The Palace Of Blessing                 Psalm 1:1 part 2 cont.Saturate in Your Blessings v.1 Blessed is the manHas God blessed the Jews? Measure of Achievement by the Jews as seen in History.  Again realize we’re contemplating a nationality of individuals that represent only 2% of the American population and 2 hundredths of a percent of the worlds population.

Inventions

Encyclopedia Britannica provides its list of “Great Inventions.” Of the 267 individual inventors, more than 13 were Jews, including Zoll (the defibrillator and the pacemaker), Land (instant photography), Gabor (holography), and Ginsburg (videotape). Jews are represented on the list 22 times more than one would expect based on their population.

Symphonies

In America’s leading symphony orchestras is led by Jewish conductors one-third of the time.

Acting

They have created nearly two-thirds of Broadway’s longest running musicals.

Photography

Probably one-fourth of the greatest photographers of all time have been Jews.

Architecture

Ten percent of the world’s great master architects is Jewish.

Film & Cinema

Of movie directors who earned Oscars, 38 percent were Jews. In broad artistic recognition, nearly 30 percent of the Kennedy Center honors and 13 percent of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards have gone to Jews.

Literature

Mohamed called the Jews, people of the book. Its not surprising Jews have 20 percent of the Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction. Their outpouring of books, screenplays, and newspaper and magazine articles is prodigious.

Education

In education, it is difficult to name an academic discipline in which they have not played a leading role. Certainly Jews have been seminal thinkers in philosophy (Spinoza, Maimonides, Marx), deconstruction (Derrida), economics (Marx, Ricardo, Friedman, Samuelson, Becker, Kuznets), physics (Einstein, Bohr, Gell-Mann, Feynman, Szilard), mathematics (Von Neumann, Mandelbrot, Fefferman, Zelmanov, Erdos), chemistry (Heeger, Kohn, Kroto, Olah), linguistics (Chomsky), paleontology (Gould), medicine (Flexner, Chain, Goldstein and Brown, Salk, Sabin, Prusiner), law (Brandeis, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Tribe, Dershowitz), anthropology (Boas), psychiatry and psychology (Freud, Adler, Erikson, Fromm, Rapaport, Maslow), sociology (McClelland, Riesman, Glazer, Lipset), and many other fields. Their research and teaching helped shape entire disciplines. They head three of the eight Ivy League schools (down from four several years ago), and Jewish students are 21 percent of all Ivy League students. Any review of the lists of faculty of most schools will evidence a disproportionate number of Jewish teachers. They are, for example, roughly 30 percent of the faculty of the Harvard, Stanford, and Yale law schools.

Politics

In politics, they are 11 percent of the United States Senate and 6 percent of the House of Representatives. They were 42 percent of the 100 largest political donors to the 2000 election cycle, and since 1917, when Judge Louis Brandeis was appointed, 17 percent of Supreme Court justices have been Jews. They now hold two of the nine positions.

Economics

As economists they are gifted. They have earned 38 percent of all Nobel Prizes for economics and 67 percent of the John Clarke Bates Medals for promising economists under age 40. They were instrumental in the creation of the Federal Reserve System and have headed it for twenty-five of the last thirty-five years.

Philanthropy

In philanthropy, a December 2004 Business Week listing of America’s fifty most generous benefactors included at least nineteen Jewish families and individuals. Their charitable donations totaled nearly $10 billion over less than five years. More than 90 percent of their donations went to secular causes in support of education, health care and medicine, arts, culture, and the humanities. It is remarkable that 38 percent of America’s most philanthropic people come from a group representing only 2 percent of its population.

CEO’s

Much of the wealth behind that philanthropy came from success as entrepreneurs. In that role, Jews created whole new industries and hold leading positions in many other companies. Increasingly, they also occupy the corner office as CEOs of some of America’s largest and most important companies. Of the 2003 CEOs of Fortune’s 100 largest companies, 10 to 15 percent are Jews. Of Fortune’s 2003 list of the twenty-five most powerful people in business, six (24 percent) are Jews. Of the thirty entrepreneurs included in the 2004 Fortune “America’s 40 Richest Under 40,” at five of the top ten are Jewish as are 23 percent of the Forbes 400.

Clothing

Jews pioneered the ready-to-wear garment industry and, in 1885, owned all but seven of New York’s 241 garment factories. Names like Levi Straus, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Donna Karan are just a few contemporary representatives of that legacy. Of the four pioneers of prestige cosmetics – Helena Rubenstein, Elizabeth Arden, Est’e Lauder, and Charles Revson – only Elizabeth Arden was not Jewish.

Department Stores

More than half of America’s department stores were started or run by Jews including such greats as Macy’s, Federated, May Company, Bloomingdale’s, Filene’s, Saks, Abraham & Straus, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Sears, and, in London, Marks & Spencer.

Retail

In specialty retailing, major chains such as Gap Stores, Limited, Mervyn’s, Barneys, Men’s Warehouse, Home Depot, Ritz Camera, Bed Bath & Beyond are just a few of the Jewish creations. In television retailing, both QVC and Home Shopping were largely shaped by Jews.  The world’s foremost demonstration salesman, Ron Popeil, uses television to sell products he invented.

Fine Jewelry

In diamonds, De Beers and the Lev Leviev Group are the dominant forces in the worldwide diamond trade, while Zales, Helzbergs, Whitehall, and Friedman’s are among the leading diamond and jewelry retailers.

Entrepreneurs

We drink our Starbucks coffee and have sipped Seagrams wines and distilled spirits. The Dove Bar, H’agen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry’s and Baskin-Robbins ice cream lead to our later signing up for Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutri-System programs or buying Slim-Fast in the supermarket. All these companies were founded by Jewish entrepreneurs.

