect, and they became her trademark.

For fifteen years, Abzug, her husband, and their two daughters—Eve Gail, called Eegee, born in 1949, now a sculptor and social worker; and Isobel Jo, called Liz, born in 1952, now an attorney and political consultant—lived in Mount Vernon, an integrated suburb that the parents believed the girls would benefit from. When the family moved to Greenwich Village, a center of urban activity, everybody was happier.

During the 1950s, Bella Abzug was one of very few independent attorneys willing to take "Communist" cases. With Martin's encouragement, she opened her own office, and defended teachers, entertainment, radio, and Hollywood personalities assaulted during the witch-hunt.

She also defended Willie McGee. In an internationally celebrated case, McGee, a black Mississippian, was falsely accused of raping a white woman with whom he had a long-term consensual relationship. Abzug appealed the case before the Supreme Court and achieved two stays of execution when she argued that "Negroes were systematically excluded from jury service." But she did not achieve a change of venue, and after the third trial and conviction, all appeals were denied.

On her trip south to Jackson for the special hearing board appointed by Mississippi's governor, Abzug never thought much about her personal safety, even though she was pregnant at the time. She realized she was in trouble, however, when the hotel room she had booked was denied her and no other room made available. When a taxi driver offered to take her fifteen miles out into the country to find a place to stay, she returned to Jackson's bus station and spent an unsettling night. At court the next morning, she argued fervently for six hours on behalf of racial justice, protesting the clear conspiracy to deny Willie McGee's civil rights, as well as the long tradition of race prejudice and unfair discrimination. To cancel his death sentence, she argued in 1950, would restore faith in U.S. democracy throughout the world. Despite worldwide publicity, protest marches, and Abzug's fervent plea to prevent another legal lynching, McGee went to the electric chair. Abzug had a miscarriage, but her dedication to the cause of justice was strengthened by her days in Mississippi.

In 1961, Abzug and her Hunter circle (Mim Kelber, Amy Swerdlow, and Judy Lerner) joined others (including Dagmar Wilson, Claire Reid, and Lyla Hoffman) to create Women Strike for Peace. For the next decade, they lobbied for a nuclear test ban treaty, mobilized against Strontium-90 in milk, and protested against the war in Indochina. During the 1960s, Abzug became a prominent national speaker against the poverty, racism, and violence which mocked the promise of democracy in America.

A leading reform Democrat, a successful attorney, a popular grass-roots activist, Abzug was urged to run for Congress, which she agreed to do at the age o fifty in 1970. Stunning and galvanizing, with her hats and her homilies, she became a household symbol for dramatic change. Representing Greenwich Village, Little Italy, the Lower East Side, the West Side, and Chelsea, she was the first woman elected to Congress on a women's rights/peace platform. New York agreed, "This woman's place is in the House-the House of Representatives." And so, her daughter Eve proclaimed: "We got her out of our house and into your House."

A creative powerhouse for good, Abzug understood "pork," alliances, and the contradictions of leadership. Representing women, justice, and peace, she cast her first vote for the Equal Rights Amendment. As a member of the Committee on Public Works and Transportation, she brought more than $6 billion to New York State in economic development, sewage treatment, and mass transit, including ramps for people with disabilities and buses for the elderly.

As chair of the Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, she coauthored three important pieces of legislation: the Freedom of Information Act, the Government in the Sunshine Act, and the Right to Privacy Act. Abzug's bills exposed many secret government activities to public scrutiny for the first time. They allowed her and others to conduct inquiries into covert and illegal activities of the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies. The first member of Congress to call for Nixon's impeachment, Abzug helped journalists, historians, and citizens to combat the disinformation, misinformation, and generally abusive tactics that marked so much of the Cold War and blocked for so long the path toward human rights.

Above all, Abzug achieved splendid victories for women. She initiated the congressional caucus on women's issues, helped organize the National Women's Political Caucus, and served as chief strategist for the Democratic Women's Committee, which achieved equal representation for women in all elective and appointive posts, including presidential conventions. She wrote the first law banning discrimination against women in obtaining credit, credit cards, loans, and mortgages, and introduced pioneering bills on comprehensive child care, Social Security for homemakers, family planning, and abortion rights. In 1975, she introduced an amendment to the Civil Rights Act to include gay and lesbian rights.

Reelected for three terms, Abzug served from 1971 to 1977 and was acknowledged by a U.S. News & World Report survey of House members as the "third most influential" House member. In a 1977 Gallup poll, she was named one of the twenty most influential women of the world. That pipe-smoking Republican lady of the House, Millicent Fenwick, once said that she had two heroes, women she admired above all: Eleanor Roosevelt and Bella Abzug. They shared one thing, Fenwick said: They meant it! Women of vast integrity, they spoke from the heart, and they spoke truth to power. Although she agreed politically with Abzug on virtually nothing, Fenwick explained, Abzug was her ideal.

After Abzug was defeated in a four-way primary race for the Senate in 1976 by less than one percent, President Carter appointed her chair of the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, and later cochair of the National Advisory Commission for Women. Active in the UN Decade for Women conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), and Nairobi (1985), Abzug became an esteemed leader of the international women's movement. She also led the fight against the obnoxious Zionism Is Racism resolution passed in 1975, which was finally repealed in 1985 in Nairobi. Long active in supporting Israel, especially in Congress and in Israeli-U.S.-Palestine peace efforts, she insisted that Zionism was a liberation movement. Always controversial, her definition of Zionism embraced the international peace movement represented in Israel by Shulamith Aloni and others who promoted the peace process.

During this time, Abzug's not-for-profit advocacy organization, Women USA Fund, organized with Brownie Ledbetter, Patsy Mink, Gloria Steinem, Maxine Waters, and Mim Kelber, published educational materials and created the Women's Foreign Policy Council, which led to the creation of WEDO.

In November 1991, WEDO convened the World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet. Fifteen hundred women from eighty-three nations met in Miami, Florida, to produce the Women's Action Agenda for the twenty-first century. This agenda became the platform for action at UN conferences preparing for the Fourth World Congress on Women (held in September 1995 in Beijing) and created an international women's caucus that transformed the thinking and policies of the UN community. Since 1991, Abzug has promoted the program around the world.

In the face of personal medical challenges, including breast cancer and heart disease, Abzug continues to confront global problems of poverty, discrimination, and the violent fallout of this "bloodiest century in human history." As chair of New York City's Commission on the Status of Women (1993-1995), and in partnership with Greenpeace and WEDO, she launched a national grass-roots campaign against cancer called "Women, Cancer and the Environment: Action for Prevention."

She cats macrobiotically, swims regularly, and plays poker fiercely, maintains a loving relationship with her daughters, with whom she shares a vacation home, and entertains her countless and loving friends (her "extended family") with her great good humor and her love of song. Her friendships with people from Hollywood to New York are legion. Woody Allen directed her in Manhattan, she played alongside Shirley MacLaine in Madame Sousatzka, and her magical rendition of "Falling in Love Again" inspired feminist troubadour Sandy Rapp to compose a ballad, "When Bella Sings Marlena." One line of the song reads, "On the second refrain of 'moths to the flame,' spirits fill the room."

Shameless about enlisting her friends and colleagues to her causes, Abzug is known for her boundless generosity. An indefatigable force for global survival, her mission, her challenge, and her legacy are clear:

It's not about women joining the polluted stream. It's about cleaning the stream, changing the stagnant pools into fresh, flowing waters.

