15 Most Famous Jewish Americans Who Changed the World

15 Most Famous Jewish Americans Who Changed the World

Jews are generally known to be very successful. Several books and podcasts have taken the time to analyze why Jews have a tendency to prosper in all they put their hands to do. Jews are the source of a lot of great ideas and inventions. Well if you doubt this for a second then this list will  blow your mind!

Jewish Americans are American citizens who are Jewish, whether by religion, ethnicity, culture, or nationality. As of 2020, the core American Jewish population was estimated at 7.6 million people. This accounts for 2.4% of the total US population. Let’s look at the 15 Most Famous Jewish Americans Who Changed the World!

1. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Photo by Supreme Court of the United States. Wikimedia Commons.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg who was a Supreme Court Justice was the second woman to sit on the court and the first female Jewish justice. She co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1970.

RBG was a badass who went on to argue six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976. She won five of these!! Throughout her career on the Supreme Court bench, Bader-Ginsburg became a pop culture icon due to her carefully-crafted and fiery dissents. On September 18, 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died after a battle with cancer.

2. Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim was a prolific singer born in New York City in 1930. His singing was so good that he won eight Tony awards, an Academy award, eight Grammy awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award and  a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement award.

His impact was so heartfelt to the extent that he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Sondheim wrote lyrics for beloved musicals such as West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies and Into the Woods. His best-known song is  “Send in the Clowns.” Sondheim passed away in November 26, 2021 at the age of 91.

3. Elie Wiesel

Photo by Remy Steinegger. Wikimedia Commons.

Born on September 30th in 1928, Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, an award-winning novelist, journalist, human rights activist and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. In June of 1944, Wiesel and his family were sent to a camp in Auschwitz.

This is where he lost his mother and sister while he and his father were sent to a forced labor camp. After being moved to another camp, Wiesel’s father died due to starvation and exhaustion. Wiesel was freed  in 1945 and he  wrote his first novel, Night, in 1958. The novel depicted  the story of the horrors of the Holocaust. Elie lived by the phrase “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” He died in July 2016.

4. Elizabeth Taylor

Photo by Dr. Macro. Wikimedia Commons.

Elizabeth Taylor was an Academy Award-winning British American actress. The actress was born on February 27th, 1932. After Taylor’s third husband died, she decided to convert to Judaism. This was in 1959.

Elizabeth Burton was named seventh on the list of Female Legends created by the American Film Institutes. She was widely known for her roles in Father of the Bride, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Cleopatra. Taylor was a philanthropist. She made effort to travel to Israel and help raise funds for the Jewish state during the Arab boycott in the 1970s.

5. Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin was born in Tyumen, Russia on May 11, 1888. Despite not knowing more than the basic principles of music composition, Berlin wrote more than 3,000 songs and produced 17 Hollywood film scores and 21 Broadway scores.

This speaks to the persistent man that was Berlin. He is best known for his hit song “White Christmas,” which, for up to  50 years, was the recognized best-selling music single in any category. Berlin went on to co-found the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). He also founded his own music company and donated millions of dollars in royalties to organizations like the Army Emergency Relief, the Boy and Girl Scouts and more.

6. Jerry Lewis

Photo by Georges Biard. Wikimedia Commons.

Jerry Lewis was one of the most popular actors and comedians of his time. He was born in 1926 to a family of actors. In fact, Lewis began his acting career at 16 years. At the age of 20, he began working closely with singer Dean Martin and, by the late 1940s, they had both risen to national fame.

He starred and co-starred in great movies like At War with the Army, The Bellboy, The King of Comedy and more. Jerry Lewis was a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, a recipient of the United States Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service and he received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Throughout his life, Lewis also raised more than $2 billion dollars for his Muscular Dystrophy Association Charity, Jerry’s Kids.

7. Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem was an acclaimed journalist, a fierce feminist and one of the most passionate leaders of the women’s rights movement in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio.

Gloria recognizes Judaism as her heritage. When she began her career, Gloria had to publish her articles under a man’s name. Women were not allowed to be smart, they were to be seen not heard. Later on in 1971, Gloria went on to co-found the first feminist periodical that was circulated in the entire country! She truly pushed forth the feminist agenda.

8. Albert Einstein

Photo by Orren Jack Turner. Wikimedia Commons.

