The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (35 page)

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long with Benjamin Cardozo, Louis Dembitz Brandeis was the most influential Jewish jurist in American history. Cardozo’s influence on the development of jurisprudence was probably greater than Brandeis’s. Lawyers remain influenced by the beauty of Cardozo’s legal writing and his attention to the part played by the courts in making law. Many of Cardozo’s opinions, especially those made while he was chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, continue to affect the modern-day legal system. However, before Brandeis was a judge, he was a great lawyer, defender of the public interest, an important Zionist, and a leader of the progressive politics that led to the elections of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first great Jewish lawyer in the United States and the first person of his religious faith to serve on the Supreme Court, Brandeis’s example continues to work its powerful influence.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky four years before the Civil War into a cultured immigrant family from Bohemia, Brandeis learned the German spoken in his home and attended public school in Louisville. His father, Adolph, saw his grain business expand exponentially during the war and Reconstruction. In the early 1870s Adolph correctly predicted a slowdown in the abundant postwar economic boom (the depression of 1873), closed down his business, and moved the family back to Europe to visit relatives and enjoy the fruits of their prosperity. (He would later see fortune come and go—Louis was to show in his career a similar degree of discernment, but a more heightened frugality.) Brandeis attended the Annen Realschule in Dresden, Germany, incorporating the discipline of Teutonic thinking and logic while at the same time reacting with discomfort to the rigidity and oppression of the pedagogy.

Returning to the United States in 1873, Louis did find a place of learning totally to his liking—Harvard Law School. Brandeis was one of the earliest law students (and its first prominent success) to benefit from the rigors of the form of study called the “case method” (initiated at Harvard by Christopher C. Langdell). Pupils learned the law by studying its evolution in actual court cases. Brandeis fell in love with legal studies, reading so much and so intensely that he hurt his vision. Graduating with the highest grades in his class, Brandeis founded his own law firm with a classmate, Samuel D. Warren, son of wealthy industrialists and intimately connected to Boston’s upper-class or Brahmin society.

Warren & Brandeis quickly became a success. Brandeis’s analytical skills, incomparable ability to digest and interpret complex fact patterns, wide knowledge of business, and keen understanding of people ensured his involvement in what was then the cutting edge of the legal profession. In the age of the Robber Barons, America was losing its soul in a too rapid industrialization. The fast accumulation of personal wealth was deemed more important than the public good.

Brandeis built an early career as an activist lawyer on top of a lucrative practice representing wealthy families and institutions. Known popularly as the “People’s Attorney,” he spent most of his time taking on public interest cases for no fee, pro bono. Yet he continued to bring in sufficient commercial clientele (serviced by his partners) to warrant the princely draw for that time of $100,000 a year. The cases included the granting of transportation and utility franchises, regulation of the insurance industry and the development of savings bank life insurance available to all at nominal charge, defending the State of Oregon in its enforcement of a ten-hour work day, wrongdoings in the Interior Department, and the settling of labor unrest. He created a form of written argument listing general principles first, then pages of supporting facts. This became known as the “Brandeis brief” and revolutionized litigation.

Brandeis viewed his activism as an attempt, ultimately conservative in its approach, to restore a balance to America’s democracy. Unfettered control of every walk of life by big business diminished the Jeffersonian ideal of democracy Brandeis cherished. Every small man must have his say. Brandeis took on unpopular causes as his way of righting the balance.

In 1912 he met another great reformer, Woodrow Wilson, who had just received the Democratic nomination for president. Their meeting at Sea Girt, New Jersey, was widely publicized, the controversial Jewish lawyer from Boston, “more Brahmin than the Brahmins,” endorsing the stern Protestant scholar. Although Wilson at the time had strong ideas about social justice, his economic program was vague, not thought through. Brandeis filled Wilson with ideas of social reform serving as the great regulator of business growth. Wilson’s New Freedom for America was to be built based on morality, not just on making money (how the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years were to prove him wrong!).

When Wilson was elected, Brandeis was passed over as too controversial to be attorney general or secretary of commerce. But he continued to work as an unpaid adviser to Wilson, guiding the early administration in its formation of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission.

Brandeis never practiced his religion. Just before the First World War, however, he began to equate Zionism with being a good American. Brandeis assumed that Jewish tradition mandated that a renewed Jewish Zion could only be a democracy like the United States. He opposed Jewish leaders such as Jacob Schiff who believed that an American could not be loyal to his country and still be a Zionist. Brandeis’s developing leadership role in the American Zionist movement led to creation of the American Jewish Congress. To have America’s greatest Jewish lawyer actively behind American Zionism gave the movement in its difficult early years a much-needed legitimacy.

When presidents before Wilson nominated Supreme Court justices, their recommendations largely met with little or no opposition in the Senate. In 1916 Wilson proposed Brandeis to the Court and thereby unleashed a furious fight. Brandeis’s integrity and progressive politics were viciously attacked at the hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Prominent conservatives such as former president Taft could not accept that a Jew could become a Supreme Court justice.

