Jewish Corrupters: Och-Ziff Capital Management Group

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Och-Ziff Capital Management Group

Och-Ziff Capital Management Group (NYSE: OZM) is a global hedge fund and alternative asset management firm. As of November 4, 2008, the firm had approximately $28.3 billion of assets under management.[1]

The firm operates multiple investment strategies, including merger arbitrage, convertible arbitrage, equity restructuring, credit and distressed investments, private investments and real estate.[2]

As of September 2008, Och-Ziff employed 150 investment professionals from its headquarters in New York and offices in London, Hong Kong, Bangalore, Tokyo, and Beijing.[2]

History

The firm was founded in 1994 by Daniel Och with financial support from the Ziff family, founders of Ziff Davis Media. William Ziff's sons Dirk, Robert and Daniel manage the family's investments through Ziff Brothers Investments. Prior to founding Och-Ziff, Och was a vice president at Goldman Sachs.

Och-Ziff completed an initial public offering in 2007, listing its shares on the New York Stock Exchange initially at a price of $32.00. The firm was one of the few hedge funds and private equity firms that were able to complete successful IPOs before the onset of the capital markets downturn in 2007. The company's stock has declined significantly since the IPO, reaching its year-to-date low of $4.02 on October 27, 2008.[3] The firm laid off a significant number of professionals in December 2008.

The firm is a significant investor in Cobra Beer.[4]In the UK in April 2008 it purchased 10% of the privately owned Towergate Group for UK£100m implying a market value of only £1bn for that company.

According to New York Times from January 5, 2009, Och-Ziff's asset base shrank by $5.5 billion in December 2008 to $22.1 billion as of Jan. 1, a drop of 20 percent over just one month's time (http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/ ... 5-billion/).

Och-Ziff's Form 10-Q (Notes to Unaudited Consolidated Financial Statement March 31, 2009, filed May 4, 2009) shows a consolidated net loss of $415,978,000.

On July 16, 2009, a piece of concrete fell from the 18th story of Montreal's Marriott Residence Inn, owned by an affiliate of Och-Ziff, killing 33-year-old Léa Guilbeault and injuring her husband, Hani Beitinjaneh as they dined in the ground-floor restaurant.[5] [6]


(Jew'd ) Management

According to Och-Ziff's website [7] the key managers and directors of the company include:

    * Daniel Och - Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, Executive Managing Director
    * David Windreich - Head of U.S. Investing, Director, Executive Managing Director
    * Joel Frank - Chief Financial Officer, Director, Executive Managing Director
    * Michael Cohen - Head of European Investing, Executive Managing Director
    * Zoltan Varga - Head of Asian Investing, Executive Managing Director
    * Harold Kelly - Head of Global Convertible and Derivative Arbitrage, Executive Managing Director
    * Jeffrey Blockinger - Chief Legal Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, Secretary, Managing Director
    * Allan S. Bufferd - Director, Chair of the Compensation Committee
    * William C. Cobb - Director
    * Jerome P. Kenney - Director, Chair of Nominating Corporate Governance and Conflicts Committee
    * Jeffrey R. Leeds - Director, Chair of Audit Committee


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William Bernard Ziff, Jr.

William Bernard Ziff, Jr. (June 24, 1930 – September 9, 2006) was an American publishing executive. His father, William B. Ziff, Sr., was the co-founder of Ziff Davis Inc. and when the elder Ziff died in 1953, Ziff took over the management of the company. After buying out partner Bernard G. Davis, he led Ziff Davis to become the most successful publisher of technology magazines in the 1970s and 1980s. [1]

His three sons, Dirk Ziff, Robert Ziff, and Daniel Ziff, are principals of Ziff Brothers Investments in Manhattan  and were listed on the 2007 Forbes 400 list with a net worth of approximately $3.5 billion dollars [1].
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Jewish Achievement

Written Words©

Jewish written tradition begins with the Torah. Dating from 900 to 800 BC, it was taken to be the Word of God, as dictated to Moses. When written onto a scroll and wound around two wooden poles it became a Torah. When printed in book form, these first five books of the Bible (or Tanach), became the Pentateuch or Chumash. The remaining books of the Bible were reduced to writing and organized as the official canon (list of books) by 90 BC.

The Pharisees are said to be the first to proclaim the Oral Law. These were additional dictates from God to Moses that were not written into the Torah. Instead, they were handed down orally through the generations to supplement the Torah and provide specific guidance for Jews as to their Laws and traditions. For centuries, any effort to put the Oral Law into writing was prohibited. But the scholarly culture of the Pharisees, always open to debate and varying interpretations, led to growing disputes about the Oral Law.

Between 900 BC and 300 AD, the Jews were dispersed three times. First, in 722 BC, the Kingdom of Israel was defeated by the Assyrians and its ten tribes dispersed and lost to history. In 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonians conquered Judah, destroying the First Temple, and exiling the remaining Jews. In 70 AD the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and began what most now think of as the Diaspora or, dispersal of Jews to the four corners of the world.