Our struggle is [against] violence, intolerance, inequality, injustice.

Our struggle is about creating sustainable lives, and attainable dreams.

Our struggle is about creating violence-free families. . . . violence-free streets, violence free borders.

Our call is to stop nuclear pollution. Our call is to build real democracies not hypocracies. Our call is to nurture and strengthen all families. Our call is to build communities, not only markets. Our call is to scale the great wall around women everywhere.

Bella Abzug's understanding of the need for an international network of women working across this troubled planet for decency, justice, and peace has fortified a global sisterhood never before imagined. With a song in her throat and a very high heart, Abzug is a boundless source of hope for the future. She lives every day to the fullest and blesses every day with the spiritual fervor of her responsibility and commitment to all people-one life, one weave.

Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore eds. Sources: Jewish Women in America. NY: Routledge, 1997. Reprinted with permission of the American Jewish Historical Society. Photo from Biographical Dictionary of the US Congress

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Born in the Bronx on July 24, 1920, Bella (Savitzky) Abzug predated women's right to vote by one month. A fighter for justice and peace, equal rights, human dignity, environmental integrity, and sustainable development, Bella Abzug has advanced human goals and political alliances worldwide.

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Perhaps check out this article about Moses

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Perhaps check out this article about Moses

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Along with God, it is the figure of Moses (Moshe) who dominates the Torah. Acting at God's behest, it is he who leads the Jews out of slavery, unleashes the Ten Plagues against Egypt, guides the freed slaves for forty years in the wilderness, carries down the law from Mount Sinai, and prepares the Jews to enter the land of Canaan. Without Moses, there would be little apart from laws to write about in the last four books of the Torah.

Moses is born during the Jewish enslavement in Egypt, during a terrible period when Pharaoh decrees that all male Hebrew infants are to be drowned at birth. His mother, Yocheved, desperate to prolong his life, floats him in a basket in the Nile. Hearing the crying child as she walks by, Pharaoh's daughter pities the crying infant and adopts him ( Exodus 2:1-10). It surely is no coincidence that the Jews' future liberator is raised as an Egyptian prince. Had Moses grown up in slavery with his fellow Hebrews, he probably would not have developed the pride, vision, and courage to lead a revolt.

The Torah records only three incidents in Moses' life before God appoints him a prophet. As a young man, outraged at seeing an Egyptian overseer beating a Jewish slave, he kills the overseer. The next day, he tries to make peace between two Hebrews who are fighting, but the aggressor takes umbrage and says: "Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" Moses immediately understands that he is in danger, for though his high status undoubtedly would protect him from punishment for the murder of a mere overseer, the fact that he killed the man for carrying out his duties to Pharaoh would brand him a rebel against the king. Indeed, Pharaoh orders Moses killed, and he flees to Midian. At this point, Moses probably wants nothing more than a peaceful interlude, but immediately he finds himself in another fight. The seven daughters of the Midianite priest Reuel (also called Jethro) are being abused by the Midianite male shepherds, and Moses rises to their defense ( Exodus 2:11-22).

The incidents are of course related. In all three, Moses shows a deep, almost obsessive commitment to fighting injustice. Furthermore, his concerns are not parochial. He intervenes when a non-Jew oppresses a Jew, when two Jews fight, and when non-Jews oppress other non-Jews.

Moses marries Tzipporah, one of the Midianite priest's daughters, and becomes the shepherd for his father-in-law's flock. On one occasion, when he has gone with his flock into the wilderness, an angel of the Lord appears to him in the guise of a bush that is burning but is not consumed (see next entry). The symbolism of the miracle is powerful. In a world in which nature itself is worshiped, God shows that He rules over it.

Once He has so effectively elicited Moses' attention, God commands-over Moses' strenuous objections-that he go to Egypt and along with his brother, Aaron, make one simple if revolutionary demand of Pharaoh: "Let my people go." Pharaoh resists Moses' petition, until God wreaks the Ten Plagues on Egypt, after which the children of Israel escape.

Months later, in the Sinai Desert, Moses climbs Mount Sinai and comes down with the Ten Commandments, only to discover the Israelites engaged in an orgy and worshiping a Golden Calf. The episode is paradigmatic: Only at the very moment God or Moses is doing something for them are they loyal believers. The instant God's or Moses' presence is not manifest, the children of Israel revert to amoral, immoral, and sometimes idolatrous behavior. Like a true parent, Moses rages at the Jews when they sin, but he never turns against them-even when God does. To God's wrathful declaration on one occasion that He will blot out the Jews and make of Moses a new nation, he answers, "Then blot me out too" (Exodus 32:32).

The law that Moses transmits to the Jews in the Torah embraces far more than the Ten Commandments. In addition to many ritual regulations. the Jews are instructed to love God as well as be in awe of Him, to love their neighbors as themselves, and to love the stranger-that is, the non-Jew living among them-as themselves as well.

The saddest event in Moses' life might well be God's prohibiting him from entering the land of Israel. The reason for this ban is explicitly connected to an episode in Numbers in which the Hebrews angrily demand that Moses supply them with water. God commands Moses to assemble the community, "and before their very eyes order the [nearby] rock to yield its water." Fed up with the Hebrews' constant whining and complaining, he says to them instead: "Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?" He then strikes the rock twice with his rod, and water gushes out ( Numbers 20:2-13). It is this episode of disobedience, striking the rock instead of speaking to it, that is generally offered as the explanation for why God punishes Moses and forbids him to enter Israel. The punishment, however, seems so disproportionate to the offense, that the real reason for God's prohibition must go deeper. Most probably, as Dr. Jacob Milgrom, professor of Bible at the University of California, Berkeley, has suggested (elaborating on earlier comments of Rabbi Hananael, Nachmanides, and the Bekhor Shor) that Moses' sin was declaring, "Shall we get water for you out of this rock?" implying that it was he and his brother, Aaron, and not God, who were the authors of the miracle. Rabbi Irwin Kula has suggested that Moses' sin was something else altogether. Numbers 14:5 records that when ten of the twelve spies returned from Canaan and gloomily predicted that the Hebrews would never be able to conquer the land, the Israelites railed against Moses. In response, he seems to have had a mini-breakdown: "Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembled congregation of the Israelites." The two independent spies, Joshua and Caleb, both of whom rejected the majority report, took over "and exhorted the whole Israelite community" ( Numbers 14:7). Later, in Deuteronomy, when Moses delivers his final summing-up to the Israelites, he refers back to this episode: "When the Lord heard your loud complaint, He was angry. He vowed: "Not one of these men, this evil generation, shall see the good land that I swore to give to your fathers, none except Caleb.... Because of you, the Lord was incensed with me too, and He said: You shall not enter it either. Joshua ... who attends you, he shall enter it" (1:34-38).

Despite these two sad episodes, Moses impressed his monotheistic vision upon the Jews with such force that in the succeeding three millennia, Jews have never confused the messenger with the Author of the message. As Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann has written: "in Greece, the heroes of the past were held to have been sired by a god or to have been born of a goddess ... [and] in Egypt, the Pharaoh was considered divine." But despite the extraordinary veneration accorded Moses — "there has not arisen a prophet since like Moses" is the Bible's verdict ( Deuteronomy 34:10) — no Jewish thinker ever thought he was anything other than a man. See And No One Knows His Burial Place to This Day.

* - Lifespan of Moses as calculated by the Seder Olam Rabbah.