Vacations

We may lounge in our Fairmont, Loews, Hyatt, Helmsley or Wynn hotel, or cruise on any of the seventy-three ships of Carnival or twenty-eight of Royal Caribbean. These companies were founded or largely shaped by Jews.

Hollywood and Entertainment

Every major Hollywood studio except United Artists was created by Jews, as were NBC and CBS. Of the three original television networks, only ABC was not started by a Jew, but Leonard Goldenson bought it seven years after its founding and ran it for forty-five years. Viacom and Comcast were largely created by two Jewish families, while Steve Ross and Gerald Levin played critical roles at Time Warner.

Publishing

In publishing, America’s newspaper of record is The New York Times, and in the nation’s capital, Katherine Meyer Graham’s son, Donald, now runs The Washington Post. The Pulitzer Prize is the legacy of the family that still runs the St. Louis Post Dispatch and Arizona Daily Star. Reuters, Newhouse, Triangle and Ziff Davis are just a few of our leading magazine publishers. Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Simon & Schuster, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux are but four of the major book publishers created and run by Jews.

Finance

In finance, the story is much the same. Premier names like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Salomon Brothers, Lazard Freres, and Wasserstein Perella are just a few of the contemporary names of a legacy dating back to the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Kuhn-Loebs, and Seligmans.

Private Equity

In private equity, names like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Thomas H. Lee Partners, Blackstone Group, Hellman & Friedman, Quantum Fund, Steinhardt Partners, Claxton, Arthur Rock, Alan Patricof, Gene Kleiner, and Ben Rosen are today’s legends taking the place of Bernard Baruch and Henry Morgenthau Jr. Of the twenty-six individuals named to the Private Equity Hall of Fame, at least eight (31 percent), and perhaps as many as eleven, are Jewish.

Real Estate

Jews were generally not allowed to own real estate outside the ghetto for the better part of 1,800 years. They have compensated by becoming a major force in development and management of property all over the world. Of the five largest Real Estate Investment Trusts listed by Forbes magazine in May 2002, four were headed by Jews.

Today, Michael Bloomberg is New York’s mayor, but earlier, he created Bloomberg LP, the enterprise that gave him the wherewithal to take on a second career. It is the largest financial information company in the world.

Oil Resources

Few people know that the shell of Shell Oil traces back to a London curio shop where the Samuels family featured seashells before two sons started trading kerosene. Nor would they know that the Amoco part of BP Amoco was the creation of the father and son team of Louis and Jacob Blaustein, who also invented the railroad tank car. Amerada Hess, Aurora Oil, Marvin Davis, Occidental Petroleum, and Kaiser-Francis are just a few more of the petroleum businesses started or principally shaped by Jews.

Museums

America’s great legacy of the Guggenheim Museums and Smithsonian’s Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden have their origins in the success of two great mining operations established by Jewish families.

Services

In business services, Manpower is the world’s largest temporary staffing company, just as ADP is the largest payroll processing company and H & R Block is the largest preparer of tax returns. All were started by Jews.

Technology

And lest anyone think Jews are not on the leading end of new technology, Jews:

• Created the world’s largest and most valuable computer company (Dell, Michael Dell).
• Co-founded the world’s most successful search engine (Google, Sergey Brin).
• Head the world’s largest software company (Microsoft, Steve Ballmer)
• Co-founded and head the world’s second largest software company (Oracle, Lawrence Ellison).
• Co-founded, led and serve as chairman of the world’s dominant microprocessor and memory chip company (Intel, Andrew Grove).
• Served as CEO or COO at three of the world’s four most valuable Internet companies (Yahoo, Terry Semel; eBay, Jeff Skoll; and IAC, Barry Diller).
• Co-founded and head the communications protocol/chip company whose chips are in most U.S. cell phones and are slated to be utilized in the next generation of cell phones to be used worldwide (Qualcomm, Irwin Jacobs).

And this does not consider Jews vital role as labor leaders and advocates for the poor and the oppressed.

Labor Organization

While Jews were busy creating the garment industry, their fellow Jews, Bessie Abramowitz, Sidney Hillman, David Dubinsky, and others, were organizing that industry’s labor force. In that same era, Samuel Gompers headed organized labor for much of the early twentieth century. Later, Saul Alinsky, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem were just a few of the Jews devoted to social change.

Sports

While there are not many prominent Jewish athletes in today’s professional sports, most would be surprised to know they are two of the ten top NBA coaches of all time. Five of the 216 members in the NFL Hall of Fame are Jewish, and Jews own 25 percent of the NFL football teams and 28 percent of the NBA teams. Meanwhile, Jews serve as commissioners of all five major professional sports: baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and soccer. And, where the games have more to do with brains than brawn, Jews have held the world chess championship title for roughly two-thirds of the time since it began in 1834, and in bridge, the legend of the game, Charles Goren, was Jewish.

Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment, looks at those who achieved excellence in the arts and sciences from 800 BC to 1950. He devotes part of that book to what he calls the “astounding” disproportionate representation of Jews among history’s great figures. Following “the Jewish Emancipation” (which he dates from 1790 to 1870), he measures the representation of Jews among the 1,277 great historical figures between 1870 and 1950. Based on their percentage of the population, he says 28 should have been Jews. “The actual number was at least 158.” His observation is corroborated in other listings of “history’s greats.” Michael Hart’s book, The 100 ‘ A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, counts eight Jews among the 100 (Jesus, St. Paul, Einstein, Marx, Moses, Freud, Pincus, and Bohr). This is 35 times what one would expect.