Julia Morgan

If you've ever toured Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, and marveled at the sheer, unadulterated hubris of a media baron building a lavish Mediterranean fantasy on a hill, you can thank Julia Morgan. While William Randolph Hearst provided the mountains of cash and eccentric demands, Morgan was the actual engineering and architectural genius who made the whole sprawling, 165-room compound not collapse down the hillside during an earthquake.

Morgan was a trailblazer in the truest sense. She was the first woman admitted to the prestigious architecture program at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the first licensed female architect in California, and she went on to design over 700 buildings in her career, pioneering the structural use of reinforced concrete. When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake flattened the city, her newly constructed concrete buildings were among the few still standing, effectively making her the go-to builder for anyone wanting their mansion or YWCA to survive the next apocalypse.

So, is there a Jewish connection behind this brilliant, quiet workaholic? Alas, none at all. Morgan was born in San Francisco to a thoroughly Protestant family of East Coast lineage. Her father was a New England mining engineer and her mother's family hailed from prosperous New York traders. She lived a famously private life entirely centered around blueprints, drafting tables, and structural calculations, free from Jewish ancestry or practice.

We can certainly admire an independent woman who out-engineered every man of the Gilded Age while putting up with Hearst's insufferable whims for nearly three decades. But we can't claim her. Hearst Castle remains magnificent, but decidedly un-kosher.