Jewish Contributions to Humanity

# in a series

Jewish Playwrights
Who Moved America.

LILLIAN HELLMAN (1905-1984).

Staff at Detroit Youth
Development Alliance in
Detroit work on drawing
their nonverbal responses.

eggs, it had been 15 years since I left J.
Walter Thompson and I missed working
on charitable accounts,” Mel said. “You
never want to admit you were eaves-
dropping — it’s kind of embarrassing
— but I thought, ‘What the heck? I’m an
old guy, I can do this.’”
He stopped by Allen’s table as they
were leaving and said, “I have to apol-
ogize; I’ve been eavesdropping. I’ve
been listening to your conversation,
and I’m very interested in what you
are doing. If there’s anything I can do,
I’d be happy to help.”
Allen gave Mel a brochure and the
name of the organization “I thought it
was a perfectly horrible name and the
logo was not much better,” Mel said. “I
knew that I could help.”
And he did … at no charge.
Similar in age and with a shared
Jewish heritage — Allen was raised in
a Jewish home with an emphasis on
tzedakah, giving back, and Mel was
raised in in an Orthodox home and
went to yeshivah as a kid — the two
men jelled.
“I always had a focus on tikkun olam,
repairing the world,” Mel said. “That’s
what Allen’s organization is trying to do.
I’m trying to help out in every way I can.”
The two met in February. In May,
Allen launched his newly renamed, re-
branded and re-positioned nonprofit
poised for growth and success: The
Einstein Method.

thrived. He retired in 2010.
Then, in the fall of 2015, he procured
funding for an afterschool program
three days a week in Avondale for
sixth-grade boys who were failing. The
program was voluntary. Allen mentored
two teachers and a counselor who ran
the program about his teaching meth-
ods that worked best, and they began
doing things differently.
“They had very immediate results —
the kids learned to multiply after four
sessions. That led me to know right then
and there that I’d be better off teaching
teachers than teaching kids,” Allen said.
He applied for a 501(c)(3) and
launched the Einstein Education
Ecosystem, working with Karen Boyk,
an expert in brain development and
the differences in how genders learn.
Together they have a combined 60
years of classroom experience. Allen
and Karen had both taught for more
than 20 years at Berkshire Middle
School in Birmingham.
Allen and Karen began going into
schools and teaching teachers dur-
ing staff meetings and professional
development time about how boys
and girls learn differently according to
brain research and how to best work
with under-achieving students. Armed
with new tools, teachers were able to
refine their methods, improve their
classroom environment and help their
students succeed.

HOW ALLEN STARTED

THE EINSTEIN METHOD

During the last 11 years of his teach-
ing career, Allen started a program in
Birmingham schools called Project
2000 for eighth-grade boys at risk of
failing. He had them all day, teach-
ing them everything from math and
English to arts and health as well as
life skills, such as manners, goal-set-
ting and what success was. The boys

The Einstein Method doesn’t provide a
curriculum to teachers. “What I provide
is insight to teachers who are teaching
for tests now as opposed to teaching
kids to learn how to think,” he said.
The Einstein Method provides teach-
ers tools on how boys and girls should
be taught differently and shows them
what they need to do in their class-

b. New Orleans, Louisiana. d. Tisbury, Massachusetts.
An uncompromising spirit.
The playwright of such classics as The Children’s Hour,
The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine, nearly everything
Lillian Hellman touched in the arts world turned to gold.
Her first screenplay, The Children’s Hour, opened to wide
acclaim in 1934, although it was banned in Boston and
Chicago. The Little Foxes, a play about her Southern family
members towards whom she held deep resentment, earned
her a fortune on stage and screen and was nominated for nine Oscars, including
Best Screenplay. Hellman’s connections with communists earned her the ire of the
FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When summoned
in 1952 to testify in front of Congress, Hellman agreed to testify about herself, but
refused to share information about other people. She was not held in contempt, but
she was virtually blacklisted by Hollywood, and her income dropped from $150,000
per year to nearly nothing. In a letter Hellman wrote to HUAC, she famously said, “I
cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

ARTHUR MILLER (1915-2005).

b. New York, New York. d. Roxbury, Connecticut.
He won the arts trifecta.
The writer of hits like Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The
Crucible, The Misfits and A View from the Bridge, Miller was a
master of the arts by his early 30s. By the time the play opened
on Broadway in 1939, it earned Miller the Pulitzer Prize, the
New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and a Tony—a trifecta
of awards of sorts in the arts world. The Great Depression
was a theme that entered many of Miller’s works, as he lived
through it and saw its profound impact on American society. Miller was also
briefly married to Marilyn Monroe, which brought him some unwanted attention
from HUAC—the committee desperately tried to generate publicity for itself in its
waning days. It summoned Miller, who refused to name names, earning Congress’s
contempt in response. But it also earned him the praise of his colleagues in theater.
Miller was one of America’s top playwrights of the 20th century, and while he had a
notoriously negative view of theater critics, any reviewer today would certainly put
his works on a shortlist of the finest American plays.

NEIL SIMON (1927-).

b. New York, New York.
For him, comedy is serious business.
The first living playwright to have a theater named in his
honor, Neil Simon is among our time’s most prolific writers.
He has received more Tony and Oscar nominations than any
other writer, and is perhaps best known for The Odd Couple.
Simon grew up in New York City during the Great Depression,
and his parents had a rocky marriage. To escape, a young
Simon would spend lots of time in movie theaters, where
he particularly enjoyed watching comedies. In his early 20s Simon began writing
comedy scripts for radio and TV, and soon began writing his own plays. His first hit
was Come Blow Your Horn, which ran for nearly 700 performances on Broadway.
During one particularly prolific season, four of Simon’s plays were running
simultaneously on Broadway. Many of Simon’s comedies borrow a lot of aspects
from his own childhood—characters who are Jewish New Yorkers; an unhappy
home; sibling rivalry. And through his skill with dialogue, Simon has been able to
use comedy as an effective medium to communicate serious, even heavy, ideas
about life.

Original Research by Walter L. Field Sponsored by Irwin S. Field Written by Jared Sichel

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August 23 • 2018

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