JACK BLACK
BORN : AUGUST 28, 1969
POSITION : ACTOR, MUSICIAN, FORCE OF NATURE, MAJOR MENSCH
When it comes to Jack Black, I’ll have what he’s having. Whether it’s his two-man rock group Tenacious D, his live action and animated films, Jack brings extraordinary energy, joie de vivre and an inspiring unselfconscious commitment to everything he does. Depending on how old you are, Jack may be more famous for his breakout role in High Fidelity, School of Rock, Tropic Thunder or King Kong. (He doesn’t play the title role, but he could have.) Kids may know him best as the voice behind Kung Fu Panda, Bowser in the Super Mario Bros. Movie. (I’m partial to The House With a Clock in Its Walls.)
Black also played renowned children’s author R. L. Stine in the Goosebumps movie. (R.L. was thrilled with the casting, and said, “He’s a great guy, too!”)
Jack was born Thomas Jacob Cohen to Judith Love Cohen and Thomas William Black, two engineers on the Hubble Space Telescope. His mother was Jewish, and his father was raised Protestant but converted to Judaism, because, as Black said in an interview, “he was into Judaism.” Black was raised Jewish, the full monty: Hebrew school, Bar Mitzvah. Black is “obsessed” with Chad Gadya, the Aramaic song often sung at the end of the Passover Seder. (Jack feels it’s actually a metal song, and his YouTube rendition backs that up.) In addition to Passover (he knows the Four Questions backwards and forwards) Jack aces Hanukkah. He makes latkes, and he beautifully rocks the Hanukkah prayers.
I know I shouldn’t play favorites, but I have to confess, Jack Black is one of my all-time favorite Jews. Definitely in the top 10. (I know I should have Jonas Salk in there, I mean, I don’t have polio. But come on - Jack Black, he’s just so Jack Black-y all the time. And then there’s his mother…
We need to include a major shout-out to Jack’s mom, Judith Cohen. Born in 1933, in the fifth grade, she made money writing kids’ math papers for them. She intended to be a math teacher, as a woman might back then, but her smarts had her ending up getting her a scholarship to study engineering at Brooklyn College, which led to a Master’s at UCLA, and then becoming an aerospace engineer. Her work included the aforementioned Hubble Telescope, and to help save Apollo 13 – on her way to giving birth to Jack! She went into labor – but stopped by the office on her way to the hospital! As Neil Siegel, Jack's older half-brother, wrote in a 2016 obituary for his mother:
"When it was time to go to the hospital, she took with her a computer printout of the problem she was working on. Later that day, she called her boss and told him that she had solved the problem.* And… oh, yes, the baby was born, too."
*The problem she solved was the key to making the Abort-Guidance System work. Months later her solution was instrumental in the safe return of the Apollo 13 flight crew.