Seeking to distill the cacophony of ever more diverse and divisive opinions about the so called 'twofold Law," (the Oral Law and the Pentateuch), and preserve Judaism, in the face of the Jewish Diaspora into minority enclaves around the world, the Pharisees developed the Mishnah over the first to third centuries AD. The Mishnah was intended to codify their interpretation of Jewish religion, and with that, the 'Law" and culture of Jews.

Instead, by preserving the complete debates in writing, including the opposing arguments, the Mishnah ultimately encouraged a diversity of informed views. In the process, those words, first from memory and later in writing, also became the vehicle that shaped Judaism and communicated it to fellow Jews over huge distances.

The Pentateuch and remaining books of the Jewish Bible ('Tanach"), the Mishnah, and later Talmud, the Midrash, the writings of Josephus, Hillel and Shammai, Maimonides, Rabbi Joseph Caro, and others were the vital threads which transmitted Jewish religion, law, and culture throughout the nearly 2000 years of Diaspora. They communicated, explained, and inspired. They ensured a cultural continuity which would otherwise almost certainly have been dissipated and swallowed up into the larger cultures surrounding them.

The complimentary requirement was literacy. Education was critical if Jews were to read, understand, discuss, debate, and write about the Word of God, Jewish Law, and Jewish culture. In that sense the deep Jewish commitment to education, so critical to their high achievement, was also a survival skill. Without it, Judaism itself may well have perished.

Jews became proficient with words, with their artistic use, with rhetorical flourish, description, debate, explanation, and analysis. When others let learning die out, as happened through much of the Dark and Middle Ages, Jews preserved their culture and their drive to learn.

Even when circumstances foreclosed literacy from them, as occurred in much of Eastern Europe before the Jewish emancipation, Jews continued to place great value on words and education. The rabbi was typically the most scholarly man in each community. This high esteem for learning was later demonstrated in the voracious demand for education by Eastern European Jews arriving in the United States between 1880 and 1924.
The Nobel Prize for Literature

If the Nobel Prize for Physics evidences consistently superb selections of those whose work has been the most important in that field over the last 100 years, the Nobel Prize for Literature holds much less esteem.

As Burton Feldman noted in his Book, The Nobel Prize, the Literature judges 'blew it" until the later years of the Twentieth-century. One might think they were nominating candidates for a literary 'witness protection program," making awards to authors such as: Romain Rolland, Frederic Mistral, Carl Spitteler, John Galsworthy, Grazia Deledda and J. V. Jensen. These six are but the tip of a large iceberg of writers whose works are unread, out of print and otherwise lost, despite the temporary accolade of a Nobel. In those same 50 years or so, the judges managed to miss: Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Henry James, Henrick Ibsen, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Wolf, Theodore Dreiser, George Santanaya, and Willa Cather. All have survived, regarded as great writers despite having missed the December 10th awards dinner in Stockholm.

The judges' selections improved after World War II, though still leaving a good deal to be desired. They got Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Boris Pasternak, but missed Robert Frost, W.H.Auden, Bertold Brecht, and Evelyn Waugh.

In the last 30 years or so, they seem to have gotten on track. Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, Naguib Mahfouz, and Samuel Becket all seem excellent selections as writers whose work deserves the award, and who will be read long after their titles drop from the best seller lists.

The point is that over the full one hundred plus years, the Nobel for Literature cannot be taken as the consistent gold standard for literary quality. It is an indicator of greatness, but not nearly as much so as the Nobels for Physics, Chemistry and Physiology and Medicine.

Here, though, the French can claim to lead the pack. Through 2004, they have picked up twelve of the 101 Nobels versus nine for the United States, eight for Britain, seven for Germany and six each for Italy and Sweden. Unfortunately for the French, half the twelve were earned between 1901 and 1939, and, since 1975, they have earned only one, while Americans have picked up three, and the English, Italians and Spanish two each. Alors!

How have the Jews done? They have earned twelve (12 percent) of the 101 Nobels. Jewish Laureates shown on Exhibit 11a include: Elfriede Jelinek (2004), whose father was Jewish, Imre Kertesz (2002), Nadine Gordimer (1991), Joseph Brodsky (1987) Elias Canetti (1981) Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) Saul Bellow (1976) Samuel Agnon and Nelly Sachs (1966), Boris Pasternak (1958), Henri Bergeson (1927) and Paul Heyse (1910). With twelve laureates, Jews tie the French, and surpass the United States by three. When one considers there are 61 million French, 296 million Americans, and 12 to 15 million Jews, the overachievement becomes clear.

Two further points. None of the Jewish Laureates were born in the United States and only three (Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Joseph Brodsky) emigrated. None of the other Jewish winners is American. This contrasts with the sciences where most Jewish Laureates were born in, or now reside in the United States. Second, the incidence of Jewish laureates is greatest in the years after 1975, when the evidence suggests, judging quality was best. Since then, Americans have won three Nobels, Italians, British, and Spanish two each, the French one, and the Jews seven.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Jewish Fiction Authors

An American Counterpart to the Nobel Prize for Literature is the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which is not limited to American authors). It was created from an endowment established by Joseph Pulitzer, an early twentieth century Jewish journalist, who also endowed the Columbia School of Journalism.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded seventy-eight times between 1918 and 2004 (Exhibit 11b). Jews have won seven (9 percent) of those Pulitzers: Edna Ferber in 1925, Herman Wouk in 1952, Bernard Malamud in 1967, Saul Bellow in 1976, Norman Mailer in 1980, Philip Roth in 1998, and Michael Chabon in 2001.

