Kitty Carlisle Hart: If it weren't for the Jews



(Heliocentrism)

In a  Jewish Journal article, Tom Teicholz reminisced about a “cabaret-style one-woman show” that he had seen Kitty Carlisle Hart perform when she was 94 years young.

As Hart went through her repertoire of songs by “late friends such as Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers…” (all Jews, including Hart herself), Teicholz

couldn’t help but remember this statement that Marlon Brando once made to Jewish talk-show host Larry King:

If it weren’t for the Jews, we wouldn’t have, oddly enough, Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and all the

standards that were written by Jews.  All the songs you love to sing.  Teicholz then goes on to explain that these accomplishments might be traced to the “cantorial tradition” of Judaism.

However, accomplishments of Jews are by no means limited to cantorial compositions.  Lisa Katz reports that “Jews comprise a mere ¼ of 1%... of the world’s population,” yet they have made amazing contributions in the fields of physics (Einstein), psychiatry (Freud), economics (Marx), medicine (Salk), sales (Gimbels), fashion (Levi Strauss), motion pictures (Spielberg), art (Chagall), and poetry (Lazarus) – to name just a few.

Rabbi Pruzansky offers these noteworthy statistics:  From 1900-1950, 14% of the Nobel Prizes in the

sciences or literature were awarded to Jews, but from 1950-2000, an astounding 29%(!) of Nobel Prizes in these fields went to Jews…  He attributes this to the “extraordinarily high value” that Jews have traditionally placed upon learning.  He also points out that certain discoveries that were attributed to others were actually made beforehand by Talmudic scholars.  Among these he lists the telescope, the roundness of the earth, and heliocentrism.   

Hart’s own biography reflects this emphasis upon learning and achievement.  Her German Jewish family

included a former mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana (her grandfather) and a gynecologist (her father).  She herself was educated at the Sorbonne and at the London School of Economics during an era when many women did not graduate from high school.  She then studied acting at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and went on to become a film star, an opera singer, and a TV personality.

Resources

http://www.jewishjournal.com/tommywood/article/heart_to_hart_20050701/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Carlisle

http://rabbipruzansky.com/2011/04/01/jewish-accomplishment/

http://judaism.about.com/od/americanjewry/a/accomplishments.htm

Copyright September 3, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved