Lawrence Bush first compiled a list of events from Jewish history for a calendar of the Society for Humanistic Judaism in the late 1970s. The calendar was never published, however, and thirty years later Bush rediscovered the manuscript in his office in Accord, New York. By now, he was editor of the magazine Jewish Currents, and decided to transform the calendar into a series of daily e-mails. Though Jewdayo comprises 365 individual mini-essays (many capsule biographies) it weaves an ideological argument. Secular Jews — a codename for Leftist Jews, basically — transformed the world, creating modern medicine, Hollywood, labor unions, hip ice cream, the teddy bear, mime, the Fillmore East, Barbie, gay pride, modern terrorism, Tootsie Rolls, science fiction, Trotskyism, Bugs Bunny, the Three Stooges, feminism, the atom bomb, punk rock and sexology.* And almost certainly there will be a sequel!
*Dr. Selman Abraham Waksman discovered streptomycin; The CIO was founded by Sidney Hillman, David Dubinsky and Max Zaritsky, among others; Ben Cohen was the cocreator of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream; Morris and Rose Michtom invented the teddy bear in 1902; Marcel Marceau learned mime to help silence the children he was protecting in the French Resistance; Bill Graham (Wolodia Grajonca), who was part of the kindertransport — his mother died in Auschwitz — took over the Fillmore West in 1965; Ruth Handler invented Barbie in 1959; Brenda Howard was known as the "mother of gay pride" for her work commemorating the Stonewall Rebellion; Lehi ("Fighters for the Freedom of Israel"), also called the Stern Gang, killed British soldiers and Arab civilians in 1948, to agitate for the founding of Israel; in 1896 Leo Hirshfield, an Austrian-born confectioner in New York City, created Tootsie Rolls; Hugo Gernsback (for whom the science fiction award the "Hugo" is named) founded the first science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926; Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein; Mel Blank was the voice of Bugs Bunny; Curly Howard (Jerome Lester Horwitz) replaced his brother Shemp in The Three Stooges in 1934 (Moe was also his brother); Letty Cottin Pogrebin founded Ms. magazine; Jewish participants in the Manhattan Project included Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Otto Frisch, Maurice Shapiro, Isidor Rabi; Joey Ramone (Jeffrey Hyman) cofounded The Ramones in 1974; Dr. Ruth lost her parents in the Holocaust, but survived in an orphanage in Switzerland.