A sense for the pivotal literary role of Jews in fiction writing can be gleaned from browsing the following table of selected 'Major" and 'Best Selling" Jewish Novelists. The list does not attempt to be comprehensive, but it does provide a sense for the large number and importance of Jewish novelists.

Major Novelists:

    * Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Nobel w/Nelly Sachs)
    * Nelson Algren (National Book Award)
    * Isaac Asimov
    * Isaac Emanuilovich Babel
    * Henri Bergeson (Nobel)
    * Saul Bellow (Nobel & Pulitzer)
    * Judy Blume
    * Harold Brodkey
    * Joseph Brodsky (Nobel & Poet Laureate)
    * Anita Brookner (Booker Prize)
    * Elias Cannetti (Nobel)
    * Michael Chabon (Pulitzer)
    * Paddy Chayefsky (Laurel Award & Oscar)
    * E. L. Doctrow (Pulitzer)
    * Edna Ferber (Pulitzer)
    * Herbert Gold
    * Nadine Gordimer (Nobel)
    * Joseph Heller
    * Mark Helprin
    * Paul Heyse (Nobel)
    * Franz Kafka
    * Imre Kertesz (Nobel))
    * Jamaica Kincaid (a convert)
    * Carlo Levi
    * Primo Levi
    * Norman Mailer (Pultizer)
    * Bernard Malamud (Pulitzer)
    * Boris Pasternak (Nobel)
    * Chaim Potok
    * Marcel Proust
    * Ayn Rand
    * Mordechai Richler
    * Henry Roth
    * Philip Roth (National Book Award & Pulitzer)
    * Nelly Sachs (Nobel with Agnon)
    * J. D. Salinger
    * Maurice Sendak
    * Bud Schulberg
    * Isaac Bashevis Singer (Nobel)
    * Susan Sontag
    * Leon Uris
    * Jerome Weidman (Pulitzer)
    * Nathanael West
    * Elie Wiesel (Nobel)
    * Tobias Wolf (LA Times Book Award)
    * Herman Wouk (Pulitzer)

Best Selling Novelists:

    * Jackie Collins
    * Irwin Shaw
    * Howard
    * FastSidney
    * Sheldon
    * Erica Jong
    * Danielle Steele
    * Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby)
    * Irving Stone
    * Judith Krantz
    * Jacquilin Susan
    * Harold Robbins
    * Scott Thurow
    * Erich Segal
    * Irving Wallace

One need not be a literary sophisticate to appreciate the debt owed to those who gave us the likes of Yossarian, Holden Caufield, Dr Zhivago, Captain Quegg, John Galt, 'The Natural," and countless other characters and stories that taught so much and entertained so well.
The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and Jewish Poets

Jews have also earned a disproportionate number of Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry since that Award's inception in 1919. As shown in Exhibit 11c, of the eighty-three Prizes, Jews have won five (6 percent). Among the important Jewish poets listed below, the five Pulitzers Prize winners are highlighted.

Major Jewish Poets

    * Allen Ginsberg
    * Howard Nemberov (Pulitzer and Poet Laureate)H
    * einrich Heine
    * Robert Pinsky (Poet Laureate)
    * Maxine Winokur Kumin (Pulitzer)
    * Adrienne Rich
    * Stanley Kunitz (Pulitzer 1958)
    * Karl Jay Shapiro (Pulitzer)
    * Emma Lazarus
    * Gertrude Stein
    * Philip Levine (Pulitzer)

A nation of emigrants, Since 1883 new arrivals have been greeted by the words of Emma Lazarus:

    '. . . Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breath free, The wretched refuse of you teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Dramatists and Jewish Playwrights and Screenwriters

The Tony Awards, Pulitzers, and Oscars have categories to recognize superb playwrights and screenwriters. While those artists might also be covered in chapters devoted to the performing arts or Hollywood, their skills are typically first expressed in writing. That, and the fact they also frequently display their talent in other written forms, such as novels, suggests treatment here is appropriate.

