Forward 50
Aaron Lansky
After spending a quarter-century rescuing Yiddish books from Dumpsters, clueless grandchildren and collapsing buildings, Aaron Lansky produced a book of his own this fall, titled “Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Books.” In it Lansky, 49, recounts the dramatic rise of his National Yiddish Book Center from an accidental collection in a Montreal grad student’s apartment to a nationwide organization, headquartered in Amherst, Mass., with 30,000 members and 1.5 million rescued books to its credit. The center recently joined forces with Steven Spielberg to launch a digital Yiddish library that scans crumbling books and prints them on demand. Lansky’s mission is more than just saving books, though; it’s creating, through love of Yiddish, a new language of American Jewish identity. It’s not clear that he’s cracked that code yet, but countless lovers of books are with him in the quest.
Dennis Ross
During the 12 years that he led America’s Middle East peace efforts, through the first Bush and Clinton administrations, Dennis Ross was the subject of endless debate. Some Israelis accused him of anti-Israel bias because of his nonstop attempts to win concessions. Some Palestinians saw him as the embodiment of Jewish control of American policy. As he reaffirms in his monumental new history, “The Missing Peace,” Ross never saw a conflict between his Jewishness and his diplomatic duties. But he never denied that being Jewish was at the core of his devotion to the process. Since leaving government, Ross, 56, has continued his mission as head of a pro-Israel think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Last year he took on yet another Middle East challenge: chairing the newly formed Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, an offshoot of the Jewish Agency for Israel. The institute’s first report, submitted to Israel’s Cabinet this summer, is a sweeping review of the challenges facing world Jewry, from assimilation to terrorism. Its boldest recommendation: that Israel create a permanent consultative body that would let Diaspora Jews participate in the Israeli policy decisions that will affect their lives — and safety — as Jews around the world.
Jonathan Sarna
With a big new history book, “American Judaism,” that reviewers are calling a “masterpiece” and the National Jewish Book Awards singled out as the Book of the Year, this Brandeis University history professor is rapidly becoming American Jewry’s unofficial scholar in residence. Author or editor of 18 books, Sarna, 49, serves as historian in residence at the National Museum of American Jewish History in his native Philadelphia, chairs an academic advisory board at the Cincinnati-based American Jewish Archives and edits the American Jewish history series of two university presses, at Brandeis and Wayne State. The scholarship comes in his blood; his father, Nachum Sarna, was a distinguished biblical scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary. A graduate of New York’s Ramaz Day School and a former professor at Hebrew Union College, he knows just about every wing of American Judaism from the inside.
Gary Tobin
One of the deans of American Jewish social research, Gary Tobin has been raising eyebrows for the past decade with his maverick liberal views on conversion, adoption and racial diversity within the Jewish community. This year the San Francisco-based scholar, 55, raised eyebrows yet again by launching a partnership with the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. So far the partnership has produced two major Tobin studies, both pro bono: one on American attitudes toward Israel, the other on anti-Israel trends on campus. Meanwhile, Tobin’s own Institute for Jewish & Community Research, founded in 1997 after he left his tenured post at Brandeis University, continues to produce important new religious data. A study of professional development in Jewish organizations, released this fall, showed a deep rift between volunteers and staff and documented the persistent glass ceiling facing women staffers. Another, released in October, found that the fastest growing religious group in America is, the election results notwithstanding, people with no religious identity at all.
Culture
Larry David
Over the last four years, the acerbic comic who created “Seinfeld” has redefined television comedy by creating and starring in his own show about an acerbic comic who created “Seinfeld” and doesn’t know what to do with his fame. The series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” now entering its fifth season on HBO, is also redefining the notion of Jews in the American public square by putting the personal Jewish neuroses of David, 57, under a microscope with almost manic glee. During the past season his character managed to offend his Christian wife’s parents by nibbling on a Christmas cookie (“You ate our Lord and Saviour?!”) and turned a Nativity scene into an interfaith brawl. (His real-life spouse Laurie is one of Hollywood’s top Jewish political activists.) Later in the season he held a dinner party that turned into a fight between two survivors — one from the Holocaust, the other from thereality TV show “Survivor” — over who suffered more. Trumping it all, he turned his entire spring season into an elaborate spoof of “The Producers,” Mel Brooks’s relentlessly tasteless satire of the Holocaust, proving that when it comes to sacred memory, nothing is sacred. Move over, Philip Roth: There’s a new bad boy on the American Jewish block.
Tovah Feldshuh
It has been a banner year for actress Tovah Feldshuh, who earned a fourth Tony nomination for her masterful performance as Israel’s fourth prime minister in William Gibson’s acclaimed Broadway hit — and near-phenomenon — “Golda’s Balony.” The role has Feldshuh turning in emotional hour-and-a-half solo performances eight times a week, and recently became the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history. The role is the culmination of a three-decade career that has included a bevy of strong Jewish characters, including a resistance fighter in the 1978 television mini-series “Holocaust,” which brought her first Emmy nomination, as well as the breakout title role in the 1975 Broadway production of “Yentl.” Feldshuh began acting under the stage name Terry Fairchild and settled into her role as ethnic hero only gradually. If she’d remained a Fairchild, she told the Forward in an interview, “I would have gotten a different splay of rolls, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to serve the Jewish community, which has been my pleasure.” The National Foundation for Jewish Culture honored her with its 2002 Jewish Image Award.
