Category:American Jews

When Henry Morgenthau Jr. served as Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1934 to 1945, he helped finance the New Deal and the American war effort, and pressed for the creation of the War Refugee Board. Decades later, Robert Rubin held the same Treasury post under Bill Clinton. The thread connecting these two men, and the others gathered in this category, is participation in American Jewish life: a community whose institutions, family histories, religious practice, and patterns of migration have shaped, and been shaped by, the United States across roughly four centuries.

Background

Jews have lived in what became the United States since 1654, when a group of Sephardic refugees from Recife landed at New Amsterdam. The colonial community remained small. Through the nineteenth century, German-speaking Jews from Central Europe arrived in larger numbers and established Reform congregations, merchant houses, and civic networks in cities such as Cincinnati, New York, and San Francisco. The transformative wave came between 1880 and 1924, when roughly two million Jews from the Russian Empire, Galicia, and Romania settled in American cities, concentrated heavily in New York's Lower East Side. Restrictionist legislation in 1924 closed off most further immigration. Later arrivals included refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, survivors after 1945, Soviet Jews from the 1970s onward, and Israelis, Iranians, and others in the late twentieth century.

The community that emerged is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi in origin but internally diverse in religious practice, ranging from Hasidic and Modern Orthodox communities through Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and a sizable secular or culturally identified population. Major institutions developed in parallel: the American Jewish Committee (1906), the Anti-Defamation League (1913), federations of Jewish philanthropy in most large cities, the rabbinical seminaries of the three main denominations, and a network of day schools, summer camps, and Hillel chapters on college campuses. Greater New York remains the demographic and cultural center, with substantial populations also in Los Angeles, South Florida, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and the Washington and San Francisco metropolitan areas.

Notable members

The individuals collected here cluster, unsurprisingly, in fields where American Jews have built deep professional traditions: finance, law and government, real estate, entertainment, science, and media. The mix spans several generations and political orientations.

Finance is heavily represented. Robert Rubin moved from a long career at Goldman Sachs to the Clinton Treasury. Bill Ackman runs Pershing Square Capital Management and has become a prominent public commentator. Cliff Asness cofounded AQR Capital Management and is associated with quantitative and factor-based investing. Scott Shleifer is a partner at Tiger Global Management, central to that firm's expansion into late-stage technology investing. These figures reflect the prominence of Jewish professionals on Wall Street since the mid-twentieth century, when older German Jewish houses such as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and Kuhn, Loeb were joined by a postwar generation of traders, arbitrageurs, and hedge fund managers drawn heavily from city universities and elite graduate programs.

Government and public service form a second cluster. Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Rubin are joined by Joshua Bolten, who served as White House Chief of Staff under George W. Bush, and by elected officials including Jerrold Nadler, the longtime Manhattan congressman and former chair of the House Judiciary Committee, David Kustoff, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, and Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. The geographic and partisan range here, from Manhattan to Memphis, from cabinet rooms to governor's mansions, points to the integration of Jews across the American political map, even as the community as a whole has leaned Democratic since the New Deal.

Real estate and family business form another recognizable pattern. Samuel J. LeFrak built one of the largest privately held real estate companies in the country, developing LeFrak City in Queens and large residential portfolios in the New York region. Stephen Jemal is associated with the Nobody Beats the Wiz electronics retail chain founded by his family. Jonathan Kraft is president of the Kraft Group, the holding company that includes the New England Patriots, and represents a second-generation extension of a family enterprise built by his father, Robert Kraft.

Media and entertainment are well represented. Aaron Sorkin is the screenwriter and playwright behind The West Wing, A Few Good Men, The Social Network, and a long list of other works. David Zaslav leads Warner Bros. Discovery. Terry Semel ran Warner Bros. for two decades before serving as chief executive of Yahoo. Andy Jassy is chief executive of Amazon, having previously built and led Amazon Web Services. Jill Zarin is known from The Real Housewives of New York City. The presence of studio heads, a major streamer chief, and a sitting big-tech CEO recalls the long arc that runs from the Eastern European immigrants who founded the Hollywood studios in the 1910s and 1920s through the postwar broadcasting executives and into today's technology and platform economy.

Science is represented by Harvey J. Alter, the hepatologist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. Jewish researchers have figured prominently among American Nobel laureates since the mid-twentieth century, particularly in medicine, physics, and economics, often emerging from public universities and from research institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, where Alter spent most of his career.

Identity, practice, and public life

Inclusion in this category does not imply a single relationship to Jewish identity. Some figures here are observant; others are secular or cultural Jews; some have written or spoken extensively about their backgrounds, while others rarely discuss them in public. American Jewish identity has long combined religious affiliation, ethnic and family memory, and a tradition of communal philanthropy and civic engagement. Survey research consistently finds that a majority of American Jews describe being Jewish as mostly a matter of ancestry and culture rather than strictly religion, though synagogue membership, day school enrollment, and ritual observance remain central for a substantial minority.

Philanthropy is a recurring throughline. Federations, hospitals such as Mount Sinai and Cedars-Sinai, museums, universities, and Israel-related causes are common beneficiaries of the wealth generated in finance, real estate, and media by figures of the sort grouped here. Public commentary on antisemitism, on Israel, and on the boundaries of American pluralism has also drawn many of them into civic debate, particularly since 2023. The category therefore functions less as a statement about belief than as a biographical and historical grouping, marking the participation of these individuals in a community whose institutions, neighborhoods, and intergenerational trajectories form a distinctive strand of American history.