Jews have won 15.5 (21 percent) of the seventy-four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama awarded since 1917 (Exhibit 11d). In Tony's the numbers are even more striking (20.5 of the fifty-eight awards, or 35.3 percent) (Exhibit 11e). Among prominent Jewish playwrights and screenwriters are:

Playwrights/Screenwriters:

    * George Axelrod
    * Abe Burrows (Tony & Pulitzer)
    * Eve Ensler
    * William Goldman (Oscars)
    * James Goldman (Oscars)
    * Moss Hart
    * Lillian Hellman
    * George S. Kaufman
    * Sidney Kingsley (Pulitzer)
    * Tony Kushner (Pulitzer)
    * David Mamet (Pultizer)
    * Donald Margulies (Pulitzer)
    * Arthur Miller
    * Donald Margulies (Pulitzer)
    * Clifford Odets
    * Elmer Rice (Pulitzer)
    * Howard Sackler (Pulitzer)
    * Peter Shaffer (Tonys & Oscars)
    * Rod Serling
    * Neil Simon
    * Tom Stoppard (Tonys & Oscars)
    * Alfred Uhry (Pultizer)
    * Wendy Wasserstein
    * Jerome Weidman (Pulitzer)

Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, Driving Miss Daisy, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Odd Couple, and Amadeus, are just a few of the dramas that helped shape the American stage over the Twentieth-century.
Humorists

In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten noted 'In nothing is Jewish psychology so vividly revealed as in Jewish jokes." Plaintive, self critical, anxious, and resigned are just a few of the words used to characterize the unique aspects of Jewish humor. For many it was their only antidote to terror. 'Humor," Rosten said, 'also serves the afflicted as compensation for suffering, a token victory of brain over fear." It can encourage a positive outlook even when so much else is going wrong.

If comedians perform mostly on stage or television, humorists more often write (or cartoon) for newspapers and books. A few of the notable Jewish humorists include:

Humorists and the Like:

    * Mel Blanc (Voice of a thousand characters)
    * Art Buchwald (Humor columnist)
    * Herb Caen (SF Columnist)
    * Al Cap (Li'l Abner)
    * Max Fleisher (Popeye & Betty Boop)
    * Isadore 'Fritz" Freleng (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc.)
    * Rube Goldberg (Goofy inventions)
    * Bob Kane (Batman)
    * Stan Lee (Spiderman & The Hulk)
    * Dorthy Parker (Algonquin Round Table)
    * S. J. Perlman
    * Max Shulman
    * Joe Shuster & Jerry Siegel (Superman)
    * Shel Silverstein
    * William Steig
    * Calvin Trillin

Critics, Society and Advice Columnists

From explaining good manners to suggesting which movies are worth seeing, even educating us about sex, Jews are among America's foremost critics and advice columnists. God knows how many family problems have been solved, Hollywood careers made or lost, and crises averted because of advice proffered by Jewish critics, gossip, or advice columnists:

Critics, Society and Advice Columnists:

    * Clive Barnes
    * Judith Christ
    * Neal Gabbler
    * Pauline Kael
    * Sheilah Graham
    * Jeffrey Lyons
    * Leonard Maltin
    * Michael Medved
    * Gerald Nachman
    * Gene Shalit
    * Gene Siskel
    * Abigail (Abbey) Van Buren
    * Ann Landers
    * Louella Parsons
    * Walter Winchell
    * Sylvia Porter
    * Ruth Westheimer

Non Fiction, Journalists, Opinion/Political Columnists and Religious Writers

If Jews have done well as novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, humorists, critics and advisors, they have positively shined as non-fiction authors, opinion/political columnists, and religion writers. Their Pulitzer Prizes for Nonfiction and for International Reporting tell the story. Of the forty-five Pulitzers for Nonfiction from 1962 to 2004, at least 12.5 (some were shared) went to Jews (Exhibit 11f). This, 27.8 percent of the total, is more than ten times what one would expect. Similarly, of the fifty-three Pulitzers for International Reporting, at least 11.3 (21.3 percent) went to Jews, again roughly ten times their proportion in the population (Exhibit 11g). In glancing through the following lists, which include prominent, but certainly not all significant Jewish writers in these fields, one is struck by the familiar names:

Non-fiction authors:

    * Mitch Albom
    * Shana Alexander
    * Natalie Angier
    * A Scott Berg (Pulitzer)
    * Alan Bloom
    * Harold Bloom
    * Daniel J. Boorstin
    * Robert Caro (Pulitzer)
    * Ron Chernow
    * Noam Chomsky
    * Herbert Cohen
    * Alex Comfort
    * Ariel Durant (Pulitzer)
    * Dr. Dean Edell
    * Shelby Foote
    * Anne Frank
    * Alfred Fried (NOBEL)
    * Josh Friedman (Pulitzer)
    * Martin Gilbert
    * Steven Jay Gould
    * David Halberstam (Pulitzer)
    * Richard Hofstadter (Pulitzer)
    * Tony Horwitz (Pultizer)
    * Xavier Hollander
    * Irving Howe
    * Flavius Josephus
    * Sebastian Junger
    * Justin Kaplan (Pulitzer)
    * Robert Kaplan
    * Arthur Koestler
    * Michael Korda
    * Roger Lowenstein?
    * Jonathan Miller
    * Dr. Sheldon Nuland
    * David Remmick
    * Tina Rosenberg (Pultizer)
    * Leo Rosten
    * Oliver Sacks
    * Carl Sagan
    * Stacy Schiff (Pulitzer)
    * Julian Simon
    * Sidney Shanberg
    * Art Spiegelman (Pulitzer)
    * Studs Terkel
    * Jacobo Timmerman
    * Lionel Trilling
    * Alvin Toffler
    * Barbara Tuchman (Pulitzers - 2)
    * Rebecca Walker (Pulitzer)
    * Naomi Wolf

