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1900 International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union is founded    
1903   Oscar Straus is appointed Secretary of Labor and Commerce, the first Jew to hold a Cabinet position Kishinev massacre increases Jewish exodus from Russia
1905     Settlers of the Second Aliyah arrive in Palestine, determined to create a Jewish working class
1906   American Jewish Committee is founded to safeguard Jewish rights internationally  
1907   Jacob H. Schiff sponsors Galveston Experiment

Physicist Albert A. Michelson is the first American Jew to win the Nobel Prize

  
1909 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded    
1912 United States abrogates treaty of 1832 with Russia because of Russia's refusal to honor passports of Jewish Americans Henrietta Szold founds Hadassah, the Women's Zionest Organization  
1913 Federal Reserve Act revises the nation's banking system Anarchist Emma Goldman is deported

Trial of Leo Frank in Atlanta leads to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods founded in Cincinnati

 Mendel Beilis, target of a blood libel, is tried in Kiev
1914 Panama Canal is completed Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for the Relief of Jewish War Sufferers is established During First World War, Russian forces in retreat drive 600,000 Jews from their homes
1916   Louis Dembitz Brandeis is the first Jew appointed to the Supreme Court  
1917 United States enters World War I


 

 National Jewish Welfare Board is founded Balfour Declaration conveys British support for Jewish national homeland

Jews support revolution as solution to Russian oppression
1918   American Jewish Congress is founded  
1919 Constitutional Amendment grants women the right to vote

President Woodrow Wilson signs Treaty of Versailles, ending World War I

    
1921 Felix Frankfurter seeks justice for anarchists Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, convicted of murder in the wake of "Red Scare"    
1922   Mordecai M. Kaplan founds the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the cradle of the Reconstructionist movement  
1924 Immigration Act severely limits immigration    
1925   Edna Ferber is the first American Jew to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction Hebrew University opens in Jerusalem with American rabbi Judah L. Magnes as chancellor
1927 Charles A. Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic Warner Brothers produces drama of Jewish assimilation, "The Jazz Singer," the first film with sound  
1928   Yeshiva College is dedicated in New York  
1929 Stock Market crashes   Arab rioters kill 67 Jewish settlers in Hebron
1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated President


 

 Albert Einstein leaves his academic post in Nazi Germany to reside in the United States Adolf Hitler becomes German chancellor, initiates a series of anti-Semitic actions
1935 Social Security Administration is created   Nuremberg Laws deprive German Jews of their civic rights
1938 Charles E. Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest, launches media campaign against Jews   Synagogues and Jewish businesses are destroyed throughout Germany on the night of November 9-10, Kristallnacht
1939 SS St. Louis, carrying 907 Jewish refugees from Germany, is turned back by Cuba and the United States

David Sarnoff introduces television at New York World's Fair

 World War II begins with German invasion of Poland, extending anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich
1940     Nazis establish ghettos in Poland
1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor   Einsatzgruppen (special units) follow German troops into Soviet Union, perpetrating systematic murder
1942 War Relocation Authority interns Japanese Americans Rabbi Stephen S. Wise publicizes Riegner report confirming mass murder of European Jews Nazi leaders refine the "Final Solution" - genocide of the Jewish people - at Wannsee Conference
1944   Camp for Jewish war refugees is opened at Oswego, New York  
1945 America drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II   International tribunal for war crimes is established at Nuremberg
1946 Bernard Baruch presents US policy statement for the control of atomic energy to the United Nations    
1947 Marshall Plan provides post-war recovery to European nations   Scrolls dating from approximately 22 BCE are discovered at Qumran, near the Dead Sea
1948 President Harry S. Truman recognizes the State of Israel within its first hour of existence Brandeis University is founded as first nonsectarian, Jewish-sponsored, institution of higher education Jewish state of Israel is proclaimed


 
1949     Chaim Weizmann is elected first president of Israel
1950 President Truman sends US troops to Korea, military advisers to Vietnam    
1952     Yiddish writers and other Jewish cultural figures are executed in the USSR on "Night of the Murdered Poets"
1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed for conspiring to deliver US atomic bomb secrets to the USSR    
1954 Desegregation of public schools follows Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education

Jonas Salk develops Polio vaccine

 Tercentenary of American Jewry awakens interest in American Jewish history Assassination of two Jewish Agency emissaries in Algeria prompts increased Jewish migration to France
1955     Egypt, Syria, and Jordan raid Israel
1956     Israel, France, and England invade Sinai Peninsula
1957   United States attains world's largest Jewish population Israel withdraws from Sinai Peninsula and Gaza strip
1958 Explorer I, America's first satellite, orbits    
1960     Adolf Eichmann stands trial in Israel for crimes against Jews and humanity during World War II
1963 President John F. Kennedy is assassinated    
1966     Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon receives Nobel Prize
1967     Israel is victorious over Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq in "Six Day War"
1968 Abbie Hoffman leads demonstration disrupting Democratic National Convention in Chicago

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated

   Polish government outlaws Jewish language and institutions
1969 Neil Armstrong takes first step on moon   Golda (Myerson) Meir is elected Prime Minister of Israel
1970 National Guard opens fire on anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four students   Soviet Jews agitate for the right to emigrate
1972   Hebrew Union College ordains Sally J. Priesand first woman rabbi  
1973     Egypt and Syria attack Israel on the Day of Atonement, starting "Yom Kipper War"
1974 President Richard M. Nixon resigns    
1975 United States pulls out of Vietnam    
1976     Israeli commando raid frees 105 hostages held by pro-Palestine terrorists at Entebbe, Uganda
1978 American Nazi party marches in Skokie, Illinois Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer receives Nobel Prize President Jimmy Carter's Camp David accords result in a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt
1980     Terrorists bomb a Paris synagogue
1981     Congregation Mickve Israel in Curacao marks 250th anniversary of its synagogue, oldest in the Western Hemisphere
1982     Israel returns the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, invades Lebanon
1983   Reform rabbinate decides that children of mixed marriages whose fathers are Jewish, are Jewish if so educated  
1984   15,000 Holocaust survivors gather in Washington, DC  
1985 President Ronald Reagan visits Bitburg cemetery in West Germany, site of Nazi SS graves Conservative Judaism accepts women rabbis "Operation Moses" clandestine airlift to Ethiopian Jews to Israel ends

Notorious Auschwitz doctor, Joseph Mengele, is confirmed dead
1986 Space shuttle Challenger explodes Elie Wiesel wins Nobel Peace Prize

Proposed change in Israel's Law of Return - the "who is a Jew" amendment - prompts American Jewish outcry

 Alleged Nazi criminal John Demjanjuk is deported from US for trial in Israel as Treblinka's "Ivan the Terrible"

Anatoly Shcharansky, Soviet Jewish dissident, is freed from prison
1987 Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, former officer of the Third Reich, is barred from the United States Jonathan Jay Pollard, American spy for Israel is sentenced to life imprisonment Uprising of Palestinian Arabs, known as the Intifada, begins on the West Bank and Gaza
1989 Supreme Court upholds state's right to ban public funding for abortion, individual's right to dishonor American flag   Soviet Union permits Jews to emigrate on their first application for visa
1992 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas    


 
 
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