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 to a German Jewish family in Wurttemberg, Germany. Albert Einstein is a well-known name because of the work he did in terms of research and scientific inventions. He is credited for the creation of the Quantum Theory, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and the Unified Field Theory.

As he became a world-renowned public figure, Einstein became increasingly political and spoke for Zionism and against militarism, which made him unpopular in his home country. It is for this reason that once Adolf Hitler took over Germany, Einstein moved to Princeton where he died at 77 years in 1955.

9. Stan Lee

Stan Lee was a Jewish American comic book writer, editor and publisher. In fact, he was the former president and chairman of Marvel Comics. He is best known for his comics. Lee created what fans refer to as the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby created the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and the X-Men.

With Steve Ditko, he created Doctor Strange and Marvel’s most-successful superhero, Spiderman. Lee received several awards for his work, including the National Medal of Arts, awarded to him on November 17, 2008. He also founded The Stan Lee Foundation in an effort to promote literacy and diversity in 2010 before his death on November 12, 2018.

10. Mark Rothko

Photo by Consuelo Kanaga. Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Rothko was a Jewish painter. He was born on September 25, 1903, in Russia. His work always focused on basic emotions, therefore, much of his work does not contain any bright colors.

Although he was respected by other artists of his time, his work remained relatively obscure until 1960 when he was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. In 1967, he contributed fourteen works of art to a church in Houston, Texas now known as “The Rothko Chapel.” He passed away on February 25, 1970.

11. Jonas Salk

Jonas Salk was a leading scientist in the 20th century. He gained recognition for creating the polio vaccine. After earning his M.D. at New York University in 1939, Dr. Salk interned at Mount Sinai Hospital and then earned a fellowship at the University of Michigan where he studied flu viruses.

In the 1940s, polio became widespread killing millions. Dr. Salk took a position at the University of Pittsburgh in 1947 where he began what would become his history-changing research on polio. He developed a polio vaccine in 1951 and four years later, in 1955, Dr. Salk’s polio vaccine was approved for general use. The vaccine reduced the instances of polio by 90% in a decade.

12. Emma Lazarus

Photo by Internet Archive identifier. Wikimedia Commons.

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City in 1849. She wrote her first poetry at age eleven. She grew up to become one of the first successful and highly visible Jewish American authors. She is most famous for her poem “The New Colossus” (1883). One of the most common stanza from this poem reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

It is considered an expression of one of America’s fundamental values related to immigration policy. In 1903, her famous sonnet was cast on a bronze plaque and attached to the inner wall of the Statue of Liberty. In her lifetime, Lazarus advocated for Jewish refugees and advocated for the creation of a Jewish homeland.

13. Fran Lebowitz

Lebowitz is a writer known for her iconic dapper style, New York sensibility, and sardonic social commentary. She was born and raised in New Jersey. Lebowitz remains an important fixture and commentator on all aspects of American cultural life. In the TV show “Law & Order”, Lebowitz played the character Judge Janice Goldberg.

She has also been the subject of two popular documentaries, “Public Speaking” (2010) and the recent Netflix docu-series “Pretend Its A City” (2021). At 71 years old, Lebowitz continues to live life on her own terms and is unafraid to speak her mind. How gorgeous!

14. Ruth Handler

Ruth Handler who was born in 1916 invented ‘adult’ dolls for children to play with. This was inspired by her daughter. After watching her young daughter ignore baby dolls to instead play with paper doll cutouts of adult women, Handler decided to invent a better doll to make it even more fun to play these games.

On March 9, 1959, Handler and her company, Mattel, introduced Barbie to the world at the annual toy fair in New York. At eleven inches tall and blonde, Barbie was the first mass-produced doll with adult-like features. Barbie and the related products have been wildly popular for decades. It remains one of the top-selling toys in the world.

15. Barbra Steisand

Photo by NIH Image Gallery. Wikimedia Commons.

Barbra Streisand was born on October 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York. She is a well known singer who has won many accolades. To date, she has sold more than 68.5 million albums in the U.S. and a total of 150 million albums worldwide.

She is also the only recording artist to have charted a number one song for each decade from the 1960s to the 2010s. She has received many awards in her lifetime, including the Kennedy Center Honors prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In addition, Streisand is only one of sixteen people who have achieved an EGOT—an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and a Tony. It is considered the “grand slam” of show business.