Journalists:

    * Elie Abel
    * Seymour Hersh
    * Carl Bernstein
    * Walter Lippman
    * Phil Bronstein
    * Daniel Pearl
    * Matt Drudge
    * A. M. Rosenthal
    * Max Frankel
    * Sidney Schanberg
    * Linda Greenhouse

Opinion Commentators & Political Writers:

    * Saul Alinsky
    * Paul Krugman
    * David Broder
    * Max Lerner
    * David Brooks
    * Michael Lerner
    * Elizabeth Drew
    * Andrea Dworkin
    * Anthony Lewis
    * Ellen Goodman
    * Flora Lewis
    * Howard Fineman
    * Walter Lippmann
    * Ari Fleischer
    * Seymour Martin Lipset
    * Glen Frankel (Pulitzer)
    * Robert Novack
    * Max Frankel
    * Norman Orenstein
    * Al Franken
    * Norman Podhoretz
    * Betty Friedan
    * Frank Rich
    * Tom Friedman
    * Daniel Schorr
    * David Frum
    * William Safire
    * David Horowitz
    * Gloria Steinem
    * Michael Kinsley
    * Izzy Stone
    * Joe Klein
    * Ben Wattenberg
    * Charles Krauthammer (Pulitzer)
    * Theodore (Teddy) White (Pulitzer)
    * William Kristol
    * Mortimer Zuckerman
    * Irving Kristol

Prominent Religious Writers and Spokesmen:

    * Martin Buber
    * Rabbi Harold Kushner
    * Moses
    * Maimonides
    * St. Paul
    * Dennis Prager
    * Rabbi Telushkin

Newspapers

Among great U.S. newspapers, perhaps the three most prominent are: The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. For many, they are authoritative sources of solid news and opinion and reading at least two of them, if not all three, is a daily routine. All three also share the distinction of having been started by non-Jews, but achieving their greatest prominence under Jewish ownership or management.

Adolph Simon Ochs, the son of Jewish emigrants, began as 'printers devil" when he was fourteen. By the time he was twenty, he had founded one Chattanooga newspaper and purchased control of a second. He combined them turning The Chattanooga Times into one of the South's best newspapers.

In 1896, The New York Times was in a losing battle with sensationalizing 'yellow journalists" whose stories ran long on hyperbole and short on facts. Ochs bought the failing Times, announcing his commitment to objective, factually based news reporting. His slogan, 'All the News That's Fit to Print," remains atop the masthead. Ochs dropped the newsstand price to a penny and turned the New York Times from a money loser into a viable, strong competitor.

He also created a family succession as strong as the paper itself. In 1935, Arthur Hays Sulzberger succeeded his father-in-law, Ochs, and was, in turn, briefly succeeded briefly by his son-in-law, Orvil Dreyfus. Dreyfus died after only a month to be replaced by 37 year old Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, a grandson of Adolph Simon Ochs. Sulzberger remained in charge until 1992 when his forty year old son, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., took over. Thirteen years later, Sulzberger, Jr. remains Publisher of what most people consider, America's 'Newspaper of Record."

In 1933, Eugene Isaac Meyer bought the Washington Post for $825,000 at a bankruptcy auction. Started in 1877 by non-Jew, Stilson Hutchins, the Post had fallen on hard times under its second owners, the McLean family, (also not Jewish). Meyer was already an immensely successful financier who had parlayed $600, earned from his father when he stopped smoking, into $50,000 shortly after graduating from Yale. Meyer went on to make an estimated $60 million fortune on Wall Street before age forty.

He was as talented an executive as he was a financier, and in 1918, Woodrow Wilson recruited him to head the War Finance Corporation. In 1927, Calvin Coolidge brought him in to clean up the Federal Farm Loan Board, Herbert Hoover appointed him Governor of the Federal Reserve Board in 1930, and in 1946, Harry Truman named him as the first President of what is now the World Bank (a post he disliked so much he resigned after six months).

Over time, Meyer turned the Post around, making it one of the foremost American newspapers. Philip L. Graham, his son-in-law, joined him in the business taking on ever increasing responsibility as they updated production facilities, acquired television stations, and bought out rivals. When Meyer died in 1959, Graham assumed complete control and acquired Newsweek.

Graham's 1963 suicide left his widow, and Meyer's daughter, Katherine Meyer Graham, in charge. Despite a self-effacing description of herself as a 'housewife," Katherine Graham's handling of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the 1975 Pressman's Union strike, and numerous acquisitions, not only made the Post into the Nations' second most prominent newspaper, it also generated a 3,315 percent increase in the value of Washington Post Group stock between 1971, when she took the Company public, and 1991 when she stepped down.

She turned the job over to her son, Donald who has proven equally capable. Fortune Magazine's Andy Server has called Graham: 'Understated, underrated, and one hell of a CEO." Today, the Washington Post Group is still controlled by the family. Among its properties, the Washington Post Group includes: the Post, The Everett Herald, Newsweek magazine, a number of community and military newspapers and business publications, six network affiliated television stations, Cable One, (serving much of the Midwest and Northwest), Newsweek Productions, Kaplan Educational Centers, and numerous other ventures.

