- Townsend Harris
Townsend Harris was a successful New York City merchant and minor politician, and the first United States Consul General to Japan. He negotiated the "Harris Treaty" between the U.S. and Japan and is credited as the diplomat who first opened the Japanese Empire to foreign trade and culture. He gained the respect and affection of the Japanese people, and is honoured to this day in Japan. Harris was born in the village of Sandy Hill (now Hudson Falls), …
- Michio Kaku
Dr. Michio Kaku is a Japanese American theoretical physicist, tenured professor, and co-founder of string field theory, a branch of superstring theory. He is a widely known popularizer of science, the host of two radio programs, and the author of numerous books.
- Irving Kristol
Irving Kristol (born January 22, 1920, New York City) is considered the founder of American neoconservatism. He is married to conservative author and emeritus professor Gertrude Himmelfarb and is the father of William Kristol. He describes himself as a "liberal mugged by reality". Kristol was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York and, although he had a bar mitzvah, says that belief had nothing to do with his family's observance.
- Nat Holman
Nat Holman was one of the early pro basketball players and one of the game's most important innovators. Known for his exceptional ball-handling and his accurate shooting, Holman was a star player at New York University and an important part of the Original Celtics (no relation to the Boston Celtics). Also a gifted passer and excellent floor leader, Holman has been a prototype to later playmakers.
- Leonard Jeffries
Leonard Jeffries (born January 19, 1937) is an American professor in the Black Studies department at the City College in Harlem who achieved national prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s for his antisemitic views. He was quoted in the New York Times saying that "rich Jews who financed the development of Europe also financed the slave trade." The "New York Post" quoted him lecturing that Jews controlled the slave trade, …
- Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons (born October 4 ,1957 in Queens, New York), is an African American entrepreneur, the co-founder, with Rick Rubin, of the pioneering hip-hop label Def Jam, founder of another label, Russell Simmons Music Group, and creator of the clothing fashion line Phat Farm. Russell Simmons is the younger brother of Daniel "Danny" Simmons, Jr and he is the older brother of Rev. Joseph Simmons, better known as "Run" of Run-DMC, and son of Daniel Simmons, Sr, …
- Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell (born 10 May 1919 in New York) is a sociologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University. He graduated from City College of New York with a B.A. in sociology. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is a scholar in residence of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the past, Bell taught sociology at Columbia University. He is also known for his contributions as an editor to "The Public Interest Magazine", …
- A. Philip Randolph
Asa Philip Randolph (April 15 1889 - May 16 1979) was a prominent twentieth century African-American civil rights leader and founder of the first black labor union in the U.S.
- Robert F. Wagner
Robert Ferdinand Wagner was a Democratic United States Senator from New York from 1927 until 1949. He was born in Nastätten, Province Hesse-Nassau, Germany, and immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1885. His family settled in New York City and Wagner attended the public schools. He graduated from the College of the City of New York (now named City College) in 1898 and from New York Law School in 1900. He was admitted to the bar in 1900.
- Sheldon Adelson
Sheldon Gary Adelson (born August 1, 1933) is an American billionaire businessman. He is a property developer and public company CEO based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited which operates the Venetian Casino Resort and the Sands Expo and Convention Center.
- Irving Howe
Irving Howe (June 11, 1920 - May 5, 1993), was American literary and social critic. He was born as Irving Horenstein in New York, as a son of immigrants who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression. Like many New York Intellectuals, Howe attended City College and graduated in 1940, alongside Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Upon his return, …
- Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is a prominent American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. Mosley has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; it is perhaps his most popular work. Mosley has written over 20 books in a variety of categories, including non-mystery fiction, …
- Andrew Grove
Dr. Andrew Stephen Grove (born 1936-09-02) is a Hungarian-American businessman. He participated in the founding of Intel and was key to the company's success.
- Gilbert Baumslag
Gilbert Baumslag is a Distinguished Professor at the City College of New York, with joint appointments in mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. He is director of the Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software, which grew out of the MAGNUS computational group theory project he also headed. Baumslag earned his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1958; his thesis, written under the direction of Bernhard Neumann, …
- Herbert Aaron Hauptman
Herbert A. Hauptman , Ph.D. President, Nobel Laureate Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
- Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold (born October 8 1930) is an African-American artist and author. Ringgold was raised in Harlem and educated at the City College of New York, where she studied with Robert Gwathmey and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. She was greatly influenced by the fabric she worked with at home with her mother who was a seamstress and has used fabric in many of her artworks.
- Seymour Martin Lipset
Seymour Martin Lipset was a political sociologist from the USA. Seymour Lipset was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. Lipset received a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University in 1949. Before that he taught at the University of Toronto.
- Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, emeritus; a CHP/PCOR fellow; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has been primarily in economic theory and operations, focusing on areas including social choice theory, risk bearing, medical economics, general equilibrium analysis, inventory theory, and the economics of information and innovation.
- Jerome Karle
Jerome Karle (born June 18, 1918) is an American physical chemist. He was born in New York City and attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. Jointly with Herbert A. Hauptman he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985. He received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1937, a master's degree from Harvard University in 1938, and a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1944 He worked on the Manhattan Project with his wife Dr.
- Deborah Lipstadt
Deborah Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and Director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. She has taught at U.C.L.A. and Occidental College in Los Angeles. She received her bachelor's degree from City College of New York and her master's and doctorate from Brandeis University.
