The biblical hero may be a star on Passover, but he’s not the only one with that famous name. From Grandma Moses to Moses Malone, namesakes who went on to greatness.
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His older sister may be the Apple of his parents’ eyes, but Moses Martin (son of Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay’s Chris Martin) is the one with the biblical name. Born in April 2006—appropriately enough at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York—Moses is actually named after a Coldplay song Martin wrote in 2003. And the lyrics certainly sound like they’re foreshadowing a newborn: “Like Moses had power over sea / So you’ve got a power over me / Come on now, don’t you want to know / You’re a refuge, somewhere I can go / And you’re air that, air that I can breathe / You’re my golden opportunity.”
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One of the first basketball players to turn pro right out of high school, Moses Malone began his career in the ABA and became a star for the Houston Rockets shortly after the league merged with the NBA. A 12-time NBA all-star, and a three-time league MVP, Malone won the NBA championship with the Rockets, was elected to the Hall of Fame, and in 1996 was named one of the 50 Greatest Players of All Time. But Moses is perhaps best remembered for an incident that occurred in 1981, after the Boston Celtics beat Houston for the NBA title. At the victory parade in Boston, Larry Bird took the podium and responded to a fan holding a sign. “Moses Malone does eat shit,” Larry Legend told the crowd.
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When arthritis made doing embroidery too painful, Anna Mary Robertson Moses decided to take up painting. She was in her mid-70s and she became an international star. Dubbed “Grandma Moses” by the media, she produced homespun folk art that typically revolved around American holidays. Moses, who lived to 101, was very philosophical about her late-in-life success. “If I hadn’t started painting,” she once said, “I would have raised chickens.”
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Born on a kibbutz in 1915, Moshe Dayan grew up to be the chief of Israel’s defense forces and later its minister of defense. In 1941, while still a soldier in the Jewish militia known as the Haganah, Dayan lost his left eye when a bullet sent shattered glass into his face. Unable to be fitted with a prosthetic eye, he began wearing a black eyepatch that became his trademark. A hero of the Six-Day War in 1967, Dayan died in 1982, and was denounced by his own son as an unfaithful husband and greedy man. Ehud Dayan wrote that he had recited the kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, “three times too often for a man who never observed half of the Ten Commandments.”
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A track and field legend, Edwin Moses won gold medals in the 400m hurdles at the 1976 and 1984 Olympics, but that’s not his most impressive athletic feat. From 1977 to 1987, Moses won 122 consecutive races, including 107 finals in the event, setting a world record four times. Since retiring from the sport in 1988, Moses received his MBA and was inducted into the Track and Field Hall of Fame. In addition to being named one of ESPN’s 50 Greatest Athletes of the 20th century, Moses had a boulevard named after him in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Presumably, there are no hurdles in the road.
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Among Israel’s most acclaimed architects and urban designers, 73-year-old Moshe Safdie is best known for Habitat 67, a model community he designed while studying for a master’s degree at McGill University. Composed of 354 identical interlocking concrete cubes, the development was built as a housing complex for Expo 67, the Montreal World’s Fair. Still one of the most recognizable structures in Canada, Safdie’s Habitat 67 helped redefine what urban living could be by bringing a touch of the suburbs—gardens, privacy—to the city.
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A member of one of baseball’s royal families, Moises Alou played 17 seasons in the National League and was one of the best outfielders of the 1990s and 2000s. He ended his career in 2008 with a lifetime batting average of .303, 332 home runs, and 2,134 hits. But what Alou may be best remembered for is that he never used batting gloves at the plate. Instead, Alou revealed in 2004 that he urinated on his hands to toughen the skin. And other Major Leaguers backed up his manly method. Former New York Yankees catcher Jorge Posada also confessed, “You don’t want to shake my hand during spring training.”
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Born on the eve of Passover in 1135, Moses Maimonides grew up to be one of Judaism’s greatest Torah scholars and philosophers. The Spanish-born rabbi was also a skilled physician, but it is his Mishneh Torah, which provides the definitive interpretation and commentary of Jewish law and observance, that stands as his greatest work. Composed of 14 books and hundreds of chapters, Maimonides’s magnum opus remains a seminal text in Jewish scholarship. And though his biblical namesake led his people out of Egypt, the great rabbi died there in 1204.
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Just as Moses led the exodus from Egypt, so did Robert Moses encourage New Yorkers to flee to city for the suburbs. One of defining urban planners of the 20th century, Moses built bridges, tunnels, highways and transformed neighborhoods, influencing a generation of civil engineers and causing “white flight” throughout the nation. And his urban vision earned Moses plenty of critics and enemies—Moses was famously opposed by author and activist Jane Jacobs, who caused the cancellation of the master builder’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. There are also still many Brooklynites who consider Moses largely responsible for the Dodgers moving to Los Angeles. “Had Moses been agreeable,” says Michael Shapiro, author of The Last Good Season, “the world would have never been turned on its head and the Dodgers would not have left.”
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How did Woody Allen and Mia Farrow not hear the Passover pun when they named their adopted son “Moses Farrow”? Though Moses appeared in one of his father’s films—Hannah and Her Sisters—he later turned on Allen when the director had an affair with Moses’ older adopted sister, Soon-Yi. In 1993, a letter from 15-year-old Moses was read at a custody hearing between Allen and Farrow. “You have done a horrible, unforgivable, needy, ugly, stupid thing,” Moses wrote of the relationship between Allen and Soon-Yi. “I hope you get so humiliated you commit suicide.” Now in his early thirties, Moses Farrow practices family counseling and therapy.
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