Peter Kann did not found Dow Jones or The Wall Street Journal, but after joining the Journal in 1963, he rose to become its Associate Publisher in 1980, and Publisher and the Editorial Director of Dow Jones in 1989. Since 1991, he has been Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Dow Jones, while his wife, non-Jew(?), Karen Elliot House, serves as Publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Paul Julius Reuter (nee, Israel Beer Josaphat, and later Joseph Josaphat), founded Reuters in London and built it into one of the world's first news agencies. In 1848, he established a carrier pigeon service linking Aachen, Germany with Brussels, filling a gap in the telegraph lines operating between Berlin and Paris. Three years later, he started Reuters, to provide a telegram service for businesses operating near the London Stock Exchange. Later, he shifted its focus to providing news and information for those who had no reporters at distant locations where news was being made. His first hot exclusive came when he published the 1859 speech of the King of Sardinia, anticipating the 'War of Italian Liberation.' Later, Reuters scooped everyone once more with exclusive European reporting of Lincoln's assassination. Though born to a rabbi, Reuters changed his name and converted to become Lutheran on November 16, 1845, just a week before marrying Mary Elizabeth Clementine Magnus. He built Reuters into one of the world's foremost international press agencies before retiring in 1878 and turning the business over to his son, Herbert. In 1925, Great Britain's Press Association bought majority control of Reuters. Over the next few years, its ownership shifted to its subscribing newspapers until 1984, when it was taken public on the London Stock Exchange.

Joseph Pulitzer emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1864 when he was 17. He immediately joined the Union Army, and at war's end, moved to St. Louis where, he took up politics and journalism. First, he won a seat in the Missouri legislature and, in 1878, he bought the St. Louis Dispatch and The Post. He merged the two and, by 1883, expanded, buying the New York World. At the time, the Gentile owned, Hearst papers, pioneered what became known as 'yellow journalism," promoting sensationalizing causes such as the Spanish-American War. Pulitzer, a Hearst competitor, joined the 'sensationalist" wave. He published exposes of corruption, promoted crusading investigative reporting, and carried out shameless self promotion. This was 'yellow journalism" Ochs disdained when he took control of The New York Times. Despite his history of flashy publications, when Pulitzer died in 1911, his estate endowed the country's first Journalism school at Columbia University as well as the now famous Pulitzer Prizes. Joseph Pulitzer II took control when his father died and he was succeeded, in 1955, by Joseph Pulitzer III. One hundred twenty five years since the founding, Michael E. Pulitzer continues as Chairman of the Board of Pulitzer, Inc., and the family continues to control the company that publishes the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Arizona Daily Star, twelve other daily, and sixty five weekly newspapers.
Magazines and Other Publications

Samuel Irving Newhouse (nee Solomon Neuhaus) was a seventeen year old clerk for Judge Hyman Lazarus in 1911 when Lazarus took control of the money losing Bayonne Times. He assigned Newhouse the job of turning the paper around, which he did in one year. Four years later, Newhouse was being paid a remarkable (for the time) $30,000 a year. He began buying newspapers in 1922, starting with the Staten Island Advance. He made it profitable and parlayed it into a family of small New York and New Jersey newspapers. In 1950, he acquired the Portland Oregonian and later added the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the New Orleans Times Picayune and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. His 1959 acquisition of Conde Nast took him into magazines, radio, television stations and cable television channels.

By 1979, when he died, he had created the third largest U.S. media chain. Along the way, he donated $15 million to establish the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Today, his sons, Samuel I Jr. and Donald control Newhouse as a private company whose annual sales exceed $5 billion. It publishes twenty-five daily newspapers, sixty-one magazines including: Parade Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Architectural Digest, Bon Appetit, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue and, Golf Digest. Its Fairchild subsidiary publishes eighteen trade magazines such as: Home Furnishings News, Women's Wear Daily, and Supermarket News.

Moses Annenberg, an East Prussian emigrant, was a salesman and later circulation manager for the Hearst organization before he took control of The Daily Racing Form and The Philadelphia Inquirer. When he died in 1942, after serving three years in jail for tax evasion and bribery, his holding company, Triangle Corporation, was deeply in debt. His 32 year old son, Walter, took on the job of turning it around. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, in the process building Triangle into the publisher of TV Guide, and Seventeen.

Annenberg was also a savvy investor in the Pennsylvania Railroad and Campbell Soup Company. He sold The Philadelphia Inquirer to Knight-Ridder in 1970 and everything else to Rupert Murdoch in 1988, proclaiming he would devote the rest of his life to philanthropy and public service. Along the way, Annenberg also served as Ambassador to The United Kingdom and his wife was chief of Protocol for President Ronald Regan.

His donation of impressionist paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of New York is valued at more than $1 billion. He also established the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, and a counterpart journalism school at the University of Southern California. He was a major supporter of the United Negro College Fund, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the state of Israel, and the rebuilding of black churches torched by arsonists. At his death in 1994, his Annenberg Foundation was worth $1.6 billion. It was one of the Country's wealthiest charitable foundations and that year, it announced plans to donate $500 million to reform of public schools.

