This is a serious thread, not some garbage Holla Forums bait.
Basically, I'm interested in the reasons why so many European Jews played such an eminent role in 20th-century Western thought. I mean, they made up only 1-2% of Europe's population before the Holocaust and encountered discrimination at every corner yet they seem to always be around any achievement in science, the humanities or art.
We should know, considering the amount of Jewish socialists — including the one and only Karl Marx and the infamous Frankfurt School of witchcraft and wizardry. But this is also true of physicists (Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer), chemists (Prigogine, Haber, De Evesy), historians (Bloch, Hobsbawm, Zinn), sociologists (Durkheim, Simmel, Elias), anthropologists (Boas, Lévi-Strauss, Mauss), writers (Proust, Kafka, Asimov), artists (Chagall, Lissitzky, Modigliani), musicians (Schönberg, Ligeti, Reich), even game designers (Baer, Spector, Mechner) — and the list goes on.
I mean, African-Americans (a similarly historically discriminated minority) are over-represented when it comes to innovations in popular music — blues, jazz, rock, disco, funk, soul, electro, hip-hop, house, techno, etc — but Jews' area of expertise is incomparably broader.
So… how did they do it?