Today in history 3/5 -- 1133: Birth of King Henry II of England during whose reign Jews would prosper as reported by visitors including Abraham ibn Ezra and Isaac of Chernigov as well as the money that flowed to his coffers through the estate of Aaron of Lincoln and “the Saladin tithe.” 1696: Birthdate of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. His fresco, “The Sacrifice of Isaac” is an example of how European artists used the Hebrew Bible as an inspiration and resource. It also is an example of how deeply entrenched Judaism is in the fabric of Western Civilization. 1861: William H. Seward began serving as Secretary of State under President Abraham Lincoln. Seward had visited Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine in 1859 and it is thought that his talk about that visit may have been the factor that prompted Lincoln’s comment that when his term was over he wanted to visit the “Holy Land” during his travels aboard with Mrs. Lincoln. 1863: In New York, more than three thousand Jews and their friends gathered tonight at the Academy of Music to for the second annual grand ball of the Purim Association. The first grand ball took place last year and it was great success. Many of the guest came in costumes including “one lady who was dressed … in garments made entirely of Frank Leslies paper, and was decidedly a feature of the night, as were Joan of Arc, Old Aunt Dinah, Mehitabel Ann, Old Mother Goose, Pocahontas, Anne Boleyn and the Dame aux Camelias.” One lady was dressed in the height of fashion, in garments made entirely of Frank Leslies paper, and was decidedly a feature of the night, as were Joan of Arc, Old Aunt Dinah, Mehitabel Ann, Old Mother Goose, Pocahontas, Anne Boleyn and the Dame aux Camelias.” Myer S. Isaacs and his committee are to be congratulated for putting on such a successful event which was orderly and entertaining. 1890: In Baltimore, MD, Benjamin and Rose Nathan Perlman gave birth to Philip B. Perlman who was appointed as U.S. Solicitor General by President Truman in 1947, making him the first Jew to hold that post. 1891 In one of the earliest manifestation of popular non-Jewish support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Blackstone Memorial was sent to President Benjamin Harrison. The petition was the creation of Reverend William Eugene Blackstone and called for U.S. government support in the endeavor. It was signed by 431 prominent Americans including John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and future President William McKinley and was supported by a myriad of newspapers including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post. Harrison’s lack of response may have been another sign of the ineptitude that would lead voters to deny him a second term a year later. 1892: Kansas Congressman Funston was brought to tears during his visit to Ellis Island today when he saw the conditions under which the immigrants were living. A member of the House Committee on Immigration, Funston was so moved by what he saw that he took money from his own billfold and gave it to some of those whom he encountered. 1896: Birthdate of Jacob Rader Marcus, the Reform Rabbi who founded the American Jewish Archives at the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, Ohio. He passed away in 1995 at the age of 99. 1909: Oscar Solomon Straus completed his terms as the third U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Straus had been appointed by Theodore Roosevelt and left when William Howard Taft took office. A year later Straus would return to a post he had held before, U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire. 1919: Birthdate of Albert J. Rosenthal, who as dean of Columbia Law School in the late 1970s and early 1980s helped increase the number of women on the schools faculty. 1928: Herbert Samuel’s successor as High Commissioner, Field Marshal Viscount Plumer, a distinguished WW I commander, opened Jerusalem’s first Arts and Crafts Exhibition which was held in the Citadel at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. 1934: Birthdate of Daniel Kahneman, Israeli economist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv, in the then British Mandate of Palestine, now in Israel), is a key pioneer and theorist of behavioral finance, which integrates economics and cognitive science to explain seemingly irrational risk management behavior in human beings. He is famous for collaboration with Amos Tversky and others in establishing a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and in developing prospect theory. Kahneman spent his childhood years in Paris, France and moved to Palestine in 1946. He received his B.Sc. in mathematics and psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1954, after which he served in the Israeli Defense Forces principally in its psychology department. In 1958 he came to the United States and earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. He won the 2002 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his work in prospect theory, despite being a research psychologist and not an economist. In fact, Kahneman claims to have never taken a single economics course — he claims that what he knows of the subject he and Tversky learned from collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch. In explaining why he entered the field of psychology, Kahneman once wrote: “It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 02:44:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015