Shawn Green
By deciding to skip one of two games on Yom Kippur during a tight playoff race, Los Angeles first baseman Shawn Green, 32, bolstered his claim as the heir apparent to Jewish baseball legends Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax. Though hailed nationally for affirming his faith, some rabbis took issue with his decision to skip one game and play the other. Green’s response: “Everyone approaches their religious worship in their own way.” He wasn’t the only athlete to do it his way this year. Matt Bernstein, a running back for the University of Wisconsin, started his fast early so he could take the field for an afternoon game that started late on Yom Kippur. Like it or not, this individualized brand of religion has increasingly become the norm for American Jews. But it seems that somebody somewhere was cool with Green’s and Bernstein’s compromises. The Dodgers won the game Green played 3-2, with the slugger hitting the game-winning home run, the 281st of his rising career. Bernstein, with 123 rushing yards, had the best game of his college career.
Carolyn Hessel
As executive director of the Jewish Book Council, Carolyn Hessel remains one of the most powerful arbiters of Jewish literature in the United States. The council, which has vastly increased its visibility under Hessel, coordinates some 70 Jewish book fairs at community centers around the country, and oversees the National Jewish Book Awards. Insiders say Hessel can make or break a book by deciding which writers will speak at which local fairs. Certainly the buzz of a JCC tour can play a big role in jumpstarting an author’s career, as recent beneficiaries Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer could doubtless attest. Hessel, who served at the Jewish Education Service of North America until being tapped to head the Book Council in the early 1990s, is resolute in her mission, even if her influence occasionally lands her in controversy. “My goal is to promote the reading, writing and understanding of books of Jewish interest,” she said in an interview with the Forward. “And I define ‘Jewish interest’ in the broadest terms.”
Cynthia Ozick
For her latest novel, “Heir to the Glimmering World,” the author’s first foray into fiction in seven years, Cynthia Ozick drew inspiration from an unlikely source: Christopher Robin Milne, son of A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. But the novel is no children’s book. Fat with ideas — braiding together physics, the 1,200-year-old Karaite heretics, Indian philosophy and much else besides — the book is echt Ozick in its intellectual vitality. Equally virtuosic is the author’s “whirling, churning, roiling” prose, as a review in these pages called it. And it’s not just with her fiction that Ozick continues to earn distinction. With essays on subjects as varied as Helen Keller and the Bible, Ozick, 76, remains one of American Jewry’s most searching, probing and incisive voices.
Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman is having a very good year. The Israeli-born actress, known for her beguiling portrayal of a preteen in “Beautiful Girls” (1996) and her powerful portrayal of Anne Frank on Broadway in 1996, reached a new level of professional credibility this spring with her star turn in the critically acclaimed “Garden State.” She’s set to follow that up with the upcoming, Oscar-touted Mike Nichols film, “Closer.” And her fans are eagerly awaiting her return this winter as Queen Amidala in the third “Star Wars” prequel. Having emigrated from Jerusalem to Long Island at age 3, she’s learned to stand up as a vocal if thoughtful defender of Israel and liberal causes, writing letters to the Harvard Crimson defending Israel’s record as an occupier and campaigning for John Kerry in Wisconsin. Critics call her one of the most promising young actresses of this generation, while Jewish teenagers across the country call her hot and hang her posters over their beds. At 23, she’s arguably done more for young Jewish male self-esteem than anyone since Moshe Dayan.
Art Spiegelman
With his groundbreaking “Maus,” a dark comic strip of the Holocaust that depicted Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, Art Spiegelman proved for all time that comics weren’t just for kids. By turns whimsical and tortured, it recounted a survivor’s memories of the Holocaust and his son’s struggles with the legacy of pain. After the book version won a “special citation” from the Pulitzer committee in 1992, the public was left wondering what Spiegelman might do for an encore. After publishing “Maus II” (serialized in the Forward) and a controversial series of covers for The New Yorker, the answer came on September 11, 2001, when Spiegelman met his own cataclysm. The result, “In the Shadow of No Towers,” recounts the artist’s sense of horror in a virtuosic pastiche of styles and techniques. The work, first serialized in the Forward and several European newspapers and published in book form this fall, reaffirming Spiegelman’s stature as one of this generation’s pre-eminent voices of Jewish angst.
Madonna
This year’s Forward 50 actually includes 51 entries, but the extra one should be seen as more of a cherry-on-top than an afterthought. Madonna, who does not consider herself Jewish, has earned her place as one of the 50 most influential people practicing (some form of) Judaism today. Born Madonna Louise Ciccone, she rose to stardom on a potent mix of dance-hall favorites and image switcheroos, all the while thumbing her nose at authorities of all kind and tweaking her Catholic tradition at every turn. But constant change can be exhausting, and at some point it seemed to leave both artist and audience limp. In the late 1990s, Madonna was introduced to Jewish mysticism via the controversial Kabbalah Centre founded by Rabbi Philip Berg. In a burst of creativity following the birth of her daughter, she produced what many critics believe to be her best album, “Ray of Light,” which takes its title from the kabbalistic theory about the origins of the world. Like every other personna she has tried on and discarded, Madonna has turned her latest passion into a worldwide trend — causing a run on red bendels, the trademark string bracelet intended to ward off the evil eye and, by attending a Kabbalah Centre conference in Tel Aviv this year, becoming the biggest thing to hit the Israeli tourism industry since the El Al jingle. Unlike her previous phases, which look in retrospect like bursts in some internal evolution, Madonna seems with Kabbalah to have settled finally into herself and the world. “A Kabbalist sees the world as a unified whole,” she said recently. “A Kabbalist believes that he or she has the responsibility to make the world a better place.’’ This may be a disappointment to some fans — the fight seems to have gone out of her and, with it, the fiery push of her best work — but for some of us, watching an ancient Jewish tradition influence (and be influenced by) a worldwide icon is nothing short of fantastic.
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