Tag Archives: American Jews

Jew of the Week: Rube Goldberg

Rube Goldberg

Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970) was born in San Francisco and began drawing at age 4. He was obsessed with the art, but discouraged by his parents who sent him to study engineering. After earning $100 per month designing sewer systems, Goldberg realized it wasn’t what he wanted to do in life, so he quit to pursue his dream. He earned $8 per week drawing for the San Francisco Chronicle, most of which was thrown out and never used. Mainly, his job was sweeping floors and filing morgue photos. But Goldberg persisted, and was soon discovered when editors found that issues with his drawings sold more copies. Shortly after, Goldberg became a household name with his nationally syndicated comics like Mike & Ike, Lala Palooza and Sideshow. He was now earning $100,000 per year! During World War II, Goldberg drew infamous and controversial political cartoons. Though such cartoons would later earn him the Pulitzer Prize, he was forced to change his children’s last names. Inspired by the tech boom, Goldberg started designing various contraptions and inventions. He realized that people always do things the hard way, and to spoof this, drew cartoons of incredibly complex machines performing the simplest tasks, “a symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results.” These beloved, world-famous contraptions would be known as ‘Rube Goldberg Machines’. Goldberg was also a sculptor, author and screenwriter, and the first cartoonist whose work was featured at the Smithsonian Institute. The international Reuben Award for best cartoonists is named after him.

Words of the Week

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
– Plato

Jew of the Week: R.L. Stine

Giving You Goosebumps Since 1986

R.L. Stine

Robert Lawrence Stine (b. 1943) began writing when he was nine years old, having discovered a typewriter in the attic of his Ohio home. His writing career took off with a series of humourous children’s books by “Jovial Bob Stine”. At the same time, he created the popular humour magazine Bananas, which ran for 72 issues between 1975 and 1984. But it was in another genre that Stine really lit up the literary world. In 1986 he began writing horror novels and soon after launched the most famous series of horror books of all time: Goosebumps. Between 1992 and 1997, R.L. Stine published an incredible 62 Goosebumps novels (with over 100 additional spin-off volumes in subsequent years), selling over 400 million copies and making him among the wealthiest authors in the world. He was named America’s number one best-selling author by USA Today. Among many other awards, Guinness gave him the world record for best-selling children’s book series of all time. Goosebumps was translated into 32 languages, and became a hit TV show that ran for four seasons. It also spawned three video games. Along with his humour and horror books, R.L. Stine has written adult fiction and science fiction. An equally famous series of books are R.L. Stine’s Fear Street, with over 100 titles published. A prolific writer, few know exactly how many books Stine has written, with estimates ranging from 300 to 500 books, or even more – perhaps another reason why Stine was on People‘s list of the world’s “Most Intriguing People”.

Words of the Week

Nothing is life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
– Marie Curie

Jew of the Week: Albert Einstein

Father of Modern Physics

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born in Germany, lived in Italy, and received his higher education in Switzerland. In 1905, Einstein exploded onto the science scene with 4 revolutionary papers on the subjects of the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass/energy equivalence. By 1919 his research and theories were world-famous, with The Times reporting “Revolution in Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown”. He won the Nobel Prize two years later, for the photoelectric effect (not relativity!) In 1922, Einstein travelled the world, with a 12-day stop in Israel, during which he said “I consider this the greatest day of my life.” In 1933, he moved permanently to the US due to the Nazi rise to power. The Nazis raided his house, publicly burned his writings, and even put a bounty on his head worth $5000! Of them, he said, “I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise.” Fearing the Nazis would develop an atomic bomb, Einstein penned a letter to President Roosevelt persuading him to start a nuclear weapon research program. Einstein would later call this the greatest mistake of his life – but a necessary one.

Einstein Predicts the Future…?

He spent the rest of his life researching, teaching and writing, based primarily at Princeton. He was a member of the NAACP and fought for civil rights in America. Becoming a vegetarian, Einstein believed mankind as a whole would benefit greatly by adopting such a diet. Three years before his death he was offered to be President of Israel, but was “saddened and ashamed” to decline, humbly admitting he would have no idea how to run a country. Einstein passed away while working on a speech for Israel’s 7th Independence Day. His brain was preserved to be studied, the rest of his body cremated and scattered. Receiving countless awards, Einstein would publish over 300 scientific works, and an additional 150 non-scientific ones. He revolutionized the fields of thermodynamics, light, quantum physics, energy, relativity, cosmology, statistics, motion and momentum, magnetization, refrigeration and a host of others. He was also a musician. So great is his legacy, that “Einstein” has become synonymous with “genius”.

Words of the Week

Einstein in 1947

Gems from Albert Einstein:

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.