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Along with God, it is the figure of Moses (Moshe) who dominates the Torah. Acting at God's behest, it is he who leads the Jews out of slavery, unleashes the Ten Plagues against Egypt, guides the freed slaves for forty years in the wilderness, carries down the law from Mount Sinai, and prepares the Jews to enter the land of Canaan.

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And here is one to check out about Gal Gadot

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And here is one to check out about Gal Gadot

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Gal Gadot is an Israeli actress and model. As an actress, Gadot is known for her role as Gisele Yashar in The Fast and the Furious film series. In 2016, Gadot began playing the role of Diana Prince / Wonder Woman in the DC Extended Universe, starting with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and continuing as the lead in Wonder Woman (2017).

In 2013, she was ranked as the second-highest earning model in Israel behind Bar Refaeli. She is the face of Gucci's Bamboo perfume.

Gadot was born and raised in Rosh HaAyin, Israel. In Hebrew, her first name means "wave" and her surname means "riverbanks". She is the daughter of Irit (née Weiss), a teacher, and Michael Gadot, an engineer. Both her parents were born in Israel, and they had Hebraized their surname from "Greenstein" to "Gadot." Her maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Gadot stated that she was brought up in a "very Jewish, Israeli family environment." Her ancestry is Polish-Jewish, Austrian-Jewish, German-Jewish, and Czech-Jewish. Her high school major was biology. She says that in high school she was successful at basketball due to her height.

At the age of 18, Gadot won the 2004 Miss Israel competition, and next competed in the 2004 Miss Universe pageant in Ecuador. Following her participation in the competitions, she joined the Israel Defense Forces and completed her two years of mandatory military service as a fitness/combat readiness instructor. She says of her time in the army: "You give two or three years, and it's not about you. You give your freedom away for a while. You learn discipline and respect. The things I've been through as a soldier prepared me to deal with career things as well."

After leaving the army, Gadot began studying law and international relations at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya. It was when she had completed her first year of school that a casting director called her to audition for the part of Bond girl Camille Montes in the film Quantum of Solace. Although she lost the part to Olga Kurylenko, the same casting director hired Gadot for the role of Gisele in Fast & Furious. Gadot said, "I think the main reason was that [the director] Justin Lin really liked that I was in the military, and he wanted to use my knowledge of weapons." Gadot performed her own stunts in the Fast & Furious films.

In 2007, the 21-year-old Gadot took a part in the Maxim photo shoot "Women of the Israeli Army." and as such she featured on the cover of the New York Post. In April 2012, Shalom Life ranked her Number 5 on its list of "the 50 most talented, intelligent, funny, and gorgeous Jewish women in the world" behind model Bar Refaeli and actress Eva Green. In 2014, Gadot was one of two Israeli actresses, along with Odeya Rush, listed as an upcoming leading lady by InStyle magazine.

She has led international campaigns for Captain Morgan rum, Gucci fragrances, Vine Vera skincare ranges, and advertised Jaguar Cars. She is the face of Gucci's Bamboo perfume brand, of Huawei smartphones, and of Miss Sixty. She has featured as the covergirl on Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Bride Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, UMM, Cleo, Fashion, Lucire, and FHM. Gadot was the main model for fashion brand Castro in 2008-2016. In 2013, her annual modelling salary was estimated at $700,000, more than that of other famous Israeli models such as Esti Ginzburg and Shlomit Malka, although significantly less than Bar Refaeli.

In 2008, Gadot starred in the Israeli drama Bubot. She appeared as Gisele in Fast & Furious, the fourth film in The Fast & the Furious franchise, having won the role over six other actresses. In 2010, she had a small role in the action-adventure Knight and Day. Earlier that year, she appeared in the film Date Night as Natanya, the girlfriend of Mark Wahlberg's character. In 2011, she returned to The Fast & the Furious franchise, reprising her role as Gisele in Fast Five. In 2013, Gadot played Gisele again in Fast & Furious 6.

Gadot played Wonder Woman in the movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). She received swordsmanship, Kung Fu kickboxing, capoeira and Brazilian jiu-jitsu training in preparation for the role. Gadot's performance as the superhero was hailed as one of the best parts of the film.

Also in 2016, she had a small role in John Hillcoat's crime-thriller Triple 9, where she starred along with Kate Winslet and Aaron Paul. She also co-starred alongside Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman and Tommy Lee Jones in the poorly-received film Criminal, as the wife of Ryan Reynolds' character. Gadot also appeared in the comedy Keeping Up with the Joneses along with Isla Fisher, Zach Galifianakis, and Jon Hamm.

Gadot, fellow Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter, DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson, Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins and UN Under-Secretary General Cristina Gallach appeared at the United Nations in October 2016, the 75th anniversary of the first appearance of Wonder Woman, to mark the character's designation by the United Nations as its Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls.

In 2017, she became an international superstar with her role in Wonder Woman, which she reprised the same year in Justice League. That year she was the highest-grossing actress, earning $1.4 billion. The attention also led to the opportunity to host Saturday Night Live.

In 2018, Gadot voiced Shank in the animated Walt Disney film Ralph Breaks the Internet. She also appeared in the music video for Maroon 5's song "Girls Like You" featuring Cardi B. She also played herself in an episode of The Simpsons."

In October 2019, Gadot formed a production company, Pilot Wave, with her husband Jaron Varsano. She is set to star in and co-produce an Apple TV+ limited series about actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, as well as the Warner Bros. historical thriller film Irena Sendler, about humanitarian Irena Sendler.

Gadot was named as celebrity endorser for Smartwater in 2020, replacing Jennifer Aniston. In March 2020, Gadot and a number of other celebrities performed an online version of the song "Imagine" by John Lennon, intended to raise morale in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the video was widely ridiculed for the participants' (excluding real singers) poor voices and their "smug self-satisfaction."

The much-anticipated sequel to Wonder Woman 1984 was scheduled for release in early 2020, but has been repeatedly pushed back due to the coronavirus. Nevertheless, in 2020, she was the third highest paid actress, earning $31.5 million, $20 million alone from her role in Red Notice.

Gadot is scheduled to appear as Wonder Woman in Zach Snyder's Justice League television show in 2021.

Gadot married Israeli real estate developer Yaron Varsano on September 28, 2008. The couple owned a luxury hotel in the Neve Tzedek district of Tel Aviv, which they sold to Roman Abramovich in 2015 for $26 million.

The couple has two daughters.

Sources: "Gal Gadot," Wikipedia;
Rebecca Stadlen Amir, "Gal Gadot is the highest-grossing actress of 2017," Israel21c, (January 2, 2018);
Jon Caramanica, "This 'Imagine' Cover Is No Heaven,"New York Times, (March 20, 2020);
Naama Barak, "Wonder Woman Gal Gadot third highest-paid actress in 2020," Israel21c, (October 4, 2020)

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, by Gage Skidmore licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Gal Gadot is an Israeli actress and model. As an actress, Gadot is known for her role as Gisele Yashar in The Fast and the Furious film series. In 2016, Gadot began playing the role of Diana Prince / Wonder Woman in the DC Extended Universe, starting with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and continuing as the lead in Wonder Woman (2017).

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Here's a link to learn more about Houdini 

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Here's a link to learn more about Houdini 

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Harry Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss on March 24, 1874 in Budapest, Hungary. His family emigrated to the United States while he was an infant, and his father became the first rabbi in Appleton, Wisconsin. They later moved to Milwaukee, and eventually settled in New York. Young Ehrich's life was transformed after he learned his first trick (the vanishing quarter). At the age of 17, he changed his name to Harry Houdini and began performing in medicine shows, circuses, theaters, etc.

