Some of the most important architects of string theory have been Jewish physicists. Here are the key figures:

o Leonard Susskind
He is probably the most prominent. He is one of the original founders of string theory, having independently developed it in the early 1970s. He is also the originator of the concept of the "string theory landscape" and a fierce defender of the theory against critics like Lee Smolin. He has written popular books on it, including The Cosmic Landscape.

o Edward Witten
He is widely regarded as the greatest living theoretical physicist and is Jewish. He almost single-handedly launched the "second superstring revolution" in 1995 with his work on M-theory, which unified the five competing versions of string theory. He is the only physicist ever to have won the Fields Medal, which is the highest prize in mathematics.

o Alexander Polyakov
Of Russian-Jewish background, he made foundational contributions to string theory and conformal field theory which underpins much of the mathematical framework string theorists use.

o Joseph Polchinski
He was Jewish and made one of the most important discoveries within string theory — D-branes — which became central to the entire modern framework of the theory and to Witten's M-theory unification.

o David Gross
Also Jewish, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work on asymptotic freedom, and has been a major advocate and contributor to string theory throughout his career.

o Nathan Seiberg
He is an Israeli physicist whose work on supersymmetry and string dualities has been foundational to the field.

It is worth noting more broadly that Jews constitute over 40% of the combined membership of the physics and applied physical sciences divisions of the US National Academy of Sciences, so their prominence in any major branch of theoretical physics, including string theory, reflects a much wider pattern of extraordinary contribution to physics as a whole.