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.Like all American women, Jewish women have had an uphill battle toachieve what they could in business, politics, the arts, and academia.Per-haps more than any other affected group, Jewish women benefited from theCivil Rights Act of 1964.Coming from the same socioeconomic back-grounds as their brothers and with similar educations through college, oncethe discriminatory barriers came down they were available and had the nec-essary skills to take advantage of equal opportunities in society.They en-tered law and medical schools in record numbers, and moved into the stockmarket, investment banking, and other endeavors from which they had beenbarred by restrictive academic and corporate gender policies.Ruth BaderGinsberg became the first Jewish woman appointed to the Supreme Court in1993; both Gerda Lerner and Linda Kerber were chosen to be president of theOrganization of American Historians; and Bella Abzug became the firstwoman to win election to the House of Representatives on a women s rightsplatform in the early 1970s.Other successful Jewish women could be found in the arts.BarbraStreisand, of Hollywood fame, came to prominence on the New York stagein 1963, the same year that Betty Friedan published her classic commentaryon the expectations for middle-class women in The Feminine Mystique.Wendy Wasserstein, like Lillian Hellman in a previous era, won high praisefor her plays and one of them, The Heidi Chronicles, received a PulitzerPrize.Although individual Jews can be found in almost every line of businessand professional endeavor, as a group the eastern Europeans, their children,and their grandchildren have made their greatest impact in the clothing, en-tertainment, and intellectual worlds of American society.By the earliestyears of the twentieth century the manufacture of ready-to-wear clothingwas in the hands of Jewish owners; in 1950 more than 85 percent of Ameri-can-made clothes were manufactured in Jewish-owned shops.In the late 164 Ethnic Mobility in Modern America1980s, Michael Dell started his now world-famous computer business, andin 1998 he became the richest man in Texas.In the entertainment field both the theater and the movies provided av-enues of mobility for Jewish actors, actresses, writers, tunesmiths, directors,and producers.Two Jews of Russian ancestry, David Sarnoff and WilliamPaley, developed what one financial publication called perhaps the world stwo greatest broadcasting empires, the Radio Corporation of America (nowpart of General Electric) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), re-spectively.In the intellectual community leading journals such as Com-mentary, since 1945, and The New York Review of Books, since the 1960s,have relied on Jewish sponsors and/or editors.Authors like Norman Mailer,Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Meyer Levin have beenamong the major figures in American literature in the post-World War II era.And in academia prominent scholars like historian Oscar Handlin, socialscientist Seymour Martin Lipset, and economist and Nobel Prize winnerMilton Friedman won international recognition.Artist Ben Shahn, discov-erer of the polio vaccine Jonas Salk, filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and StevenSpielberg, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, conductor and composer Leonard Bern-stein, and former Supreme Court Justice and ambassador to the United Na-tions Arthur Goldberg are only a few of the Jews of eastern European descentwho have distinguished themselves in American society.Not all Jews are asprominent and accomplished as the aforementioned group, but it is worthnoting that no twentieth-century European minority has risen as fast, so-cially and economically, as have the descendants of Jews who arrived fromeastern Europe at the turn of the century.The remarkable success of Jews was undoubtedly the consequence of hardwork, skill, and an arduous struggle in an expanding economy.Their tradi-tional respect for learning facilitated advancement because education was animportant vehicle for social mobility.To what extent American publicschools really served immigrants is a subject of debate and in need of study,but in the case of Jewish immigrants they were of great advantage.Parentspushed their children to achieve, and they themselves, eager for an educa-tion, attended public evening schools.As journalist Abraham Cahan, chron-icler of the Lower East Side of New York City, put it, The ghetto rang witha clamor for knowledge. In addition to their respect for education, Jews brought with them urbanliving experiences and skills that could be used in commercial and industrialAmerica
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