William Bernard Ziff and Bernard G. Davis created Ziff Davis in 1927. They started with Ziff's, a humor magazine, and later added other publications to build a family of magazines. When Ziff died in 1953, his son, William, Jr. took over, bought out Davis and expanded, adding Car & Driver, Yachting, Popular Mechanics, Popular Photography, Stereo Review, Computer Gaming World, and later PC Magazine.

In 1982, diagnosed with prostate cancer William, Jr. began selling off most of the magazines. Expecting to succumb to cancer, he established a family trust, with his three sons as beneficiaries. Surprisingly, he regained his health, stepped back into the business, and built an even more valuable enterprise. It became the dominant force in computer publications. In 1993, Ziff retired once more and the next year, he and his sons sold 95 percent of the remaining business to a leveraged buyout firm. The $1.4 billion in proceeds established an investment firm which continues to this day - along with the family's active support of conservation.

Hugo Gernsback is an unfamiliar name for most of us. Born in Luxembourg in 1884, he immigrated to the United States in 1904, became an inventor (dry batteries), a writer (Ralph 124C 41+), and the publisher of numerous magazines. But it was his creation of the first science fiction magazines that illustrated his entrepreneurial talent. He founded Modern Electronics magazine, the world's first radio magazine in 1908, Science and Invention in 1920 (covering hard science while debunking astrology, medical quackery, perpetual motion machines and spiritualism), and Amazing Stories, in 1926. Later, he added six more science fiction titles. His pioneering role in science fiction is memorialized today in the annual 'Hugo" award for the best science fiction novel.
Books

In book publishing, the story is much the same.

Bennett Cerf and his friend, Donald Klopfer, bought Modern Library, in 1925, from a company Cerf had joined only a few years before, after earning a degree in journalism from Columbia. Though Modern Library was focused on publishing 'the world's best books", Cerf and Klopfer decided they would also 'publish a few books on the side at random." A renaissance man, Cerf was a columnist, anthologist, author, lecturer, radio show host, joke collector, panelist (on the 'What's My Line?" television show,) and a perennial judge of the 'Miss America Pageant." His talent for finding talented authors, charming them, and working with them as they wrote and he published their books, built one of the strongest stables of twentieth century authors. Among them were: William Faulkner, James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Isak Dinesen, Edgar Snow, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, James Michener, Truman Capote, William Styron, Gertrude Stein, Robinson Jeffers, and Theodor Seuss Geisel. Cerf also built Random House by creating American College Dictionary. He took Random House public in 1957, and then acquired other publishers such as Alfred A. Knopf, L.W. Singer and Pantheon Books. In 1965, Cerf sold Random House to General David Sarnoff's Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Alfred Knopf was considered something of a Jewish pioneer in 1912 when he entered publishing at the age of twenty. He had fallen in love with publishing while traveling in Europe and decided to pursue it rather than becoming an attorney, as his father had hoped. At the time, publishing was said to be 'overwhelmingly Gentile and conservative," Despite their difference of opinion, Knopf's father helped him get a junior accountant job at Doubleday.

In 1915 after his stint at Doubleday and one other firm, and with strong encouragement from Blanche Wolf, his fiance, he invested a $5,000 stake in starting Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Over time, he built a cadre of great writers including: Willa Cather, Max Eastman, Kahil Gibran, Ezra Pound Thomas Mann, H.L. Mencken, Alfred Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, and Julian Huxley. Ultimately, after adding Vintage Books to give Knopf a paperback imprint, their son Pat, left the firm in 1959 to establish Athenaeum, his own publishing firm. Shortly thereafter, in April 1960, Knopf sold out to Random House, where his relationship with Bennett Cerf allowed him the autonomy he wanted.

Harry Scherman wanted to be a writer. He left Wharton, moved to New York and tried his hand at short stories and plays, while earning his living as a journalist at a Jewish newspaper. Ultimately, he gave up creative writing to become a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson, Ruthrauff and Ryan, and other ad agencies.

Maxwell Sackheim, a Russian Jewish emigrant, worked with Sherman at J Walter Thompson and Ruthrauff and Ryan. In 1914, the two created a literary promotion partnership. They started Little Leather Library, offering a set of thirty classic books, bound in imitation leather and sold via direct mail for $2.98. In 1916, Scherman convinced Whitman Candy Company to include small copies of Shakespeare's plays with its packaged candy. Their most important innovation, however, was their 1926 formation of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Scherman was credited with the idea of recruiting a prominent Board of Judges (Clifton Fadiman, John Marquand, Haywood Broun, and others) to provide credibility for the monthly book selections. For his part, Sackheim, conceived the so called 'Negative Option" plan sending a detailed description of each book two weeks in advance, and thus giving 'members" a choice to 'opt out" by returning a card to signal that decision. Many members, of course, did not return the card and thus, a large, stable flow of books went out each month. Within two years, the Club had 100,000 members.

