JEWISH AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH 2020

<p>An outspoken champion of feminist causes, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the first Jewish woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. She was also the first woman to make both the Harvard and Columbia law reviews. Prior to serving on the Court, Ginsburg distinguished herself as a professor of law at Rutgers Law School in Newark, as co-founder of the Women&#8217;s Rights Law Reporter, and as director of the Women&#8217;s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She served on the U.S. Court of Appeals from 1980 until her appointment in 1993 to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she has been a judicious and eloquent voice in support of civil liberties.</p> <p>Photo courtesy of the United States Federal Government.</p>

<p>Virologist Jonas Salk was born in New York to parents from Russian-Jewish immigrant families. In 1947, he accepted an appointment at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where, working with the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, he launched his quest for a vaccine against polio, a virulent disease that primarily afflicted children. When news of his discovery of a vaccine was made public on April 12, 1955, Salk was hailed as a miracle worker. In 1960, he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, a center for medical and scientific research. Salk spent his last years searching for a vaccine against AIDS.</p> <p>Photo courtesy of Julie Grahame of the Karsh Foundation</p>

<p>Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Sandy Koufax signed on as a pitcher with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954. In 1961, Koufax won 18 games and struck out 269 batters, a league record. Koufax was the first major leaguer to pitch four no-hitters, including a perfect game. He was named the National League&#8217;s Most Valuable player in 1963 and became the first player to earn three Cy Young awards. At age 36 and 20 days, he became the youngest player ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Koufax chose not to pitch in the 1965 World Series when a game fell on Yom Kippur.</p> <p>Photo courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.</p>

<p>The daughter of Sephardic Jews whose ancestors settled in New York in the colonial period, Emma Lazarus was a writer and a scholar of literature and languages. Even before Zionism became a cohesive movement, Lazarus&#8217;s poetry and essays protested the rise of antisemitism and called on Jews to create a homeland in Palestine. &#8220;Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free&#8221; are two famous lines of her sonnet, &#8220;The New Colossus,&#8221; which was affixed to the Statue of Liberty in 1903. Lazarus was at the peak of her career when she died of cancer in 1887, at the age of 38.</p> <p>Photo courtesy of the New York Historical Society.</p>

<p>So great were Albert Einstein&#8217;s contributions to the worlds of mathematics and physics that in 1999 <i>Time</i> magazine named him &#8220;Person of the Century&#8221; and a Gallup poll ranked him the fourth most admired person of the twentieth century. Many schoolchildren can recite Einstein&#8217;s pioneering theory of relativity &#8211; E=mc2 &#8211; which helped determine how we understand the universe but the scientist&#8217;s contributions to our understanding of the physical world extend far beyond the formula he discovered. A Holocaust refugee long affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in theoretical physics, which later would play a key role in the development of fiber optics, telecommunications networks, solar cells, and global positioning systems.</p> <p>Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.</p>

<p>Barbra Streisand is one of the most commercially successful recording artists in history, having sold more albums than any other female artist. She was born in Brooklyn and began her career singing in nightclubs.</p> <p>Her first album, &#8220;The Barbra Streisand Album&#8221; (1963), won two Grammys and her first film, &#8220;Funny Girl&#8221; (1968), earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress. Streisand became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song as a composer for &#8220;Evergreen,&#8221; from the soundtrack of &#8220;A Star is Born&#8221; (1976). With &#8220;Yentl&#8221; (1983), she became the first woman ever to produce, direct, write and star in a major motion picture. She is the only artist ever to receive Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Grammy, Directors Guild of America, Golden Globe, National Endowment for the Arts, and Peabody Awards, as well as the American Film Institute&#8217;s Lifetime Achievement Award.</p> <p>She is the first female director to receive The Kennedy Center Honors. Since founding the Streisand Foundation in 1981, she has raised and distributed $21 million to organizations supporting environmental issues, constitutional rights, AIDS research, women&#8217;s issues, and race relations, and has raised approximately $20 million, through performances and appearances, for additional causes and charities.</p> <p>Image Donated by Corbis-Bettmann</p>

<p>Rose Schneiderman made her mark as a prominent labor leader in early twentieth-century America. Born in Poland, she emigrated in 1890 and later experienced the harsh realities of working life in America&#8217;s big cities as a lining stitcher in a cap factory on New York&#8217;s Lower East Side. By 1903, she had successfully launched the first women&#8217;s local of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union, and she eventually became a national president of the Women&#8217;s Trade Union League. After the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which resulted in the deaths of over 100 female garment workers, Schneiderman addressed a mass meeting and called for increased workers&#8217; rights. A member of FDR&#8217;s &#8220;brain trust&#8221; in the 1930s, she was Secretary of the New York Department of Labor and a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. She also devoted herself to the cause of women&#8217;s suffrage as a key organizer.</p> <p>Image Courtesy of Library of Congress</p>

<div class="Index-page-content sqs-alternate-block-style-container"> <div id="page-59f7f4548e7b0fa62a2470c2" class="sqs-layout sqs-grid-12 columns-12" data-type="page" data-updated-on="1581375200329"> <div class="row sqs-row"> <div class="col sqs-col-12 span-12"> <div id="block-yui_3_17_2_12_1509460735792_50095" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html" data-block-type="2"> <div class="sqs-block-content"> <p class="">*Psst. May is JAHM. Spread the word. And we&#8217;ve made it easy for you by creating this <a href="http://thesocialpresskit.com/jahm-public">online social media toolkit</a> that lets you easily post about JAHM to your own channels!*</p> <p><strong>About JAHM</strong></p> <p class="">On April 20, 2006, President George W. Bush proclaimed that May would be <strong>Jewish American Heritage Month</strong>. The announcement was the crowning achievement in an effort by the Jewish Museum of Florida and South Florida Jewish community leaders that resulted in resolutions introduced by <strong>Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz</strong> of Florida and <strong>Senator Arlen Specter z&#8221;l </strong>of Pennsylvania urging the president to proclaim a month that would recognize the history of Jewish contributions to American culture. The resolutions passed unanimously, first in the House of Representatives in December 2005 and later in the Senate in February 2006.</p> <p class="">Since 2006, JAHM programs have taken place across the country. In Washington, D.C. alone, the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have joined in raising national consciousness about the contributions of Jewish Americans to our country&#8217;s heritage.</p> <p class="">The JAHM Coalition was formed in March 2007 and convened by United Jewish Communities (now The Jewish Federations of North America), The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA) and the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). The JAHM Coalition was composed of the directors of major national Jewish historical and cultural organizations including the AJA, AJHS, Jewish Women&#8217;s Archive, the National Museum of American Jewish History, the Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum of Florida, and the Jewish Historical Society of Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2010 JAHM incorporated as a tax exempt public charity with a Board of Directors and oversight by the JAHM Advisory Committee.</p> <p class="">In 2018, the National Museum of American Jewish History became the home of JAHM. Located on historic Independence Mall in Philadelphia, PA, NMAJH is the country’s only institution dedicated to telling the story of American history through the lens of the Jewish experience. Its mission to present educational programs and experiences that preserve, explore, and celebrate the more than 360-year history of Jews in America serves JAHM’s broader mission to promote education about the American Jewish community&#8217;s contributions to the history, heritage, and culture of the United States.</p> <p class="">NMAJH and JAHM work to connect Jews more closely to their heritage and inspire in people of all backgrounds a greater appreciation for the diversity of the American Jewish experience and the freedoms to which all Americans aspire.</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div>