The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (28 page)

Born a Jew, raised a Catholic, Schoenberg converted to the Lutheran Church in his youth and back to Judaism in his old age. His search for religious identity paralleled his development as an artist. In his twenties he composed the ecstatic
Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht)
and the massive
Gurrelieder.
These works were touched by Wagner while remaining quite original. At the same time that Claude Debussy was composing his famous opera based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s
Pelléas et Mêlisande,
Schoenberg was composing an orchestral tone poem on the same subject. His
First String Quartet
and
Chamber Symphony
followed, displaying the same tendencies of stretching tonal resolutions over longer and longer time periods. The musical language of these works is overripe, excessive, and rich with symbolism. His
Three Piano Pieces
of 1909 are viewed today as the turning point in his artistic journey. For the first time in Western music every note and phrase had a separate purpose, liberated from conventional harmonic rules and expectations.

Schoenberg sought a technique or system that would organize all elements of musical composition. In the works that followed through the First World War he gradually amassed the creative materials to formulate the twelve-tone method. For the most part, these works contained ever more anguished emotions than his earlier ones. The short opera
Erwartung,
composed by Schoenberg in a delirious few days, and the fantastical
Pierrot Lunaire
for singer and chamber ensemble contain music of immeasurable density and weight. During this period Schoenberg also developed a way of speaking song called
Sprechstimme,
in which the singer declaims musical line in a limbo not quite song and not quite speech.

Schoenberg’s reaction to the virulent anti-Semitism between the two great wars was to return to his Jewish roots in the oratorio
Jacob’s Ladder,
the grand opera
Moses and Aron,
and the Holocaust memorial
A Survivor from Warsaw.
Schoenberg’s later works made use of more tonal idioms, and is a kind of musical reconciliation expanded the expressive reach of his techniques.

Schoenberg’s expressionism greatly influenced his students, most important of whom were Alban Berg, the composer of the seminal opera
Wozzeck,
and Anton von Webern, who wrote aphoristic pieces of immense postwar significance. Never part of the Viennese musical establishment, Schoenberg established the Society for the Private Performance of Music, which premiered many important works of the period, and established a segregated method of introducing new music away from the promotions of commercial concerts. The society was a forerunner of the many contemporary chamber music groups, which dominated universities internationally for over forty years. With the rise of Nazism, Schoenberg fled to the United States, settling on the West Coast where as a destitute refugee he took private students to support his family, failed in an attempt to write film music, and then taught at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Schoenberg’s influence spread to American composers, who viewed his compositional style as an ideal paragon of expression. The 1950s and 1960s were dominated by composers attempting to extend Schoenberg’s revolution to all aspects of music. Many thought that the ability to organize every tone, pitch, color, and rhythm into a perfect unity could be reached only through logic and scientific analysis. Others seeking to write music that was more lyrical were abused by Schoenberg’s academic followers as crass audience seekers chasing after applause with show-business tunes. A kind of cultural totalitarianism set in, separating audiences from new music and making the concert hall more museum than living theater.

Today, Schoenberg can almost be viewed as a musical Karl Marx and not as the Moses of his visions. His first true disciples, Berg and Webern, lived in the same era and composed music that truly expresses their time. Extreme states of feeling, psychotic episodes, and violence are the stuff their period’s darkest nightmares were made of. The composition of neo-Expressionistic music after the Second World War during a long period of prosperity has seemed to most listeners, just plain wrong and out of place. A wedge was created between Schoenberg’s high culture and most concertgoers. Nevertheless, Arnold Schoenberg’s true legacy still must be his freeing of tones from conventional expectations and his challenge to all music lovers not to remain complacent in the belief that what is beautiful is the expected.

E
mile Durkheim, the son of an Alsatian rabbi, was not only the founder of modern sociology, but with Freud, Marx, and Max Weber, one of the most profound thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First at attempting to codify social science, Durkheim sought to explain rationally how societies develop and how people interact, divide their labor, become aware of values, learn restraint, resolve conflict, change together. His theories are mirrored and developed in the works of the French Jewish social scientist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Durkheim’s theories of “collective representations” have been highly influential. He noted that ideas are often created by many and because of their common creation become forceful and binding. These group concepts are also referred to as the results of the “collective conscience” serving as the justification of laws and ethical behavior.

Many of Durkheim’s studies reflect his obsession with morality. Highly influenced by Immanuel Kant’s theories of moral obligations (and perhaps reacting to the bitter public events of his time), Durkheim sought to understand how societies could change in the service of justice. He urged that peoples living among one another must have a vision and understanding of humanity, not just for themselves but for other societies. This liberal humanism conflicts with Durkheim’s often misunderstood persona as an agent of conservatism.

