Happy Jewish American Heritage Month! This month, we at Private Prep are grateful for the opportunity to celebrate the many Jewish Americans who have enriched American culture, American industry, and American education.
As anyone who has studied for a college admissions test will tell you, the ACT & SAT cover topics ranging from the humanities to STEM. And because we at Private Prep love to help students with test prep, we’re spotlighting Jewish Americans across these same fields, in order to show how these brilliant, hardworking individuals have expanded and forwarded the topics that our students study every day. Keep reading for six Jewish American thought leaders — three scientists and three authors — who have made invaluable contributions to their fields.
Mayim Bialik
STEM ADVOCATE & ACTRESS
Mayim Bialik isn’t just play a neuroscientist on TV; she is one in real life. The star of the CBS hit The Big Bang Theory took 12 years off from acting to pursue first her bachelor’s degree and then her Ph.D. in neuroscience, and has recently teamed up with DeVry University and the HerWorld Initiative to champion STEM in schools. According to Bialik, science has remained the dominant force in her life; she uses her celebrity as a platform to promote science education for all, especially young girls. Her goal is to put a female face on science and highlight the importance of educational equity. Most recently, Mayim Bialik has become the co-host for the beloved game show Jeopardy!
Vera Rubin
PIONEERING AMERICAN ASTRONOMER
Fascinated by how the stars spun outside her window as a child, Vera Rubin followed her passion for the rotation of the galaxies all the way through graduate school and beyond. Throughout her career, many teachers and colleagues disparaged Rubin’s excellent work on the basis of her gender — on the paper in which Rubin discovered the supergalactic plane (a massive breakthrough in the field), Rubin’s professor gave her two notes: One, the word data is plural. Two, her work was sloppy. Despite the sexism she faced, Rubin persisted in studying galaxies and eventually made history by discovering hard evidence for dark matter — invisible matter that emits no light or energy, but influences the behavior of stars, planets, and galaxies.
John von Neumann
THE FATHER OF THE MODERN COMPUTER
John von Neumann, who is widely regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of his time, pioneered Game Theory and was one of the conceptual inventors of the stored-program digital computer. Among his many accomplishments, the Hungarian-born American mathematician was the originator of the basic principle of computer design known as the “von Neumann architecture.” Von Neumann computers are the ancestors of today’s desktop and laptop PCs.
The principal feature of a von Neumann computer is that the program and any data are both stored together, usually in a slow-to-access storage medium such as a hard disk, and transferred as required to a faster storage medium (RAM) for execution or processing by a central processing unit (CPU). When von Neumann proposed this architecture in 1945, it was a radical idea. Today, practically all computers work this way.
Michael Chabon
PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NOVELIST & SCREENWRITER
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, among many others. As a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, Chabon’s narratives are frequently suffused with references to world mythology and to his own Jewish heritage. Chabon’s career was jump-started when his advisor submitted his master’s thesis, a work of fiction, to a New York publisher without his knowledge. The novel, which related the sexual awakening of a gay gangster’s son, earned Chabon a record advance and, because of his refusal to euphemize the protagonist’s queerness, a substantial queer following. Chabon also co-wrote the Netflix series Unbelievable, Star Trek: Picard, and the adapted screenplay for his magnum opus, Kavalier & Clay.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
SUPREME COURT JUSTICE & AUTHOR
Beloved Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is perhaps one of the best-known Jewish American women in the nation. Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent a lifetime flourishing in the face of adversity before being appointed a Supreme Court justice, where she successfully fought against gender discrimination and unified the liberal block of the court. Ginsburg’s struggles never deterred her from exceeding her goals, even when her husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer during her first year of law school. Ginsburg took on the challenge of keeping her sick husband up-to-date with his studies while maintaining her own position at the top of the class. At Harvard, Ginsburg faced gender-based discrimination from even the highest authorities, who chastised her for taking a man’s spot at Harvard Law. Justice Ginsburg proved time and again that she was a force to be reckoned with; those who doubted her capacity to effectively complete her judicial duties need only to look at her record in oral arguments, where she was among the most avid questioners on the bench.
Jonathan Lethem
AMERICAN NOVELIST & ESSAYIST
Jonathan Lethem is an acclaimed American novelist, essayist, and fiction writer in general. His most famous works are Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, and The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of a political activist and an avant-garde painter. Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he learned cartooning, made animated films, and produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange. After dropping out of Bennington College, Lethem moved to California and began working in used bookstores, where he clarified his love of writing. In 2005, Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
The contributions of the Jewish American community range far and wide: a Hall of Fame packed with Nobel Prize winners, dramatists, musicians, artists, business leaders, movie moguls, educators, journalists, and educators who have enriched and advanced American society. To learn even more, head to our sister company The Coding Space’s blog about Jewish Americans in tech!