Along the way, Scherman & Sackheim brought in publisher, Robert K. Haas, as a co-founder. Unlike Scherman and Sackheim, Haas had noteworthy credentials as a publisher and he continued that career long after he left Book-of-the-Month Club. (His own company, Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Publishers, was merged into Random House in 1936.) The Book-of-the-Month Club would ultimately become an icon of American taste, helping middle class Americans know about and read important books when they were first issued. Scherman's family retained control of the Club until 1977 when they sold it to Time-Life. Along the way, Scherman also created a family foundation which has since made charitable grants of more than $100 million.

Richard Leo Simon and Max Lincoln Schuster founded Simon & Schuster in 1924. Leon Shimkin, joined them that first year and was soon an equal partner, playing a critical role for more than fifty years. Simon, Schuster and Shimkin pioneered: crossword puzzle books (1924), the policy of allowing bookstores to return unsold books (1925), mass market paperbacks (their 1939 introduction of Pocket Books) and 'instant books" (the first, about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was published six days after his death). They were known for aggressive marketing, often spending multiples of what competitors did to promote their titles.

In 1944, they sold the business to Marshall Field, operating it with complete autonomy until 1957, when Field died and they promptly bought it back. Simon retired in 1956, and Schuster and Shimkin continued on together until 1966 when Schuster retired and Shimkin bought his shares. Shimkin then merged Simon & Schuster into his already public Pocket Book Company and continued expanding the business until he sold it to Charles Bluhdorn's Gulf+Western in 1975. Within Gulf+Western, Simon & Schuster continued to expand, acquiring 60 additional publishers including Prentice-Hall. Today, Simon and Schuster operates as part of Sumner Redstone's Viacom.

Roger Straus never needed to work. He came from two very wealthy and prominent families. His grandfather was Oscar Straus of the R H Macy clan and his mother was Gladys Guggenheim. Nonetheless, he built one America's foremost late twentieth century publishing firms. In 1945, with partner John Farrar, he started Farrar, Straus & Company in New York.

After a few lean years (and numerous changes in the partners and the firm's name) Farrar and Straus recruited editor-in-chief, Robert Giroux in 1955. In the process, they adopted the name that has lasted ever since. Before Giroux, the firm had published Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli (1947), Gayelord Hauser's Look Younger, Live Longer, and other authors such as: Edmund Wilson, Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, and Robert Graves. Giroux brought along authors from Harcourt Brace including: T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Conner, Bernard Malamud, and fourteen more. Later, through acquisitions and clever marketing, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Lowell, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nadine Gordimer, and Scott Thurow joined this remarkable talent pool. Measures of the firm's quality and strength include its seven Pulitzer Prize winning books and its twenty-one Nobel laureate authors. Farrar retired in 1972 and passed away two years later, but Strauss, always the dominant partner, kept building the firm. Despite a wave of mergers and takeovers, Straus carried on as an independent publishing house until he became convinced his son would never take over the firm. He then sold it, in 1994, to the German firm, Von Holtzbrinck. Even with that sale however, Straus demanded, and got, autonomy within that huge publisher. Straus passed away in mid-2004 and the future of Farrar, Straus & Giroux is unclear.

Arthur Frommer made himself into a one man travel publishing conglomerate over a fifty year period. Graduating with a Yale law degree, he joined Army Intelligence during the Korean War and was posted to Germany. Late in his enlistment, he created a travel guide for his fellow servicemen and, in 1956, he revised it, creating a civilian version which he published as Europe on $5 a Day. Back in the United States, Frommer practiced law for six years, all the while spending nights, weekends, and vacations creating new travel books covering other destinations such as: Japan on $5 a Day, New York on $5 a Day, and many more. He built the series over a period of years before selling it. It has since gone through various publishing hands including MacMillan U.S.A. and IDG (the 'For Dummies" publishers). Today, it is part of John Wiley & Sons.

In 1961, Frommer created a wholesale travel operator, Arthur Frommer International, Inc., and was its Chairman and president for twenty years.

He has continued to publish new travel books, has a weekly radio program on CBS, appears regularly on such television programs as Oprah, and NBC's Today, writes a syndicated weekly travel column, operates an Internet site HYPERLINK "http://www.frommer.com" www.frommer.com and most recently, produced a bi-monthly consumer travel magazine, Arthur Frommer's BUDGET TRAVEL. It quickly grew to 350,000 circulation before Frommer sold it to Newsweek, Inc. in 2000, together with his syndicated column, monthly newsletter and the Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel Club.

Jacob Kay Lasser began writing his tax guides in 1939. He published books on taxes, financial planning, business record keeping and money management continuously until he died in 1954. Even today, J.K. Lasser Tax Guides are consistently ranked among the best available. Along the way, his wife, Terese, who helped him publish his first edition of Your Income Tax, published her own book, Reach to Recovery, in 1952 on breast cancer survival. She created the Reach to Recovery program, now operated by the American Cancer Society in 44 countries. She is memorialized in their annual Terese Lasser Award. J.K. Lasser tax publications have gone through many hands since Lasser's death in 1954 including Prentice Hall, MacMillan USA, Simon & Schuster and IDG before becoming part of John Wiley in 1999.

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