In a company where the top jobs frequently go to graduates of Midwestern engineering schools — or to heirs of the founding family — Mark Fields’s rise to the top of Ford Motor Co. was hardly a sure thing. But then, in an earlier era, when the Fields family name was Finkelman and the name…
What possessed a small-town Jewish immigrant family to defy the demands of the anti-Semitic corporate owner of their car dealership franchise? And not just any corporate owner, but Henry Ford Sr. In 1916, my grandfather, Max Barish, along with his brothers and father, opened a Ford dealership in Sioux City, Iowa. The business provided them…
● Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes By John Rosengren New American Library, 400 pages, $26.95 On October 6, 1965, Sandy Koufax sat out the first game of the World Series in observance of Yom Kippur. By putting the holiest day of his faith before the most important event of the most popular sport in…
On Monday, Ned Beauman wrote about Oscar Panizza. His debut novel, “Boxer, Beetle” (Bloomsbury), is now available. His posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: Henry Ford might be the most…
The discovery and restoration of the long-forgotten film “Breaking Home Ties” is the latest revelatory moment in classic American Jewish cinema. The Boston-based National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) reported this week that the 1922 silent film will be available for screening for general audiences. The only surviving print of “Breaking Home Ties” was discovered…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Right on the heels of last week’s post about the relationship of Jews and capitalism comes this cold dose of historical reality: Henry Ford’s claim that the Jews controlled the Federal Reserve Board. I had known, of course, that the automobile tycoon was no friend of the Jews, but…
Today, the name of pioneering advertising executive Albert Lasker is mostly associated with the Lasker Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports medical research. But as a forthcoming biography by Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz points out, Lasker himself was more likely to self-identify as a “propagandist” than as a philanthropist. “The Man Who Sold America:…
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