Tag Archives: Congress

Jew of the Week: Chuck Schumer

America’s Top Senator

Charles Ellis Schumer (b. 1950) was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family with Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish ancestry. He scored a perfect 1600 on his SAT and went to Harvard, where he first studied chemistry before switching to law. He passed the bar in 1975, but went right into politics, having once been inspired when volunteering on a presidential campaign. Schumer was elected to the New York State Assembly straight out of law school. After three terms, he won a seat on the US House of Representatives. He served on the House for nine terms until 1998, when he ran for a Senate seat instead and won again. He has since been re-elected to the Senate three times, with consistently high approval ratings. In 2016, he was voted head of the Senate Democrats, making him the minority leader. Earlier this year, when the Democrats took control of the Senate, he became the majority leader. In both cases, Schumer became the first Jew (and first New Yorker) to hold the Senate leader title. Impressively, Schumer visits every single one of New York’s 62 counties every year to meet with his constituents. He has been praised for helping average New Yorkers deal with even minor issues that are not the role of a senator to address. Over the years, Schumer has worked hard to keep jobs and factories in America, and has been fiercely critical of China. In 2017, he tried unsuccessfully to get Trump to impose a ban on Chinese buyouts of American companies. (This week, he finally pushed through a massive $250 billion “China competition bill”.) Schumer has also been praised for his assistance to veterans and for lowering healthcare costs. In 2001, together with John McCain, he introduced a bill to open the prescription drug market to more generic, cheaper versions, resulting in savings of billions of dollars. Schumer has fought for net neutrality, and criticized Republicans for allowing the FCC to pass new internet restrictions in 2018. While Schumer is pro-choice, he has also supported Efrat, an Israeli anti-abortion organization. He is currently trying to push legislation to ban BPA, cadmium, and other toxins. Over the years, Schumer has fought for tougher sanctions on Iran, Russia, and North Korea, and is one of the few Democrats that continues to oppose a nuclear deal with Iran. He is a huge supporter of Israel, defending both its blockade of Gaza, and its settlements. Schumer cosponsored a 2017 bill making it illegal to boycott Israel. He praised Trump for finally moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Schumer has voted for more gun control and more college tuition credits, as well as stricter regulation of Wall Street. He has developed a “Marshall Plan for Teachers” to revamp education in America. Schumer is an avid cyclist. He has never lost an election in his life, and has always sought to be a balanced voice of reason in Congress.

Words of the Week

You can be a Jew and care about Israel and it does not make you any less American. You can be a Jew and lobby for Israel and it does not make you any less American. You can be, all at once, completely Jewish, completely pro-Israel and completely American.
– Chuck Schumer

Jew of the Week: Steven Weinberg

Architect of the Standard Model of Physics

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg (b. 1933) was born in New York to Jewish parents of Romanian and German heritage. He studied at the Bronx High School of Science, then did his undergraduate studies in physics at Cornell. After a brief stint at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, he earned his PhD at Princeton in 1957. Weinberg first did research at Columbia University, then became a professor at UC Berkeley. While there, he started writing one of his most famous books, The Quantum Theory of Fields, as well as the popular textbook Gravitation and Cosmology. In 1966, Weinberg moved back east to teach at Harvard. The following year, as a visiting professor at MIT, he published his new model unifying electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. Part of this was proposing the existence of the Higgs boson (which was finally discovered in 2012). Weinberg’s model built on the work of his former high school classmate and fellow Jewish physicist, Sheldon Glashow. The two shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work (together with Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam). Over the years, Weinberg did research on—and greatly furthered our understanding of—gravity and cosmology, quantum physics and string theory, pions, leptons, and supersymmetry. His work has expanded nearly every aspect of modern physics and is among the most renowned scientists in the world. Weinberg has testified before Congress as an expert witness, and has written many popular articles and science books, among them The First Three Minutes and To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. He has been awarded 11 honourary degrees together with a long list of awards including the National Medal of Science. Weinberg is also a staunch supporter of Israel and has refused to speak at universities that boycott the Jewish State. Today, as he nears his 87th birthday, he continues to write and teach physics at the University of Texas at Austin.

UPDATE: Sadly, Steven Weinberg passed away on July 23rd, 2021.

Words of the Week

Given the history of the attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, boycotting Israel indicates a moral blindness for which it is hard to find any explanation other than antisemitism.
– Steven Weinberg

Jew of the Week: Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders

Bernard Sanders (b. 1941) was born in Brooklyn. He studied political science at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, and was a leader of the Civil Rights Movement on campus, for which he was once arrested. After graduating, he spent some time in a kibbutz in Israel. In 1971, Sanders joined the socialist, anti-war Liberty Union Party. He ran for governor and senator many times, but never won. In 1981, he was elected mayor of Burlington, the largest city in Vermont. Sanders brought Burlington back to life, balancing the city’s budget, rebuilding its downtown area, and making Burlington the first city in US history to finance community housing. Sanders was an extremely popular mayor, and was re-elected for four terms. He then briefly taught political science at Harvard before finally winning a Congressional seat in 1990. This made him the first independent to be elected to the House of Representatives in 40 years. He served as a Representative until 2007, and as a Senator since then. That makes him the longest-serving independent Congressman in American history, as well as the only Congressman to openly identify as a socialist. Sanders opposed both wars in Iraq, the bailout of banks in 2008, the NSA, and the unpopular Patriot Act, along with many other bills aimed at expanding government powers. As a member of the Senate Budget Committee, he has focused on “rebuilding the middle class” and is working towards raising minimum wages and social security. He has also been voted the top senator with regards to environmental action, and won an award for his support of war veterans. Not surprisingly, Sanders has won essentially all of his elections by huge landslides, and holds a very high approval rating, making him among the most popular senators in the US. In 2010, following his incredible 8.5 hour speech to Congress that focused on helping the disadvantaged, many began urging Sanders to run for president. On April 30, 2015, he finally announced his candidacy. True to his beliefs, he rejected large “Super PAC” donations, and said he will finance his campaign through small individual contributions. Within 24 hours of this announcement, he raised $1.5 million through small donations averaging $43. By July 2nd, his campaign already raised $15 million through 400,000 donors (nearly triple the number that Obama had, and in less time). The day before, his speech in Wisconsin was attended by over 10,000 people, making it the largest turnout thus far for any presidential candidate. Among other issues, Sanders’ platform is focused on wealth inequality, “getting big money out of politics”, free university education, Wall Street reform, media reform, and investing in more renewable energy sources. He is now considered a top candidate for winning the presidency, which would make him the first Jewish president in American history.

Words of the Week

A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including 6 million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important.
– Bernie Sanders