Highest Ranking Orthodox Jew in the U.S.
Jacob Joseph Lew (b. 1955) grew up in Queens and graduated from Forest Hills High School. He is the son of a lawyer originally from Poland. Lew began his career in politics working as an aide to a democratic representative, while also studying at Harvard, and later rose through the ranks in Congress. Eventually he became director of several institutions, including the Center for Middle East Research. In 1993 he was appointed Special Assistant to President Clinton. His amazing work in the budgeting department led to him becoming the director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Clinton Administration, meanwhile serving on the National Security Council. After Clinton’s term ended, Lew was Vice President of New York University, where he also served as Clinical Professor. Lew returned to government with the Obama administration, first as Deputy Secretary of State, then Budget Director, and most recently White House Chief of Staff (the highest ranking White House employee – sometimes nicknamed the “Co-President”). He has since taken up the position of Treasury Secretary, making him the highest ranking Orthodox Jew in U.S. history. It also means his signature will appear on all newly printed currency in the U.S. This sparked a bit of controversy due to Lew’s funny signature, causing President Obama to joke that he wanted to rescind the nomination when he saw it. Lew is a practicing Orthodox Jew, devoted to his family and his community. In the past he assisted Natan Sharansky in freeing Jews from the former Soviet Union, together with his rabbi, who has described Lew as “one of the most unassuming, giving, and caring congregants I’ve ever been blessed to have… rare for a person in such a powerful position to be the quintessential mensch.”
Words of the Week
Man… sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present, the result being that he does not live in the the present or the future. He lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
– The Dalai Lama
Jack Lew’s Loopy Signature
The son of a software company owner, Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) grew up immersed in computer programming. At 13, he won the ArtsDigita Prize, awarded to websites deemed most useful and educational. At just 14, he was part of the team that developed RSS, the now-ubiquitous web syndication tool. Shortly after, he worked for W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, where he authored RFC 3870, a program for web resource management that is part of the complex framework of the web that very few understand (and less appreciate). After trying Stanford University for a year, Swartz left to start the wiki-site called Infogami. It later merged with Reddit, and Swartz elevated Reddit to one of the world’s most popular social news sites, with millions of visitors every month. Reddit has also become well-known for being a platform to quickly raise awareness (and funds) for important causes around the world.
The 10th richest person in the U.S., Michael Rubens Bloomberg was born in Massachusetts, the grandson of immigrants from Europe and Russia. In the 1970s he worked for a Wall Street firm where he learned that information is the key to success, and people are willing to pay for it. So, when the company he worked for was bought out, he used his severance money to start a company called Market Systems, which built terminals that gave their users on-the-fly and up-to-date financial information, presented in various graphs and charts to make it simple to understand. The company started selling its terminals in 1982 and they were an instant hit. By 1990, over 8000 ‘Bloomberg’ terminals were in use around the world. Today, that number has risen to 310,000, and Bloomberg LP also includes a news channel, radio stations, magazines (such as BusinessWeek) and software. Michael Bloomberg himself left the helm of the company to become popular mayor of New York City. His mayoral salary is a symbolic $1. A mayor of the people, Bloomberg often rides the NYC subways to work. More impressively, The Chronicle of Philanthropy lists him as the leading individual donor in the U.S. for two years in a row. Bloomberg has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to hospitals, schools, environmental causes, and scientific research, as well as the arts. Many of his contributions are anonymous. He recently pledged another $500 million together with Bill Gates. Some have stated Bloomberg is the greatest contributor to higher education institutions in history, donating over $800 million to Johns Hopkins alone. All of these factors may be why Bloomberg has been elected to a third term as mayor, despite the two-term limit. And some say he will be president in the near future. If so, it would make him the first Jewish Commander-in-Chief.