Jewish American Heritage Month was first celebrated in May of 2006. The month of May was chosen due to the highly successful celebration of the 350th Anniversary of American Jewish History in May 2004. This is a month that recognizes the more than 350-year history of Jewish contributions to American culture.

Featured:

• Baruj Benacerraf - Baruj Benacerraf was born to Sephardic Jewish parents in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 29, 1920, he grew up in Paris, where his family lived until the threat of Second World War led them to return to Venezuela in the late 1930s. Although his parents hoped Baruj would follow in his father’s footsteps and run the family textile business, he insisted on studying science at Columbia University, where he earned his B.S. in 1942. In 1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Jean Dusset and George Snell for their independent discoveries of “genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions.
• Daveed Diggs - Daveed Diggs is an American actor, rapper and singer. In 2015 he originated the roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the musical “Hamilton,” for which he won both a Grammy Award and Tony Award. Since leaving “Hamilton” in 2016, he has had a recurring role on the television series “Black-ish” and co-starred in the film Wonder. Diggs also wrote, produced, and starred in the 2018 film Blindspotting, which earned him a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. As of 2020, he stars in the television adaptation of “Snowpiercer.” In 2021, he received a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actor in a Supporting Role in a Limited Series or Movie for his performance in the Disney+ live stage recording of “Hamilton” which was released in 2020.
• Judy Heumann - Judith “Judy” Heumann (1947-2023) was an internationally recognized disability rights activist, widely regarded as “the mother” of the Disability Rights Movement. She was a leader in the historic Section 504 Sit-In of 1977 and instrumental in the development and implementation of other disability rights legislation. Judy worked in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, as an advisor at the World Bank, and as a Senior Fellow at the Ford Foundation. Judy’s story is featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution and her book, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist.
• Clara Lemlich Shavelson - As an immigrant garment worker in New York City, Clara Lemlich Shavelson began organizing women into the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1905, forcing male union leaders to include women workers in strikes. At a 1909 strike meeting at the Cooper Union, Shavelson’s fiery speech set off the Uprising of the 20,000, the largest strike by women workers to that date. She later focused on the suffrage movement and organized housewives around food boycotts, including the 1917 kosher meat boycott. In 1929, she helped found what later became the Progressive Women’s Councils, organizing women around rent strikes and food boycotts during the Great Depression. Shavelson continued her activism into her final years, helping the orderlies at her nursing home to organize a union.
• Aly Raisman - Alexandra “Aly” Raisman not only won gold and bronze medals for her individual performances at the 2012 Olympics but also captained the women’s gymnastics team that won the gold medal that year. Raisman began practicing gymnastics in 1996 when she was two years old. She took online classes for her senior year of high school to allow her to focus on training for the Olympics. At the 2012 Olympics, she earned a gold medal for her floor routine and bronze for her balance beam work and helped the US team win the gold medal, making her the most decorated gymnast of the year. Proud of her Jewish heritage, she dedicated her Olympic routine to the memory of the murdered athletes of the 1972 Munich Games.
• Levi Strauss - Levi Strauss brought the world a simple but revolutionary product that today is hard to imagine doing without: blue jeans. Strauss came to the United States from his native Bavaria in 1847, joining his brothers in their wholesale dry goods business in New York City. In 1853 he moved to San Francisco to open a West Coast branch of the family business, which he named for himself: Levi Strauss & Co. In 1872, he was approached by a Reno customer, a Latvian tailor named Jacob Davis, who had a great idea and needed a business partner. The men were awarded a U.S. patent in 1873 and soon began manufacturing blue denim work pants with copper rivets: the world’s first blue jeans. Together they had created a product perfectly suited to the West, and soon miners, farmers and others involved in manual labor were snapping up the sturdy pants, then known as waist overalls.