- Joshua Muravchik
Mr. Muravchik is a resident scholar at AEI who studies the United Nations, neoconservatism, the history of socialism and communism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, global democracy, terrorism, and the Bush Doctrine. In March 2007, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appointed Mr. Muravchik to serve on the State Department's Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion.
- Oscar Hijuelos
Oscar Hijuelos (born August 24 1951) is an American novelist. He is the first Hispanic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Hijuelos was born in New York City, in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, to Cuban immigrant parents. He studied writing at City College of New York and practiced various professions before taking up writing full time. His first novel, "Our House in the Last World", was published in 1983 and received the 1985 Rome Prize, …
- Ken Smith
Ken Smith grew up in Iowa, and attended Iowa State University, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s of Landscape Architecture in 1976. After graduation, he apprenticed with sculptor Paul Shao, and worked for the Iowa Conservation Commission in Parks and Recreation Planning. He attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and received his Master’s in Landscape Architecture in 1986. After working in the office of Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz, …
- Joy Garnett
Joy Garnett is an artist based in New York. She studied painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and received her MFA from The City College of New York. Garnett's subject is the apocalyptic-sublime at the intersections of media, politics and culture. Her paintings, based on documentary photographs she appropriates from the Internet, exploit the accessibility and malleability of images in the media.
- Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 - July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.
- Edward G. Robinson
Edward Goldenberg Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg, Yiddish: עמנואל גאלדנבערג; December 12, 1893 - January 26, 1973) was an American stage and film actor of Romanian origin. Born to an Yiddish-speaking Jewish family in Bucharest, he emigrated with his family to New York City in 1903. He attended Townsend Harris High School and then City College of New York, …
- Leon M. Lederman
Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922 in New York) is an American experimental physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for his work on neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998.
- Herman Badillo
Herman Badillo (born August 21, 1929 in Caguas, Puerto Rico) is a Bronx, New York politician who has been a borough president, United States Representative, and candidate for Mayor of New York City. He was the first Puerto Rican to be elected to these posts (and run for mayor) in the United States (outside of Puerto Rico). When Badillo was 11 years old, both of his parents died of tuberculosis and he was sent to live with his aunt in New York City.
- Jackie Mason
Jackie Mason (born Yacov Moshe Maza on June 9, 1928, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin) is an American stand-up comedian. His "politically incorrect" routines and opinionated observations on Jewish and American life have often provoked controversy. Mason graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from City College of New York and (at the age of 25) was ordained as a rabbi in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Three years later he resigned the post to become a comedian.
- Paul Weiss
Paul Weiss was an American philosopher, known for his work in metaphysics and for his efforts to reverse age discrimination policies at American universities. Born in New York City, he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from City College of New York and his doctorate from Harvard (1929), where he studied under Alfred North Whitehead. He taught at several universities, but spent most of his career at Yale, where he eventually held an endowed chair.
- Morris Raphael Cohen
Morris Raphael Cohen was a Jewish philosopher, lawyer and legal scholar who united pragmatism with logical positivism and linguistic analysis. He was father to Felix S. Cohen. Cohen was born in Minsk, Belarus (then Russian empire), but moved with his family to New York, at the age of 12. He was educated at the City College of New York (ccNY) and Harvard University, where he studied under Josiah Royce, William James, …
- Julius Axelrod
Julius Axelrod (May 30, 1912 - December 29 2004) was an American biochemist. He won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970 along with Bernard Katz and Ulf von Euler. The Nobel Committee honored him for his work on the release and reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters, a class of chemicals in the brain that include epinephrine, norepinephrine, and, as was later discovered, dopamine.
- Yip Harburg
E. Y. "Yip" Harburg (born Isidore Hochberg on April 8 1896 in New York City - died March 4 1981 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California) was an American lyricist who worked with many well-known composers.
- Richard Schiff
Richard Schiff (born May 27, 1955 in Bethesda, Maryland) is an Emmy Award-winning American actor, best known for playing Toby Ziegler on the NBC television drama "The West Wing", a role for which he won his Emmy Award. Schiff also made his directorial debut with "The West Wing", directing an episode entitled "Talking Points." Schiff is the middle of three sons born to a real estate lawyer and a cable television and publishing executive.
- Julian Schwinger
Julian Seymour Schwinger (February 12, 1918 -- July 16, 1994) was an American theoretical physicist. He formulated the theory of renormalization and posited a phenomenon of electron-positron pairs known as the Schwinger effect. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED), along with Richard Feynman and Shinichiro Tomonaga
- Jill Nelson
Jill Nelson (born June 14, 1952) is a prominent African American journalist and novelist. She has written several books, including the autobiographical "Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience", which won an American Book Award, and is currently Professor of Journalism at the City College of New York. Jill Nelson grew up in New York's Harlem, spending summers on Martha's Vineyard.
- Eli Wallach
Eli Herschel Wallach (born December 7, 1915) is an American film, TV and stage actor.
- Ntozake Shange
Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of spirits.
- Ben Gazzara
Ben Gazzara (born Biagio Anthony Gazzara on August 28, 1930, in New York City) is an American actor in television and motion pictures. Born to Italian immigrants, Antonio Gazzara and Angela Consumano, Gazzara grew up on New York's tough Lower East Side. He attended New York City's famed Stuyvesant High School. He found relief from his bleak surroundings by joining a theater company at a very young age.
- Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon is an American real estate tycoon. He lives in Indiana and is a billionaire. He was born around October 23, 1934 and educated at the City College of New York.