When 100,000 people watched "The King of Handcuffs" wriggle free while hanging from a building in 1916, a newspaper reported that this was "the biggest crowd ever assembled in Washington at one place except for the inauguration of the President." One of Houdini's most spectacular illusions was the "Vanishing Elephant," in which the pachyderm lumbered on to the stage and walked straight into a large cabinet. Almost simultaneously the cabinet's walls would be pulled back and the elephant had disappeared. Houdini said "Even the elephant does not know how it is done."

Four years after the Wright Brothers flew the first practical airplane, Houdini bought a French plane and made his first flight. And just 5 months later, on March 16, 1910, he became the first person to make a successful flight in Australia!

Houdini was also a motion picture star, making his first appearance in 1918 in a serial "The Mastery Mystery." Soon he set up the Houdini Picture Corporation where he wrote and starred in "The Man from Beyond" and "Haldane of the Secret Service." On October 31, 1975 Houdini's pioneering accomplishments earned him a star on Hollywood Boulevard.

Houdini was lounging in his dressing room at the Princess Theater in Montreal on October 22, 1926 when a student from McGill University asked if it was true that Houdini could sustain punches to his midsection without injury. The visitor struck him immediately, not realizing that Houdini had to brace himself. Even though Houdini had stomach pain, he boarded the train for his next appearance in Detroit. Collapsing after the final curtain, Houdini was taken to the hospital where his ruptured appendix was removed. But it was too late, and he passed away on October 31 -- Halloween. At his funeral, Rabbi Bernard Drachman called Houdini "one of the truly great men of the age."

Sources: Jewish-American Hall of Fame - Jewish Museum in Cyberspace. Photos: Top: "My Two Sweethearts," [Houdini with his wife and mother], Gelatin silver print, ca. 1907, McManus-Young Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. In text: Harry Houdini with his mother Cecilia Steiner Weiss (d. 1913), Rochester, New York, Gelatin silver print, ca. 1907, McManus-Young Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress

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Harry Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss on March 24, 1874 in Budapest, Hungary. His family emigrated to the United States while he was an infant, and his father became the first rabbi in Appleton, Wisconsin. They later moved to Milwaukee, and eventually settled in New York.

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One of the greatest physicists of all time, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the special and general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, of secular Ashkenazi German Jewish parents. Einstein was observant for a time, but never had a bar mitzvah. A Jewish medical student and family friend - ironically named Max Talmud - introduced Einstein to science books, which Einstein saw as contradicting religious teachings. Einstein did not believe in the commonly accepted anthropomorphic conception of God. "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men," he wrote to a rabbi in 1929.

He spent his early years in Munich where his father set up a small electrochemical business. As a boy he was fascinated by algebra and geometry, though he detested the barracks discipline of German schools. In 1896, he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, graduating in 1900 and receiving his doctorate from Zurich in 1905. Unable to get an academic position, he took a post with the patent office in Bern while continuing to pursue his concern with the fundamental problems of physics.

In 1905, he published four brilliant papers in the Annalen der Physik which were to transform twentieth-century scientific thought. He established the special theory of relativity, predicted the equivalence of mass (m) and energy (e) according to the equation e = mc2, where (c) represents the velocity of light; he created the theory of Brownian motion and founded the photon theory of light (photoelectric effect) for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1921.

Einstein joined the German University of Prague in 1910 and then, in 1913, through Max Planck received a Professorship at the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin.

In 1916, Einstein published his Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitatstheorie (Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition, 1920), which profoundly modified the simple concepts of space and time on which Newtonian mechanics had been based. His prediction of the deflection of light by the gravitational field of the sun was borne out by a British team of scientists at the time of the solar eclipse in 1919, making Einstein a household name.

Throughout the Weimar years he was lionized, especially abroad, though in Germany not only his work but also his pacifist politics aroused violent animosity in extreme right-wing circles. Anti-semites sought to brand his theory of relativity as 'un-German' and during the Third Reich they partially achieved their objective, when Einstein's name could no longer be mentioned in lectures or scholarly papers, though his relativity theory was still taught.

During the 1920s Einstein travelled widely in Europe, America and Asia and identified himself with various public causes such as pacifism, Zionism, the League of Nations and European unity. Einstein was asked by WZO president and fellow scientist Chaim Weizmann to raise money for the organization and for Hebrew University. Einstein worried the establishment of a Jewish state would provoke conflict with the Arabs, but, like Herzl before him, the anti-Semitism he faced in Europe convinced him of the need for a Jewish state. In 1921, he went on a fundraising tour of the United States. The following year, he stopped in Palestine for 12 days on the way back from a trip to Asia and gave the first-ever scientific lecture at Hebrew University. Einstein said he was proud of how Jews were becoming "a force in the world," but never visited again.

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Einstein was at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

and he never returned to Germany, being almost immediately deprived of his posts in Berlin and his membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His property was seized, a price was put on his head by Nazi fanatics and his books were among those burned publicly on May 10, 1933, as manifestations of the un-German spirit. Einstein and his wife Elsa returned to Europe in March and stopped in Belgium where he renounced his German citizenship. He returned to the U.S. and never again set foot in Germany. A lifelong opponent of nationalism, Einstein regarded the Third Reich as a catastrophe for civilization and became an outspoken opponent of National Socialism, making his name became synonymous with treason in the Third Reich.

In 1940, Einstein became a Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies (Princeton) and an American citizen. Alarmed at the prospect that Hitler's Germany might acquire an atomic bomb after two German physicists had discovered the fission of uranium, Einstein signed a letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939, which sparked off the Manhattan project. It was one of the great ironies of his career that the pacifist Einstein, through this action, should have helped initiate the era of nuclear weapons to whose use he was completely opposed.

Four years after the creation of Israel, Einstein was offered the Presidency of Israel by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Though moved by the offer, Einstein declined, offering the following statement:

I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel [to serve as President], and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions. For these reasons alone I should be unsuited to fulfill the duties of that high office, even if advancing age was not making increasing inroads on my strength. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.

His simplicity, benevolence and good humour as well as his scientific genius gave Einstein a unique fame and prestige among physicists, even though after the mid-1920s he diverged from the main trends in the field, especially disliking the probabilistic interpretation of the universe associated with quantum theory.

In 1955, Einstein was scheduled to deliver a speech marking Israel's seventh Independence Day on ABC, NBC and CBS. On April 17, nine days before the speech, he experienced internal bleeding that landed him in the hospital. He reportedly took a draft of the speech with him to the hospital, but he died the next day at his Princeton home after refusing emergency surgery. The Israel State Archive published drafts of the speech in 2013.

[T]he establishment of Israel is an event which actively engages the conscience of this generation....It is, therefore, a bitter paradox to find that a State which was destined to be a shelter for a martyred people is itself threatened by grave dangers to its own security. The universal conscience cannot be indifferent to such peril.

The Knesset declared that March 14 - Einstein's birthday - would be National Science Day.

Sources: Wistrich, Robert S. Who's Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge, 1997;
8 Jewish Factoids About Albert Einstein, JTA, (November 25, 2015);
Israel State Archives
Photo Credit: Albert Einstein™ Licensed by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Represented by The Roger Richman Agency, Inc., Beverly Hills, CA 90212; www.albert-einstein.net

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One of the greatest physicists of all time, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the special and general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, of secular Ashkenazi German Jewish parents. Einstein was observant for a time, but never had a bar mitzvah.

