Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Of Neiman Marcus, Kinky Friedman and 12 Other Things About (Jewish) Texas

1) 158,505 Jews live in Texas.

2) The state’s first Jewish cemetery was established in Galveston in 1852.

3) Texas’s first Jewish congregation, Congregation Beth Israel, was founded in Houston in 1859.

4) Abraham Neiman and Stanley Marcus founded the Neiman Marcus department store in Dallas in 1907.

5) Olga Bernstein Kohlberg opened Texas’s first public kindergarten in El Paso in 1893.

6) E.M. Kahn and Company, founded in 1872 by Emanuel Kahn, was Dallas’s first air-conditioned store.

7) Born in 1905, Abraham Zapruder, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, was working in the Dal-Tex building across from the street from the Texas School Book Depository on the day he made the infamous “Zapruder film” that documented John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Jack Ruby in a Dallas mug shot after he was charged with killing JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Image by wikipedia

8) Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby (born Jacob Leon Rubenstein), was found guilty of murdering JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963.

9) The Texas-based band Asleep at the Wheel is fronted by Ray Benson, who was born Ray Benson Seifert in Philadelphia.

10) Michael Dell, founder of Dell, Inc. was born to a Jewish family in Dallas in 1965.

11) Joe Straus, the current speaker in Texas’s House of Representatives, is Texas’s first Jewish speaker of the house.

12) Elected mayor of Austin in 1975, Jeffrey Friedman became known as the “hippie mayor.”

13) Adlene Harrison became the first Jewish mayor of Houston in 1976,

14) In 2006, Kinky Friedman ran as an independent candidate for governor of Texas and received 12.6% of the vote.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.