Barbra Streisand Gets Presidential Medal — 4 Jews on List
Image by Getty Images
Singer and actress Barbra Streisand, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim and award-winning conductor Itzhak Perlman are among 17 Americans who this year will receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the White House said on Monday.
President Barack Obama will award the medals to a star-studded list of Americans to honor their accomplishments in public service, entertainment and sports during a Nov. 24 ceremony, the White House said.
Gloria Estefan, Grammy Award-winning Cuban-American singer, and her husband Emilio Estefan, a producer and songwriter, will each receive the medal, along with baseball great Willie Mays and singer James Taylor, the White House said.
Bonnie Carroll, known for her work with veterans, also will be honored, as will long-serving Democratic Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, former Indiana Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, NASA mathematician Katherine G. Johnson, and former Environmental Protection Agency head William Ruckelshaus.
Posthumous honors will be given to New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, African American trail-blazing Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Indian treaty rights advocate Billy Frank, Jr., and Japanese-American civil rights activist Minoru Yasui, the White House said.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