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There is lots to discover about Menachem Begin - check out this link

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There is lots to discover about Menachem Begin - check out this link

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Menachem Begin was born in BrestLitovsk in 1913. As a child he was forced to flee with his family to escape the fighting between the German and Russian armies in World War I.

A passionate Zionist from an early age, he joined Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Betar youth movement in his teens, rising quickly to important administrative and leadership positions.

By 1936 he was in charge of Betar Czechoslovakia, and in 1938 he became the head of Betar Poland, an organization with 100,000 members which engaged in weapons training to defend Polish Jewry, preparation and transport of "illegal" immigrants to Israel, agricultural training, and communications.

In 1940, Begin was imprisoned in Siberian labor camps by Josef Stalin's NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB). After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he was set free by dint of his Polish citizenship, and joined the Free Polish Army, which in 1943 made its way to British controlled Palestine for training.

Contacting the dormant Jewish underground, Irgun Zvai Leumi, Begin set about planning a Jewish uprising against the British authorities. This began in 1944, but increased in pace and scope immediately after World War II and continued until late 1947. Begin ordered many of the Irgun's operations, including the Akko prison breakout and the destruction of the central British administrative offices in the King David Hotel. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Begin disbanded the Irgun.

From 1948 to 1977, Menachem Begin was the leader of Israel's opposition. In the 1950's, he led the movement against accepting German reparations for the Nazi Holocaust.

In 1965, Begin merged his Herut Party with the Liberals to form Gahal, which later served as the foundation of the Likud Party. The crisis atmosphere in 1967 saw the establishment of a National Unity Government, which finally brought Begin and other Gahal leaders to the Cabinet table. The National Unity Government continued until 1970, when Begin insisted that Israel condition Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's extension of the cease-fire across the Suez Canal on the signing of a peace treaty recognizing Israel.

In 1977, Begin was elected Prime Minister of Israel. As the new head of state, he helped initiate the peace process with Egypt, which resulted in the Camp David Accords and the 1979 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty. As of a result of this effort to achieve peace with Egypt, Begin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1978 with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Begin invested national resources in development programs for Israel's poorer neighborhoods and sought to liberalize Israel's economy.

In 1981, Begin ordered the Israeli Air Force to bomb the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, where the Iraqi regime was developing nuclear weapons. Though Israel was roundly condemned by the international community at the time, it became apparent during the 1991 Gulf War that Israel's action had succeeded in hampering Baghdad's drive to acquire nuclear weapons.

In 1982, after repeated acts of PLO terror, Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee to remove the terrorist threat from Israel's northern border.

Begin's decision to encourage Ethiopian Jews to immigrate to Israel later culminated in Operation Moses, which brought thousands en masse to Israel in the early 1980's.

Following the death of his wife, Aliza, in the winter of 1982, Begin resigned as Prime Minister. He spent the rest of his life in seclusion, glimpsed in public only at memorials for his wife or at the weddings of his grandchildren. He died March 9, 1992, and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

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Menachem Begin was born in Brest­Litovsk in 1913. As a child he was forced to flee with his family to escape the fighting between the German and Russian armies in World War I. A passionate Zionist from an early age, he joined Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Betar youth movement in his teens, rising quickly to important administrative and leadership positions.

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You will find lots of information about Abraham - perhaps check out this link

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You will find lots of information about Abraham - perhaps check out this link

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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Changemakers - Moses and Albert Einstein

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Changemakers - Moses and Albert Einstein

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One of the greatest physicists of all time, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the special and general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, of secular Ashkenazi German Jewish parents. Einstein was observant for a time, but never had a bar mitzvah. A Jewish medical student and family friend - ironically named Max Talmud - introduced Einstein to science books, which Einstein saw as contradicting religious teachings. Einstein did not believe in the commonly accepted anthropomorphic conception of God. "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men," he wrote to a rabbi in 1929.

He spent his early years in Munich where his father set up a small electrochemical business. As a boy he was fascinated by algebra and geometry, though he detested the barracks discipline of German schools. In 1896, he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, graduating in 1900 and receiving his doctorate from Zurich in 1905. Unable to get an academic position, he took a post with the patent office in Bern while continuing to pursue his concern with the fundamental problems of physics.

In 1905, he published four brilliant papers in the Annalen der Physik which were to transform twentieth-century scientific thought. He established the special theory of relativity, predicted the equivalence of mass (m) and energy (e) according to the equation e = mc2, where (c) represents the velocity of light; he created the theory of Brownian motion and founded the photon theory of light (photoelectric effect) for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1921.

Einstein joined the German University of Prague in 1910 and then, in 1913, through Max Planck received a Professorship at the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin.

In 1916, Einstein published his Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitatstheorie (Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition, 1920), which profoundly modified the simple concepts of space and time on which Newtonian mechanics had been based. His prediction of the deflection of light by the gravitational field of the sun was borne out by a British team of scientists at the time of the solar eclipse in 1919, making Einstein a household name.

Throughout the Weimar years he was lionized, especially abroad, though in Germany not only his work but also his pacifist politics aroused violent animosity in extreme right-wing circles. Anti-semites sought to brand his theory of relativity as 'un-German' and during the Third Reich they partially achieved their objective, when Einstein's name could no longer be mentioned in lectures or scholarly papers, though his relativity theory was still taught.

During the 1920s Einstein travelled widely in Europe, America and Asia and identified himself with various public causes such as pacifism, Zionism, the League of Nations and European unity. Einstein was asked by WZO president and fellow scientist Chaim Weizmann to raise money for the organization and for Hebrew University. Einstein worried the establishment of a Jewish state would provoke conflict with the Arabs, but, like Herzl before him, the anti-Semitism he faced in Europe convinced him of the need for a Jewish state. In 1921, he went on a fundraising tour of the United States. The following year, he stopped in Palestine for 12 days on the way back from a trip to Asia and gave the first-ever scientific lecture at Hebrew University. Einstein said he was proud of how Jews were becoming "a force in the world," but never visited again.

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Einstein was at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

and he never returned to Germany, being almost immediately deprived of his posts in Berlin and his membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His property was seized, a price was put on his head by Nazi fanatics and his books were among those burned publicly on May 10, 1933, as manifestations of the un-German spirit. Einstein and his wife Elsa returned to Europe in March and stopped in Belgium where he renounced his German citizenship. He returned to the U.S. and never again set foot in Germany. A lifelong opponent of nationalism, Einstein regarded the Third Reich as a catastrophe for civilization and became an outspoken opponent of National Socialism, making his name became synonymous with treason in the Third Reich.

In 1940, Einstein became a Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies (Princeton) and an American citizen. Alarmed at the prospect that Hitler's Germany might acquire an atomic bomb after two German physicists had discovered the fission of uranium, Einstein signed a letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939, which sparked off the Manhattan project. It was one of the great ironies of his career that the pacifist Einstein, through this action, should have helped initiate the era of nuclear weapons to whose use he was completely opposed.

Four years after the creation of Israel, Einstein was offered the Presidency of Israel by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Though moved by the offer, Einstein declined, offering the following statement:

I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel [to serve as President], and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions. For these reasons alone I should be unsuited to fulfill the duties of that high office, even if advancing age was not making increasing inroads on my strength. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.

