You want I should tell you something? Feh. In this Diary, you don't have to be Jewish, but, as the old song goes, when you're in love, the whole world is Jewish.
So, here's to the Jews of the world and the Jews of America of whom I am one. We may have practices which seem alien to some, we may even have collective guilt out the tuchas, but remember, we also have moxie- hell, we invented the word moxie!
And we've made quite a contribution to American history too!
Since 1845, 29 Jews have served in the Senate, including present-day senators Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Arlen Specter (R-PA), Norm Coleman (R-MN), Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl (both D-WI), Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein (both D-CA), Carl Levin (D-MI), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Joe Lieberman (D-CT), and seven have served on the United States Supreme Court. Sixteen American Jews have been awarded the Medal of Honor. Judah P. Benjamin, was a member of the Confederate cabinet.
But not just in government-
Many individual Jews have made significant and diverse contributions to American popular culture. Probably the most famous examples are the early Hollywood moguls such as Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, Jesse L. Lasky, Carl Laemmle, Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor, and the original Warner Brothers and the characteristically Jewish humor of the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and Gilda Radner, but the legacy also includes songwriters as diverse as Irving Berlin, Burt Bacharach, Arlo Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman (aka) "The Sherman Brothers, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Jeff Barry, Lou Reed, and Paul Simon and writers as diverse as J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, E.L. Doctorow, Lillian Hellman, Allen Ginsberg (who continued to consider himself a Jew even after he began practicing Buddhism), Isaac Asimov, and Harlan Ellison in addition to the authors listed above. On the countercultural and radical political front, Jewish hippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, with help from Allen Ginsberg, formed the controversial Youth International Party ("Yippies"), and the four main organizers of the 1969 Woodstock Festival concert were all Jewish, as was Max Yasgur, the man on whose farm the legendary concert took place. In addition, master sound mixer and producer Eddie Kramer was Jewish, as is Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, his first wife, Sara and sons Jesse and Jakob.
And of course... Academia and science...
The Manhattan Project, America's World War II effort to develop the atomic bomb, included the contributions of American Jewish physicists, many of whom were refugees from Hitler's Germany or from anti-semitic persecution in other European nations: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard P. Feynman, Wolfgang Pauli, Leo Szilard (Hungarian physicist), Albert Einstein,John von Neumann (Hungarian mathematician), Isidor I. Rabi, Edward Teller (Hungarian physicist), Eugene Wigner (Hungarian physicist and mathematician), Otto Frisch, Samuel Goudsmit, Jerome Karle, Stanislaw Ulam (Polish mathematician), Robert Serber, Louis Slotin, George Kistiakowsky, Walter Zinn, Robert Marshak, Felix Bloch, Emilio G. Segrè, James Franck, Harold C. Urey, Joseph Joffe, Eugene Rabinowitch, Hy Goldsmith, Samuel Cohen, Victor F. Weisskopf, and David Bohm. Hans Bethe and Niels Bohr both had Jewish mothers, which also necessitated their fleeing from Nazi-occupied lands during the war.
Ashkenazi Jews have traditionally been drawn to academia (see Secular Jewish culture for some of the causes), and have made major contributions in science and the humanities. Of American Nobel Prize winners, 37% have been Jewish Americans (19 times the percentage Jewish population), as have been 71% of the John Bates Clark Medal winners (35 times the percentage Jewish population).
All from http://en.wikipedia.org/...
But, to me, the most important Jewish contribution to American History comes in the form of a poem written by Emma Lazarus. You might recognize it, it's called The New Colossus:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
So... let's hear it for the Jews. In this diary, I grant all non-Jews the gift of being Jewish in my estimation if they leave a comment.