The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (29 page)

The feminist historian Ginette Castro notes that
The Feminine Mystique
developed out of a desire to prove that it was possible to combine work with the home. Identifying “the problem that has no name,” Friedan posited that American women were tired out and driven to boredom due to lives without any interests other than housekeeping and raising children. Friedan had lost a job as a newspaper reporter because she had requested maternity leave. In the magazines she then contributed to, Friedan noticed that stories about real women’s lives were ignored, while fantasies about the “Happy Housewife Heroine” were eagerly sought. She dubbed the myth of the perfect domestic wife the “Feminine Mystique.”

Castro remarks that Friedan’s first goal in her book was to debunk the myth of this “new religion of femininity.” Women were not special “Wife-Mother” goddesses, but victims of a system structured to subjugate them. Victims of a “Housewife’s Syndrome,” their only identity could be found in what objects (things and children) they possessed. “Imprisoned in a comfortable concentration camp,” they had “forfeited” their self. Some women who found pride in their roles as housewives deeply resented Friedan’s definitions, but the book struck a chord of outrage among many and woke up a generation.

Her background in psychology also gave Friedan the tools to attack the sexual advice of certain followers of Freud. These post-Freudians, she asserted, overemphasized the importance of sexual fulfillment in a cult of the orgasm. Sex was not a substitute, Friedan urged, for self-realization as a person.

Neither were a woman’s possessions the answer to her life’s work. Housework had to be regarded for what it was—and finished “as quickly and efficiently as possible,” said Friedan. Marriage and motherhood were not the culmination of all of a woman’s goals, but part of a human being’s life. More important was the knowledge that she can think for herself, work productively in her chosen field, mean something in her society beyond the home.

Friedan’s first book energized the fledgling women’s movement into a revolution in search of identity and place. It gave activist women a purpose and a direction, serving as a highly influential generator of future ideas.

The 1960s were active years for Friedan. In 1966 she helped found NOW and acted as its president through 1970. One of the most visible feminists of her time, Friedan picketed, lectured, debated, stood up as one of the foremost “Women’s Libbers,” as they were somewhat disparagingly called then. Her liberal positions on issues were however often confused with those of radical feminists like Kate Millett or Ti-Grace Atkinson. As Friedan was to show in her three later books,
It Changed My Life,
and especially the wonderful
The Second Stage
and
The Fountain of Age,
she sought, in a consistent way, to free
all
people, young and old, from themselves.

Her later books posed difficult questions. Recognizing that in the increasingly difficult economy of the 1980s and beyond, men doubted the purposes of having a career, whether “working hard” always translated into success. She related her fascinating experiences of working with the military at West Point, seeing in women’s entry into our fighting force a symbol of the developing “personhood of women.” Friedan rejected the “sexual politics” of many of the radical and lesbian feminists as deflecting the true purposes of their common rebellion. If love was improved between the sexes, then all of their relations would be equal. In caring and humane observations, Friedan the grandmother identified the family and men as partners in the journey toward equality. In Erica Jong’s words, Betty Friedan wanted to bring women to their “senses,” to recognize what was important so that they could do their important work and face their own truths. After all the rhetoric died down, people would be left to their own “evolving human condition.”

No longer were the issues only about women caught in a mystique that robbed them of their humanity. The elderly too were trapped in a culture that idealizes youth, carelessly discarding the old. Friedan’s message was that ultimately we must all free ourselves from the myths that limit us, face the pain, fight back restraints, learn from our own pasts, and forge ahead, caring for what we do and those we love.

D
avid Sarnoff, born into poverty in Uzlian, Russia, a
Shtetl
in the province of Minsk, was the greatest visionary in the history of broadcasting. His administrative genius developed RCA (the Radio Corporation of America) and its subsidiary, NBC (the National Broadcasting Company) into the first great manufacturing and mass-communication conglomerate, a model for other electronics companies and, with Ford Motor Company as the only other possible exception, the largest American corporation to grow mostly as the result of one man’s efforts.

Sarnoff, skilled in the workings of telegraphy and nationally famous for his reception of distress calls from the sinking S.S.
Titanic,
foresaw in 1915 the utility of every house in America owning a “Radio Music Box.” In the early 1920s he became popularly known as the “wonder boy of the radio.” Seizing in 1926 the opportunity to control the then unfettered airwaves, Sarnoff created the first coast-to-coast radio network. A modern Medici, he developed alongside moneymaking commercial shows cultural programing such as a highly influential sponsorship of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. Recognized in 1944 by the Television Broadcasters Association as the “Father of American Television,” no person did more than Sarnoff to further the development of the medium. Against intense resistance from many at RCA, he later forced the growth of color television.

In each instance his vision became reality, largely due to incomparable administrative skills and a brutally direct manner. Sarnoff changed the way people get to learn about and entertain each other. He helped to create and then foster the growth of a communications industry limited only by the seemingly infinite ideas of its great inventors. Sarnoff would not be shocked at the growing obsolescence of the network system. Information highways, satellite and cable broadcasting, interactive movies and computers, video games, virtual reality, holographic images as real as Princess Leia in
Star Wars,
are all children of the revolution in communications led by Sarnoff. It is not enough now for the world to sit back and just laugh at Jack Benny’s routines on their Westinghouse radios or watch
Bonanza
on RCA wood-cased TV consoles. The earth became a global village when entrepreneurs such as Sarnoff found a way for us all to communicate quickly in sound and later with sight.