His simplicity, benevolence and good humour as well as his scientific genius gave Einstein a unique fame and prestige among physicists, even though after the mid-1920s he diverged from the main trends in the field, especially disliking the probabilistic interpretation of the universe associated with quantum theory.

In 1955, Einstein was scheduled to deliver a speech marking Israel's seventh Independence Day on ABC, NBC and CBS. On April 17, nine days before the speech, he experienced internal bleeding that landed him in the hospital. He reportedly took a draft of the speech with him to the hospital, but he died the next day at his Princeton home after refusing emergency surgery. The Israel State Archive published drafts of the speech in 2013.

[T]he establishment of Israel is an event which actively engages the conscience of this generation....It is, therefore, a bitter paradox to find that a State which was destined to be a shelter for a martyred people is itself threatened by grave dangers to its own security. The universal conscience cannot be indifferent to such peril.

The Knesset declared that March 14 - Einstein's birthday - would be National Science Day.

Sources: Wistrich, Robert S. Who's Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge, 1997;
8 Jewish Factoids About Albert Einstein, JTA, (November 25, 2015);
Israel State Archives
Photo Credit: Albert Einstein™ Licensed by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Represented by The Roger Richman Agency, Inc., Beverly Hills, CA 90212; www.albert-einstein.net

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One of the greatest physicists of all time, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the special and general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, of secular Ashkenazi German Jewish parents. Einstein was observant for a time, but never had a bar mitzvah.

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Along with God, it is the figure of Moses (Moshe) who dominates the Torah. Acting at God's behest, it is he who leads the Jews out of slavery, unleashes the Ten Plagues against Egypt, guides the freed slaves for forty years in the wilderness, carries down the law from Mount Sinai, and prepares the Jews to enter the land of Canaan. Without Moses, there would be little apart from laws to write about in the last four books of the Torah.

Moses is born during the Jewish enslavement in Egypt, during a terrible period when Pharaoh decrees that all male Hebrew infants are to be drowned at birth. His mother, Yocheved, desperate to prolong his life, floats him in a basket in the Nile. Hearing the crying child as she walks by, Pharaoh's daughter pities the crying infant and adopts him ( Exodus 2:1-10). It surely is no coincidence that the Jews' future liberator is raised as an Egyptian prince. Had Moses grown up in slavery with his fellow Hebrews, he probably would not have developed the pride, vision, and courage to lead a revolt.

The Torah records only three incidents in Moses' life before God appoints him a prophet. As a young man, outraged at seeing an Egyptian overseer beating a Jewish slave, he kills the overseer. The next day, he tries to make peace between two Hebrews who are fighting, but the aggressor takes umbrage and says: "Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" Moses immediately understands that he is in danger, for though his high status undoubtedly would protect him from punishment for the murder of a mere overseer, the fact that he killed the man for carrying out his duties to Pharaoh would brand him a rebel against the king. Indeed, Pharaoh orders Moses killed, and he flees to Midian. At this point, Moses probably wants nothing more than a peaceful interlude, but immediately he finds himself in another fight. The seven daughters of the Midianite priest Reuel (also called Jethro) are being abused by the Midianite male shepherds, and Moses rises to their defense ( Exodus 2:11-22).

The incidents are of course related. In all three, Moses shows a deep, almost obsessive commitment to fighting injustice. Furthermore, his concerns are not parochial. He intervenes when a non-Jew oppresses a Jew, when two Jews fight, and when non-Jews oppress other non-Jews.

Moses marries Tzipporah, one of the Midianite priest's daughters, and becomes the shepherd for his father-in-law's flock. On one occasion, when he has gone with his flock into the wilderness, an angel of the Lord appears to him in the guise of a bush that is burning but is not consumed (see next entry). The symbolism of the miracle is powerful. In a world in which nature itself is worshiped, God shows that He rules over it.

Once He has so effectively elicited Moses' attention, God commands-over Moses' strenuous objections-that he go to Egypt and along with his brother, Aaron, make one simple if revolutionary demand of Pharaoh: "Let my people go." Pharaoh resists Moses' petition, until God wreaks the Ten Plagues on Egypt, after which the children of Israel escape.

Months later, in the Sinai Desert, Moses climbs Mount Sinai and comes down with the Ten Commandments, only to discover the Israelites engaged in an orgy and worshiping a Golden Calf. The episode is paradigmatic: Only at the very moment God or Moses is doing something for them are they loyal believers. The instant God's or Moses' presence is not manifest, the children of Israel revert to amoral, immoral, and sometimes idolatrous behavior. Like a true parent, Moses rages at the Jews when they sin, but he never turns against them-even when God does. To God's wrathful declaration on one occasion that He will blot out the Jews and make of Moses a new nation, he answers, "Then blot me out too" (Exodus 32:32).

The law that Moses transmits to the Jews in the Torah embraces far more than the Ten Commandments. In addition to many ritual regulations. the Jews are instructed to love God as well as be in awe of Him, to love their neighbors as themselves, and to love the stranger-that is, the non-Jew living among them-as themselves as well.

The saddest event in Moses' life might well be God's prohibiting him from entering the land of Israel. The reason for this ban is explicitly connected to an episode in Numbers in which the Hebrews angrily demand that Moses supply them with water. God commands Moses to assemble the community, "and before their very eyes order the [nearby] rock to yield its water." Fed up with the Hebrews' constant whining and complaining, he says to them instead: "Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?" He then strikes the rock twice with his rod, and water gushes out ( Numbers 20:2-13). It is this episode of disobedience, striking the rock instead of speaking to it, that is generally offered as the explanation for why God punishes Moses and forbids him to enter Israel. The punishment, however, seems so disproportionate to the offense, that the real reason for God's prohibition must go deeper. Most probably, as Dr. Jacob Milgrom, professor of Bible at the University of California, Berkeley, has suggested (elaborating on earlier comments of Rabbi Hananael, Nachmanides, and the Bekhor Shor) that Moses' sin was declaring, "Shall we get water for you out of this rock?" implying that it was he and his brother, Aaron, and not God, who were the authors of the miracle. Rabbi Irwin Kula has suggested that Moses' sin was something else altogether. Numbers 14:5 records that when ten of the twelve spies returned from Canaan and gloomily predicted that the Hebrews would never be able to conquer the land, the Israelites railed against Moses. In response, he seems to have had a mini-breakdown: "Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembled congregation of the Israelites." The two independent spies, Joshua and Caleb, both of whom rejected the majority report, took over "and exhorted the whole Israelite community" ( Numbers 14:7). Later, in Deuteronomy, when Moses delivers his final summing-up to the Israelites, he refers back to this episode: "When the Lord heard your loud complaint, He was angry. He vowed: "Not one of these men, this evil generation, shall see the good land that I swore to give to your fathers, none except Caleb.... Because of you, the Lord was incensed with me too, and He said: You shall not enter it either. Joshua ... who attends you, he shall enter it" (1:34-38).

Despite these two sad episodes, Moses impressed his monotheistic vision upon the Jews with such force that in the succeeding three millennia, Jews have never confused the messenger with the Author of the message. As Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann has written: "in Greece, the heroes of the past were held to have been sired by a god or to have been born of a goddess ... [and] in Egypt, the Pharaoh was considered divine." But despite the extraordinary veneration accorded Moses — "there has not arisen a prophet since like Moses" is the Bible's verdict ( Deuteronomy 34:10) — no Jewish thinker ever thought he was anything other than a man. See And No One Knows His Burial Place to This Day.

