In 1955 a young musician named Chuck Berry got the opportunity to audition before Leonard Chess, one of the owners of Chess Records. He played a unique version of a country Western song and Chess agreed to produce it. He had one condition, that the name of the song be changed to something catchy. Chess famously said “Call it Maybelline” and rock and roll was born. Much of the music of the following decades would be composed by Jewish artists working in the famous Brill Building and would be played by ground-breaking Disc Jockeys including Alan Freed.
Beginning with Sigmund and Anna Freud and continuing through Abraham Maslow, Alfred Adler, Bruno Bettleheim, Noam Chomsky and many others, the field of psychology has in many ways been shaped by Jewish minds. Join us for a fun and fact-filled discussion on the Jewish roots of this branch of science and for a discussion on how psychology aligns with and grew out of Jewish culture at the time and the impact of Nazism on the formation of psychology.
In 1938 the character of Superman would make his first appearance in Action Comics, ushering in the Golden Age of comics and helping to create an industry that is today valued in the billions of dollars. Few people realize that the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish boys out of Cleveland and that he was, in many ways, a direct response to Adolf Hitler.
On August 13th, 1942, the government of the United States began a project that would change human history. Urged on by physicists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard and proceeding under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer and involving literally dozens of Jewish physicists, chemists and mathematicians the Manhattan Project would be the greatest work ever undertaken. They knew that they were in a race against the Germans to develop a weapon of mass destruction. The fate of the world hung in the balance.