His life’s work was centered in the ways in which society and individuals control their actions (or are controlled). Whether he studied suicide, Australian aborigines, educational methods, morality, law, or religion, Durkheim sought in each instance reconciliation and synthesis. How can man be free in the face of authority? Does tradition hamper choice? These were important questions first asked by Durkheim in a sociological context.

Durkheim viewed sociology as the result of history. Natural sciences had presented philosophers with a rational means to understand the world. The decline of monarchy and the rise of democratic regimes brought crisis and radical change to modern society. With scientific analysis, such change could be studied and analyzed. Durkheim studied the causes of breakdown in the old order and the reasons for the ascent of the new.

His philosophy of social change has been considered problematic by some. Durkheim’s ideas were not readily identifiable or simply translated. He ignored the writings of Karl Marx, perhaps terrified at communist visions of brutal class conflict. Durkheim approximated answers, more willing to explain the gray than to draw in black outline.

The most appealing aspect of his work is a concern with healing. Often using medical symbols, Durkheim attempted to understand how societies interact or personalities develop for the just purpose of improving life.

His studies on the division of labor in primitive and developed societies and problems in personality development discussed in his work on suicide have also been highly influential, and show Durkheim’s concern with curing. Primitive societies, he argued, have a kind of “mechanical solidarity” in which labor is barely divided, everyone helping each other in a ritual of interdependence. Personal decisions are rigidly sublimated to the will of the group. In more developed societies, labor is divided into many specialties and an “organic” solidarity takes hold, regulated by a much needed and complex judicial system to settle conflicts and impose direction. Similarly the act of suicide was viewed by Durkheim in its relationship to society and therapy. A suicide may be in the service of a cause (such as the altruistic death of a soldier on a suicide mission), or brought about by a belief that the society has totally disintegrated, been separated away, or justified by an ego shut off from the company and solace of other people.

Educated in law, philosophy, anthropology, and social science, Durkheim, despite being Jewish in a snobbishly anti-Semitic culture, had a very successful career in education. Like many of the important people of his day, he attended the Ecole Normale (one year behind the great French Jewish philosopher, Henri Bergson). After working from 1882 to 1887 in secondary schools (a prerequisite in France at the time for a position in higher education), Durkheim began teaching the first university course in social science at the University of Bordeaux. In 1896 the university created for him its first professorship and university chair in the new discipline of sociology. Durkheim went to Paris in 1902 to teach at the Sorbonne, where he spent the remainder of his life.

France’s defeat by Germany in 1870, the Dreyfus affair, and the First World War defined Durkheim’s philosophical outlook and the direction of his work. The fall of the Second Empire in 1870 and the establishment of the Third French Republic wrought immense social changes. The Dreyfus affair of the 1890s divided France’s intellectuals into warring camps. Durkheim, a private and studious man, firmly and publicly came to Dreyfus’s aid. For this, Durkheim’s classes were disrupted and his life threatened. Later, the disintegration of the world as he had known it in the trenches of the First World War proved overwhelming, contributing to his death.

B
orn Betty Naomi Goldstein to Harry and Miriam (Horowitz) Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, educated at Smith College, married in 1947 to Carl Friedan, the mother of three children, divorced in 1969, activist, best-selling author, professor, a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the First Women’s Bank, researcher, journalist, Democrat, clinical psychologist, and grandmother, Betty Friedan was the most influential feminist of the postwar era. Deemed by Marilyn French and others as an “initiator of the ‘second wave’ of feminism,” Friedan’s writings and lectures, including the highly influential books
The Feminine Mystique
and
The Second Stage,
synthesized women’s views on what equality meant and how women could achieve the right to choose, not only to have children but how to live and work. For over twenty-five years from the early 1960s, Friedan was a powerful spokesperson, always seeking rational, caring discussion and solutions, not just dogma.

The first push for equal rights for women ended in 1920 with the granting of the right to vote. Despite Emma Goldman’s pleas that voting rights would not solve their problems, the American women’s movement before the Second World War largely failed to carry on the fight (although the Equal Rights Amendment or ERA was first presented to Congress in 1923). The tremendous push to secure the ballot box had exhausted the suffragettes and given them a false sense of security.

When the war against fascism ended two decades later, four million women lost their jobs to returning GIs. Women were again told that their place was in the home. The freedom to work to build up and defend their nation was over. Men would earn the family’s bread. What the boys needed was a warm place to come home to every night. Ironically, American soldiers had accepted some of the same values toward women
(Kinder, Küche, Kirche
—children, kitchen, church) as the Nazis they thought they had defeated.

The contemporary women’s liberation movement began not in the 1960s as many believe, but gradually in those postwar years. Women in small groups started a process of consciousness raising and examining their history. The publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
crystalized the concerns raised by that process, igniting a worldwide movement not just for women, but for human rights.