* - Lifespan of Moses as calculated by the Seder Olam Rabbah.

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Along with God, it is the figure of Moses (Moshe) who dominates the Torah. Acting at God's behest, it is he who leads the Jews out of slavery, unleashes the Ten Plagues against Egypt, guides the freed slaves for forty years in the wilderness, carries down the law from Mount Sinai, and prepares the Jews to enter the land of Canaan.

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Moses, Hebrew Moshe, (flourished 14th-13th century ), Hebrew prophet, teacher, and leader who, in the 13th century bce (before the Common Era, or bc), delivered his people from Egyptian slavery. In the Covenant ceremony at Mt. Sinai, where the Ten Commandments were promulgated, he founded the religious community known as Israel. As the interpreter of these Covenant stipulations, he was the organizer of the community's religious and civil traditions. In the Judaic tradition, he is revered as the greatest prophet and teacher, and Judaism has sometimes loosely been called Mosaism, or the Mosaic faith, in Western Christendom. His influence continues to be felt in the religious life, moral concerns, and social ethics of Western civilization, and therein lies his undying significance.

The historical problem

Historical views of Moses

Few historical figures have engendered such disparate interpretations as has Moses. Early Jewish and Christian traditions considered him the author of the Torah ("Law," or "Teaching"), also called the Pentateuch ("Five Books"), comprising the first five books of the Bible, and some conservative groups still believe in Mosaic authorship.

Opposing this is the theory of the German scholar Martin Noth, who, while granting that Moses may have had something to do with the preparations for the conquest of Canaan, was very skeptical of the roles attributed to him by tradition. Although recognizing a historical core beneath the Exodus and Sinai traditions, Noth believed that two different groups experienced these events and transmitted the stories independently of each other. He contended that the biblical story tracing the Hebrews from Egypt to Canaan resulted from an editor's weaving separate themes and traditions around a main character Moses, actually an obscure person from Moab.

This article, following the lead of the biblical archaeologist and historian W.F. Albright, presents a point of view that falls somewhere between these two extremes. While the essence of the biblical story (narrated between Exodus 1:8 and Deuteronomy 34:12) is accepted, it is recognized that, during the centuries of oral and written transmission, the account acquired layers of accretions. The reconstruction of the documentary sources of the Pentateuch by literary critics is considered valid, but the sources are viewed as varying versions of one series of events ( see biblical literature: The Torah [Law, Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses]). Other critical methods (studying the biblical text from the standpoint of literary form, oral tradition, style, redaction, and archaeology) are equally valid. The most accurate answer to a critical problem is therefore likely to come from the convergence of various lines of evidence. The aid of critical scholarship notwithstanding, the sources are so sketchy that the man Moses can be portrayed only in broad outline.

The date of Moses

According to the biblical account, Moses' parents were from the tribe of Levi, one of the groups in Egypt called Hebrews. Originally the term Hebrew had nothing to do with race or ethnic origin. It derived from Habiru, a variant spelling of Ḫapiru (Apiru), a designation of a class of people who made their living by hiring themselves out for various services. The biblical Hebrews had been in Egypt for generations, but apparently they became a threat, so one of the pharaohs enslaved them. Unfortunately, the personal name of the king is not given, and scholars have disagreed as to his identity and, hence, as to the date of the events of the narrative of Moses. One theory takes literally the statement in I Kings 6:1 that the Exodus from Egypt occurred 480 years before Solomon began building the Temple in Jerusalem. This occurred in the fourth year of his reign, about 960 bce; therefore, the Exodus would date about 1440 bce.

This conclusion, however, is at variance with most of the biblical and archaeological evidence. The storage cities Pitḥom and Rameses, built for the pharaoh by the Hebrews, were located in the northeastern part of the Egyptian delta, not far from Goshen, the district in which the Hebrews lived. It is implicit in the whole story that the pharaoh's palace and capital were in the area, but Thutmose III (the pharaoh in 1440) had his capital at Thebes, far to the south, and never conducted major building operations in the delta region. Moreover, Edom and Moab, petty kingdoms in Transjordan that forced Moses to circle east of them, were not yet settled and organized. Finally, as excavations have shown, the destruction of the cities the Hebrews claimed to have captured occurred about 1250, not 1400.

Inasmuch as tradition figured about 12 generations from Moses to Solomon, the reference to 480 years is most likely an editorial comment allowing 40 years for each generation. Since an actual generation was nearer 25 years, the most probable date for the Exodus is about 1290 bce. If this is true, then the oppressive pharaoh noted in Exodus (1:2-2:23) was Seti I (reigned 1318-04), and the pharaoh during the Exodus was Ramses II ( c. 1304- c. 1237). In short, Moses was probably born in the late 14th century bce.

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Moses | Story, Summary, Significance, & Facts

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Moses, Hebrew prophet and leader who, in the 13th century bce, delivered his people from Egyptian slavery.

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Here is another link to an article about Molly Picon

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Here is another link to an article about Molly Picon

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Jewish-American actress Molly Picon (1898-1992) was known as the great comedienne of Yiddish theater over a career that lasted for nearly 90 years. In later life her appearances in English-language films and plays drew substantial audiences as well.

At the height of Picon's fame, Murray Schumach of the New York Times noted that "[s]he was idolized in Jewish neighborhoods, where children and clubs were named after her during her heyday in the 1920s." Picon had various talents. She sang, danced, wrote songs, and excelled in the conventional English-language roles she took on from time to time. But at the center of her art lay Yiddish plays, in which she usually performed one of a set of variations on a basic character: a young woman who dresses or acts like a boy, making her way in the world with a combination of nerve and presence of mind.

Father Often Absent

Picon (accented on the second syllable, pronounced as in "con") was born in New York City on June 1, 1898, to immigrant garment workers who lived in Manhattan's teeming Lower East Side. Her Polish-born father, Louis Picon, held work only intermittently, and the family bounced around when Picon was very young, living in New Jersey and in Chicago before moving to Philadelphia. Three generations, including nine of Picon's cousins, shared an apartment there. "As for Papa-well, Papa was disdainful of life in general and, I think, of me in particular," Picon recalled, as quoted on the website of the Jewish Women's Archive. "He never worked. He was just too 'educated' to do menial labor. Basically, he was just 'anti': anti-capitalist, anti-religion, anti-labor, and anti-girls.... He just faded out of our lives."

If there was a bright side to this situation, it was that Picon became exposed to the stage after her mother found work sewing costumes at a Yiddish-language theater in Philadelphia. Picon was a born performer who began her career at age five in a talent show-and picked up a few dollars in tips by trying out her act on trolley car riders on the way to the show. Soon she had graduated to song-and-dance routines at local theaters, and she had a role in a Yiddish-language dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin . Picon dropped out of William Penn High School at 16 to take a role in a traveling vaudeville show called The Four Seasons .

When the troupe arrived in Boston at the height of the 1918 influenza epidemic, it fell apart owing to the lack of available work; all the theaters except one in the city were closed. The only one that remained active was a Yiddish-language group that held performances at the Boston Grand Opera House. Picon auditioned and was hired by producer Jacob "Yonkel" Kalich. The two married in 1919. "I always said influenza was our matchmaker," Picon was quoted as saying on the Jewish Women's Archive website. The couple

suffered a setback when a daughter was stillborn in 1920 and Picon emerged from the ordeal unable to bear any more children.

