Eliezer Ben-Yehuda: Father of Modern Hebrew, Israel’s Mother Tongue
Eliezer Ben Yehuda (Jan. 7, 1858 – Dec. 16, 1922) was the main force behind the revival of Hebrew as a modern, living, spoken language…
Natan Sharansky: Hero ‘Refusenik’ Who Spent Nine Years in Soviet Prisons
Natan Sharansky (72) is a modern-day hero of the Jewish people: In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a prominent Soviet “refusenik” — mostly Jews who were…
Elie Wiesel: Holocaust Survivor Dedicated to Keeping the Memory of the Six Million Alive
Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel (Sept. 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was perhaps the world’s best-known and most revered Holocaust survivor.
Golda Meir: Israeli Stateswoman and the Country’s Fourth Prime Minister
Golda Meir (May 3, 1898 — December 8, 1978) was born in Kyiv, Ukraine; she and her family immigrated to the United States to escape…
Sigmund Freud: The Revolutionary and Controversial Founder of Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 — Sept. 23, 1939) is considered one of the most revolutionary and influential thinkers of the last century.
Anne Frank: The Jewish Teen Who Died in the Holocaust but Lives On in Her Diary
Anne Frank (June 12, 1929 – February or March 1945) was a German-born Dutch teenager who perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration…
Maimonides: Brilliant Torah Scholar, Philosopher, Astronomer, and Physician
During the Middle Ages, Moses ben Maimon (1135 or 1138 — 1204) was a Sephardi Jew who was born in Cordoba, Spain, but spent…
David Ben-Gurion: Founding Father of the Modern State of Israel
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion — speaking in Tel Aviv under a portrait of Theodore Herzl, founder of modern Zionism…
Albert Einstein: The Genius Who Helped Explain the Universe
It would be difficult to overestimate the intelligence of Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 — April 18, 1955); indeed, his very name has become virtually synonymous with “genius.” It would be equally difficult to overstate the impact his prodigious mind has had…
To learn about these and many more AmazingJews, watch a compilation put together by JewOfTheWeek.net in 2015 and posted on YouTube.