The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (39 page)

With his colleague Rosenzweig, Buber’s main literary output in the 1920s consisted of a new German translation of the Bible. They viewed the Bible as an oral history which had lost its immediacy in earlier pedantic settings. Completed after Rosenzweig’s death by Buber in 1961, the translation is vibrant and directly immediate. For Buber, the reader is never an object to be manipulated by the author, but someone to join with in the celebration of revelatory history.

Buber’s productive work as professor of Jewish religion and ethics at the University of Frankfurt was terminated when the Nazis seized power in 1933. Jews throughout Germany were restricted from attending public schools. In a period of progressively vicious racial and religious prohibitions, Buber served as director of a bureau for Jewish education in Germany. He traveled throughout the country, often at great personal risk, an inspiring symbol of spiritual strength and resistance.

In 1938 Buber emigrated to Palestine, just escaping the horrors of the Holocaust. He was named professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University, where he taught until 1951. Buber remained active in Israeli political and cultural affairs until his death in 1965, often espousing unfashionable views based on his unique ethical values.

For some he remains a kind of master of Jewish existentialism. Perhaps his most important influence on the non-Jewish world was his profound affect on leading Protestant theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth. Buber, more a universal philosopher than just a Jewish thinker, was admired for his view that the relationship of I to the Eternal Thou favors a life of dialogue, faith as an active, not passive, participation and oneness with God, in everything we do.

U
ntil the 1950s, the disease had been the scourge of young people, savagely attacking, rendering strong muscles flaccid, causing sudden painful paralysis and often death. Poliomyelitis, commonly known as polio, is a crippling, potentially deadly sickness, which during the epidemic of 1952, for example, killed 3,300 persons out of the 57,626 stricken.

Amid great publicity, acclaim, and controversy, during the 1950s a handful of scientists, led by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, using conflicting methods and in almost virulent opposition to each other, developed vaccines that have largely eradicated polio from the industrial world. The discovery of a vaccine for polio improved forever the health of society. Children could grow up and run about their homes, yards, and schools, free from what was a common, brutally debilitating illness.

Under the auspices of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Salk, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh medical school, announced in 1953 the creation of a dead virus serum which when needle-injected immunized its recipient against contracting polio. Salk’s announcement preceded by seven years the introduction by Sabin of an oral live virus vaccine that became most widely used and has proven extremely effective in fighting polio.

However, it was Salk’s declaration that galvanized the medical community into doing something definitive and lasting to end this awful plague. To prove his point that the vaccine was safe, Salk first injected himself, his wife, and their three sons. Evidence was soon established that the serum was effective in warding off the virus. The serum was then used on children crippled with polio and at an institution for the retarded. Such methods of experimentation would today most probably be illegal. In 1954 the Foundation (now called the March of Dimes) sponsored a mass test of the vaccine on almost two million schoolchildren. By 1955, the vaccine was proven fit for use and was the accepted form of vaccination until the establishment of the oral Sabin serum in 1960.

Salk was born in New York City, the oldest son of a garment center worker. He was an exceptional student at the City University of New York and later in graduate school at New York University medical school. Salk also studied with and worked in Michigan for the eminent virologist Thomas Francis Jr., with whom he helped develop one of the early commercial vaccines against the flu.

In 1947 Salk joined the research staff at the University of Pittsburgh, which was to be the site of his great discovery. He continued to develop vaccines to fight influenza, but was drawn to preventing the spread of polio. Two years later, Dr. John Enders received the Nobel Prize for growing in his Harvard laboratory polio virus in a test tube containing monkey tissues. Enders’ findings proved an effective means of mass-producing the viral strains required for the creation of Salk’s vaccine.

Three types of polio viruses were identified. After growing these strains in Enders’ test tube environment, Salk killed them with formaldehyde. Developing a vaccine from the mixture, he injected sufficient amounts of the dead virus serum in his patients to achieve immunity.

Salk’s vaccine made him internationally famous. Proceeds from the vaccine were used to improve its potency and in other medical research. To further the cause of science and the humanities, he also established the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California in 1963. Salk served as director of the Institute until 1985. Thereafter he conducted experiments on a dead virus vaccine for AIDS, seeking to bring to the battle against this dread disease the same multinational forces he had directed in the development of the polio serum.

I
n 1935 a young dancer named Jerome Rabinowitz applied for a scholarship at the School of American Ballet run by George Balanchine—and was summarily rejected by a secretary.

Born in New York City to Harry and Lena (Rips) Rabinowitz and raised in Weehawken, New Jersey, Jerome Robbins became (without the early overwhelming pressure of Balanchine’s presence) one of the most influential choreographers in modern history.

Active in both Broadway musicals and classical ballet, Robbins developed an eclectic style immediately recognizable for its rhythmic clarity and angular form. A fierce ballet master, Robbins elicited seemingly perfect performances from his dancers, the geometric shapes of his choreography sharply realized. Agnes De Mille once remarked that Jerome Robbins brought to dance a kind of American colloquialism, as if the streets ran into the stage. Whether working with composer Leonard Bernstein on
Fancy Free
or
West Side Story
or at George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet on
Dances at a Gathering,
based on piano music by Chopin, Robbins added remarkably original masterpieces to the ballet and theatrical repertoire. In an interview with
The New York Times
in 1990, Robbins expressed wonder at how each of his ballets, composed over a then thirty-five-year period, retains “its own character, colors and spines—its own center.”