Wilson prevailed, however, and Brandeis was confirmed by the Senate by a 47 to 22 vote, the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, whose appointment opened the door for future Jewish justices Cardozo, Frankfurter, Goldberg, Fortas, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan.

Early in his tenure, Brandeis established what has become a tradition on the Court. Rejecting the use of a permanent secretary, he chose each year a recent graduate (chosen by his friend, Professor Felix Frankfurter) from Harvard Law School as an apprentice. Future secretary of state Dean Acheson was one such assistant.

Brandeis’s career on the Court was a continuation of his progressivism. He felt deeply that the Court was too often preoccupied with property rights to the deprivation of personal freedoms, such as privacy. Brandeis believed his opinions should not only persuade but should instruct and guide. Possessing a broad and detailed knowledge of American business, Brandeis was able to give his opinions, many in dissent with his friend the great justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a profound resonance. Brandeis was one of the first great modern justices not to rely solely on a narrow interpretation of the law, but to develop his opinions after sensitive investigation and accumulation of facts, seeing the law as an active and growing part of life, the “living” law, relevant to all.

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o Jewish inventor has yet equaled the greatness of men such as Bell, Edison, or Ford. None has developed to date, in inventor Gordon Gould’s words, “one you don’t quite see.” However, there have been many Jewish inventors who have transformed impractical innovations into useful tools, immensely improving mankind’s quality of life in the process.

Emile Berliner did not invent the phonograph; Thomas Alva Edison did. Ten years after Edison’s invention of a tinfoil recording cylinder machine, however, Berliner created the gramophone, replacing Edison’s cylinder with a flat disk made of zinc.

Berliner also did not invent the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell is commonly credited with that invention. However, Berliner sought to improve the clarity and amplification of transmitted sound. He thus invented a kind of loose-contact telephone transmitter, which Berliner called the “microphone.” He also developed the induction coil, improving the telephones performance. Because of Berliner’s improvements (and original creation of the microphone), the telephone became more than just a gadget, but instead an efficient method of mass communication capable of sending sounds over long distances. And later refinements made the microphone an integral part of public speaking, broadcasting, and recording.

Berliner was born and studied in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, near Hanover. When he was nineteen, he emigrated to the United States, settling, after a short stay in New York, in Washington, D.C. While working as a clerk, salesman, and then as an assistant in a chemical lab analyzing sugar, Berliner studied electricity and acoustical science.

In 1876, he began to fiddle at home with Bell’s brand new design for the telephone. To make Bell’s invention useful, its poor sound quality and low amplitude had to be improved. Fashioning a loudspeaker out of a soapbox, Berliner assembled a crude microphone. With the addition of an induction coil, the telephone was transformed into a convenient and useful means of communication. The rights to his improvement were snatched up by the Bell Telephone Company. Berliner was then hired as chief electrical instruments inspector for Bell.

In 1887, Berliner developed the gramophone and flat disk for recording sound. Berliner’s invention of a flat disk proved that the primary agent distorting the sound generated from Edison’s hand-rotated cylinders was gravity. Sound waves fixed with shellac onto a flat disk, however, successfully captured sound. In addition, Berliner invented the method of reproducing copies from a master recording, now commonly known as “duping.” Berliner’s patent was purchased by the Victor Talking Machine Company, serving as the model of a multimillion-dollar industry. “His Master’s Voice” was Berliner’s.

Berliner continued dabbling in many fields, later experimenting in aviation (inventing the revolving cylindered light engine and erecting a helicopter at about the same time as Igor Sikorsky, the man commonly credited with the invention), public hygiene, and improving the quality of milk production. Berliner also led national efforts in fighting tuberculosis and supported the construction of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Other Jewish inventors include, but cannot be limited to, the list being so long: Abraham ibn Ezra (astrolabe for navigators), Levi ben Gershon (the “Jacob’s staff,” a quadrant used by Columbus), Nahum Solomon (thin-spoked wheel and the first safety bicycle), Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. (Kodachrome color process), Peter Carl Goldmark (color television and the long-playing record), Jacob Rabinow (mail-sorting machines), Harold Rosen (geosynchronous satellites), and of course John Von Neumann (most of the basic features of the modern computer, such as its central processing unit, memory-storage capabilities, and the use of binary numbers and serial processing).

N
o figure greater represents
la belle époque,
the beautiful era of late nineteenth-century France, than the actress Sarah Bernhardt. The Divine Sarah, as she was known, was the greatest performer of her age, and like Caruso in opera or Chaplin in the movies, became for actors, directors, and playwrights who witnessed her talents their source and inspiration. During her lifetime there were certainly other great theatrical figures such as the actresses Rachel and Eleonora Duse, and the playwrights Sardou, Wilde, Ibsen, Rostand, and Shaw. But none of them had Sarah’s worldwide influence.

Her mother, Youle Bernard, was a Dutch Jew who fled a middle-class life in Amsterdam with her sister Rosine for adventure on the continent. The sisters wandered through European capitals, finally settling in Paris, supporting themselves through prostitution. Youle’s first pregnancy resulted in the birth of twins who died in infancy. One year later, in 1844, her little girl, Sarah (then Rosine), was born, daughter of an unknown father.