Picon, who had tried to become Americanized, had performed in both English and Yiddish, but spoke a colloquial variety of Philadelphia street Yiddish that was difficult even for New York audiences to understand. Kalich, on the other hand, was a Polish immigrant devoted to the idea of Yiddish theater. In 1920 the two toured Europe. Picon refined her Yiddish, and the two went to see Yiddish plays and devised new material that they performed to large crowds. The American-born Picon actually became a star in Europe first, stirring up interest in the United States as European Jews wrote to their American relatives about the appealing young comedienne they had seen.

Played Featured Stock Characters

Back in the United States in 1923, Picon and Kalich began building a small theatrical empire among New York's growing immigrant audiences. With Picon as star and Kalich as writer, they turned out numerous short comic plays. The music was often provided by composer Joseph Rumshinsky, but Picon also wrote nearly one hundred songs herself. Kalich's output seems prodigious, but the plays were not conceived from scratch each time; instead they featured recurring characters such as Yonkele, a Peter Pan-like figure whom Picon saw as a reflection of herself, and Schmendrick, an amiable dunce. Some of Picon's characters were ambiguous in gender, either tomboy-like or actually calling for Picon to dress as a boy. Among Picon's hits were Yonkele (1923), Gypsy Girl (1925-26), and The Radio Girl (1929). The shows were primarily in Yiddish, but Picon, attuned to the aspirations of her immigrant audiences, kept up on the latest Broadway dance routines and sprinkled her act with English dialogue.

Picon also began a film career, making several silent features in Austria. The first, Das Judenmadel (The Jewish Girl, 1921), has been lost, but Ost und West (East and West, 1923), a satirical look at the differences between Americanized and Old World Jewish families, survives and is considered by historians to be the earliest Yiddish film (although silent, it would have had text panels with dialogue and narration). Picon remained well known in Europe, and in the 1930s she traveled to Poland to film two productions that became among the best-known examples of Yiddish cinema. Yiddle Mitn Fiddle (Yiddle with the Fiddle, 1937) fit Picon's personality, with its story of a girl who dresses as a boy so she can work as a klezmer musician. In Mamale (1938) the 40-year-old Picon played a 12-year-old girl. It was the last Yiddish film made in Poland before the Holocaust, and both films are priceless documentaries of the lives of the Eastern European village Jews who were killed by the Nazi regime in Germany.

By the time she made those films, Picon was a star whose popularity in the United States extended beyond Jewish audiences. She and Kalich lost money in the stock market crash of 1929 but bounced back quickly, opening a Molly Picon Theatre at Second Avenue and 12th Street in Manhattan. In 1934 Picon began performing in a long-running radio program that gained sponsorship from the makers of Jell-O desserts, and for the film Yiddle Mitn Fiddle she was paid the then-unheard-of sum of $10,000. Cast in the English-language drama Morningstar (1939), she had the makings of a career independent from Kalich. Their marriage suffered but survived.

The upheavals of World War II helped to bring the couple together. They adopted a teenaged Belgian Jewish orphan in 1941 and later adopted two more children. Picon performed on the USO (United Service Organizations) circuit, entertaining American troops during World War II. Picon toured the world during the war years, reportedly becoming a favorite with a Zulu audience in South Africa for her imitations of film comedian Charlie Chaplin. After the war's end her activities continued to be motivated by public service, as she gave performances for displaced European Jews. One young mother, according to Schumach, approached Picon and Kalich and said, "My child is two years old and she has never heard the sound of laughter," to which Kalich answered, "Molly, that's our job. Make them laugh!" Picon was also a supporter of the new state of Israel, traveling there in 1954 and wading into the debate over whether Hebrew or Yiddish was to be the language of the new country-she performed in Yiddish.

Co-Starred with Sinatra

Picon and Kalich attempted to maintain the traditions of Yiddish theater with new shows, including Abi Gezunt and Sadie Was a Lady (both 1949) and Mazel Tov, Molly (1950). She wrote new songs for a 1959 Yiddish show, The Kosher Widow , which allowed the audience to select from alternate endings by applauding and having their noisemaking metered. The use of Yiddish was declining in the United States, however, as second-generation American Jews overwhelmingly began to favor English. So Picon, entering her sixth decade of performing, branched out once again and attempted, with considerable success, to move beyond the niche of ethnic actress in which she had been placed. She appeared in the London production and in many regional American productions of the long-running romantic comedy A Majority of One , and in 1962 she had a starring role in the Frank Sinatra comedy Come Blow Your Horn , playing opposite Lee J. Cobb as the (Italian-American, not Jewish) mother of Sinatra's on-screen co-star and romantic rival, Tony Bill. The role brought Picon an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. In the 1960s Picon made guest appearances on Gomer Pyle and other television series, and she was a frequent guest on The Merv Griffin Show and other television talk programs.

Having already appeared on stage in 1957 in The World of Sholom Aleichem , a tribute to the great Russian Jewish Yiddish-language writer, Picon was a natural pick for casting when the stage musical Fiddler on the Roof , based on Aleichem's stories about the milkman Tevye, was made into a film in 1971. Picon played Yente, a village matchmaker, and she and Kalich, who had already done so much in the 1930s to document the shtetls or Jewish villages of Eastern Europe on film, helped to re-create the vanished world for the new production.

Picon took several years off from performing when Kalich fell ill in the early 1970s, caring for him until his death in 1975. After that, the nearly 80-year-old Picon resumed touring, traveling around the United States, Canada, and Israel. Picon mounted a one-woman show, Hello Molly , in 1979, dancing the can-can and doing deep knee bends on stage. In 1980 Picon published her autobiography, Molly! . She had a small part in the Burt Reynolds slapstick comedy The Cannonball Run (1981), and its 1984 sequel, Cannonball Run 2 . That year Picon made her final film appearance in Grandma Didn't Wave Back , a drama about a child forced to come to terms with his grandmother's mental decline.

Performing well into her eighties, Picon received several major awards toward the end of her life. In 1981 she became the first actress with a background on the Yiddish stage elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame, and among her various awards from Jewish organizations was a "Goldie" from the Congress of Jewish Culture in 1985. Picon accepted that award clad in a tuxedo. She died in her sleep at the home of her sister in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on April 6, 1992, aged 94. In 2005 a new Yiddish-language biographical musical, Picon Pie: A Slice of Life of Molly Picon , celebrated her accomplishments. The show's creator, Rose Leiman Goldemberg, told the New York Times that Picon "had this idea that she could just get in there and do something. There was no question of could she do this, should she do this. She just did it, she followed her heart."

Books

Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television , volume 12, Gale, 1994.

Picon, Molly, with Eth Clifford Rosenberg, So Laugh a Little , Messner, 1962.

Picon, Molly, with Jean Bergantini Grillo, Molly! , Simon & Schuster, 1980.

Periodicals

New York Times , April 7, 1992; September 18, 2005.

Times (London, England), April 16, 1992; April 24, 1992.

Online

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007, reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Thomson Gale, 2007, http://www.galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (January 19, 2007).

"Molly Picon, All-American Maydl," American Jewish Historical Society, http://www.ajhs.org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=291 (January 19, 2007).

"Molly Picon," Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/picon.html (January 19, 2007).

"Molly Picon," Jewish Women's Archive, http://www.jwa.org/exhibits/wov/picon (January 19, 2007).

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Jewish-American actress Molly Picon (1898-1992) was known as the great comedienne of Yiddish theater over a career that lasted for nearly 90 years. In later life her appearances in English-language films and plays drew substantial audiences as well.

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