He developed out of a milieu common to the experience of children of immigrant parents. Harry and Lena had left the fearful pogroms of Russia like so many others for security in America. Settling in Weehawken, Harry worked in a delicatessen and later manufactured corsets. Jerome’s older sister, Sonya, interested him in studying dance. Jerome was not a child prodigy, coming to dance studies as a teenager. After graduation from high school and one year at college at New York University, Robbins put aside a business career and concentrated on dance.

He studied with masters of almost every dance discipline including ballet (with Antony Tudor), interpretive, modern, Oriental, and Spanish dance. Robbins studied acting and worked winters in the chorus of many Broadway shows and summers (like so many Jewish boys of his generation) in the mountains (Tamiment Camp in Pennsylvania).

In 1940, the young professional dancer was hired by the newly formed Ballet Theatre (later known as American Ballet Theatre or ABT to its fans). In 1942 Robbins portrayed the title role in Igor Stravinsky’s classic ballet
Petrouchka,
dancing into immediate stardom.

In the remarkable year of 1944, Robbins and his contemporary Bernstein created
Fancy Free.
Considered a period piece today for its Second World War setting and casual theme (on leave from naval duty, three sailors go out on the town trying to meet girls), the work was a smash. Appealing to the patriotism of the time,
Fancy Free
was highly influential, not only through its music and everyday story, but also for dance that easily combined popular and classical styles with wit and brilliance.

Bernstein and Robbins were so elated with their success that they enlisted the book and lyrics writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green to expand the ballet into a Broadway show. For the first time as a creator, Robbins stepped out of the classical ballet world into popular culture. His creative cross-fertilization would immeasurably and permanently influence both worlds. Three days before the end of 1944, on December 28,
On the Town
opened, marking New York forever as “a helluva town.”

Through 1965, Robbins worked almost simultaneously on Broadway and in ballet. His classical ballets such as
Interplay
(music by Morton Gould) and
Facsimile
(again Bernstein) were juxtaposed with path breaking dance direction for popular Broadway shows such as Phil Silvers’
High Button Shoes
(featuring a takeoff on Mack Sennett silent comedies and for which Robbins won his first Tony award).

Robbins joined Balanchine’s infant New York City Ballet in 1948 as associate artistic director. In Robbins, the great Russian choreographer Balanchine (apart from Robbins and a very few others, the most influential choreographer in history), found an American version of himself (but not quite, Robbins always being his own man), a business partner, and a collaborator with whom he could develop many of the great ballets that now form the basis of much of the repertoire. With Balanchine, Robbins was also participating in a prominent setting in a virtual renaissance of dance in America. New companies sprouted up and flourished like corn in Kansas in June. It was a period to create and to set an unforgettable standard.

While dancing such roles as the Prodigal Son for Balanchine (until at thirty-four he gave up prancing about, as he called it), Robbins continued to choreograph many Broadway shows. After working on Irving Berlin’s
Call Me Madam
with the irrepressible Ethel Merman (they would do it again on
Gypsy),
Robbins’ most impressive theatrical work of the early 1950s was his creation of the Siamese court and their unusual presentation of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe (pronounced “Stowah” in the play) in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s immortal
The King and I.

Also during this fertile period, Robbins developed and choreographed Mary Martin’s
Peter Pan
with a deliciously wicked Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook. The television version of
Peter Pan
continues to delight children with its flights of fancy, magical choreography in the air. With a precocious Bob Fosse, Robbins directed
Bells Are Ringing
starring the effervescent Jewish comedienne Judy Holliday. After directing Aaron Copland’s
The Tender Land
at the City Opera, Robbins began his collaboration with Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Harold Prince that would permanently change American theater,
West Side Story.

West Side Story,
aided by Bernstein’s aggressively lyrical score and Sondheim’s youthful poetry, used dance as the underlying force moving the drama to its tragic and cathartic conclusion. No other musical play before it had so incorporated dance into its organism, influencing profoundly the later creations of Fosse, Michael Bennett, and Tommy Tune.

Robbins followed
West Side Story
with astonishingly deft work on
Gypsy
(initially not a hit, but probably the work most respected by the professionals in the business) and the worldwide success of
Fiddler on the Roof
(a sentimental yet clearheaded retelling of the stories by Sholem Aleichem about Tevye the milkman and his wife and many daughters).

With the City Ballet in the early 1950s, Robbins developed major works, including
The Guests, Age of Anxiety
(to Bernstein’s symphony),
The Cage
(a story of female insects gobbling up males), and
Fanfare.
In 1958, Robbins organized his own company, Ballets, USA, touring internationally (and not without controversy—he was considered somewhat “far out” during these years). Among his productions was a wondrous retelling of Vaslav Nijinsky’s
Afternoon of a Faun.