Sarnoff’s background in tsarist Russia could not have been further away from the powerful executive suites he later inhabited at New York’s Radio City. His father, Abraham, an itinerant house painter, emigrated to America in 1896, bringing over his young family four years later. David grew up in the squalor of New York’s Lower East Side. Except for his early years in Russia studying Talmud for long hours six days a week, he had little schooling. Sarnoff had no childhood. His father was incapable of supporting the family, and by the age of ten, David was earning the family’s bread by peddling Yiddish newspapers. Noting that he could earn more if he hired others and by selling to small vendors in need of distribution, Sarnoff created his first profitable network.

In 1906 the fifteen-year-old joined the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America as an office boy. Working as a gofer for the great inventor of the wireless telegraph, Guglielmo Marconi himself, Sarnoff learned how to speak English without much of an accent, to read from scraps of newspaper, and to manage the intricacies of running the office and working its equipment.

He was made the manager of the Marconi station in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, and then became the operator of the company’s telegraph equipment at Wanamaker’s Department Store in Manhattan. In 1912 he was one of the few telegraph operators to hear a distress call from the S.S.
Olympic
1,400 miles out in the frigid waters of the north Atlantic radioing, “S.S.
Titanic
ran into iceberg. Sinking fast.” The twenty-one-year-old became known throughout the country over the next seventy-two-hour period as he relayed to the nation periodic reports received from the rescue ships at sea with radios. President William Howard Taft ordered radio silence so Sarnoff could have no signal interference. Congress and the nation recognized from the disaster that radio was no longer just a scientific oddity. Transmitters were made a requirement by federal law on all large ships. The ability to transmit SOS calls was now viewed as a necessity. Sarnoff was later to recall that ironically the
Titanic
disaster made radio important—and incidentally himself.

RCA, the creature of General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T, and the United Fruit Company, acquired Marconi Wireless in 1919. Sarnoff became RCA’s commercial manager, in 1926 formed NBC, in 1930 was made the conglomerate’s president. Unlike his archrival William Paley of CBS, Sarnoff did not have an innate sensitivity to popular programing. His public position was that he much preferred developing cultural programs, viewing his role as protective of the public good, not just to make money. Despite his refined taste, Sarnoff populated his radio shows with some of the greatest headliners, only to have many of them stolen by Paley just before the advent of television. Sarnoff also led Paley in the development of the necessary hardware to project the shows both would promote. CBS never successfully developed its own television sets. Sarnoff’s RCA was for many years the Tiffany of electronics companies, a model for Sony and Mitsubishi.

The Toscanini concerts (first broadcast over radio, later over television also) not only exposed millions of Americans to classical music for the first time, but also saved the networks from governmental controls during the activist Franklin D. Roosevelt years. RCA also used the concerts to sell Toscanini records, one of the earliest and remarkably long-lasting examples of cross selling in the entertainment industry.

Like many titans of industry, Sarnoff was very active in government and philanthropic affairs. Appointed a brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserve by FDR during the Second World War, Sarnoff was for the rest of his life known as “the General.” Military rank fit him well. Unlike Paley, who tried to cover up his Jewish roots in an almost WASP genteelness, Sarnoff bristled at the slightest anti-Semitism, always making it clear what he was and from where he came (most notably face-to-face with Nikita Khrushchev).

M
ozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, was born Emmanuele Conegliano in the ghetto at Ceneda (now called Vittorio Veneto) near Venice. It is not commonly known that Da Ponte was Jewish, for he paraded around Europe most of his life as a priest, albeit a very sexually active one, and Mozart’s life story still garners most of the attention. Friend of the infamous Casanova, the Abbate or Abbe Da Ponte wrote
The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni,
and
Cosi fan tutte,
the three greatest libretti in opera history set to music by Mozart. Before the brilliant adaptations in the late 1800s of Shakespeare’s
Othello (Otello)
and
The Merry Wives of Windsor (Falstaff)
for Verdi by composer-librettist Arrigo Boito, Da Ponte’s
commedia per musica
represented the pinnacle of musical theater. Most important, without Da Ponte’s collaboration, Mozart would not have been inspired to write music that lays bare human emotion in ways never before attempted and rarely approached since.

Nothing in Da Ponte’s past foreshadows his miraculous life and literary achievement. Emmanuele’s father, Geremia, was a leather merchant. When Emmanuele was five years old, his mother, Ghella (Rachel) Pincherle, died after giving birth to his younger brother. Geremia’s second wife was a Christian. Whether to satisfy her religious needs or to find a way out of the ghetto, in 1763 Geremia took his three children by Ghella to be converted by the bishop of Ceneda (who was named Lorenzo Da Ponte!). As was the custom, the last name of Da Ponte was assumed by the Conegliano family, Emmanuele accepting the bishop’s first name also. The bishop took in his new namesake and two brothers, enrolling young Lorenzo in the seminary.