Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, came from a family that was, shall we say, indisputably Jewish. Her father, Emil Kiesler, was a successful banker from Lemberg (then Galicia, now Ukraine), and her mother, Gertrud Kiesler (née Lichtwitz), was a Budapest-born pianist from an affluent family. Both parents were assimilated Jews, with her mother even converting to Catholicism when Hedy was about 13, though not for religious conviction, but rather as a social maneuver in antisemitic Vienna. However, Hedy herself never practiced Judaism, nor did she openly identify with it.

While her Jewish identity score is a resounding zero, her origins are as solid as a block of matzo. She had the classic "Jewish mother" who, despite her own conversion, still worried about her daughter. This full-blooded Jewish ancestry, passed down through generations of Austrian and Hungarian Jews, ensures a perfect score on the O scale, regardless of her personal beliefs or lack thereof.

But where Lamarr truly shines, quite apart from her luminous career as a film star, is in her extraordinary intellect and ingenuity. During World War II, driven by a desire to contribute to the Allied effort, she co-invented a "secret communication system" with composer George Antheil to combat Nazi torpedoes. This frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, patented in 1942, was decades ahead of its time and is now the bedrock of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Kvell-worthy? We're talking about a woman who helped win the war and enable your smartphone to find cat videos. That's not just kvell-worthy; it's practically miraculous.