A Year of Curses and Many Blessings
Title IX Warrior Alexandra Brodsky began 2016 as a law student. She will end it with a degree from Yale, as a leading feminist activist, and one of the most respected voices on the hot-button issue of “rape culture.” She’s a senior editor at Feministing.com and a co-founder of Know Your IX, a not-for-profit that…
Leader of the Bernie Bros Influenced The Election During the first half of 2016, America was Feeling the Bern. Bernie Sanders, 75, rose to become a surprisingly formidable opponent to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, speaking truth to power in his Brooklyn Jewish accent all across America. Again and again, primaries and polls came…
The Jewish Afroculinarian A food historian, Michael Twitty, might be an unlikely voice of popular protest, but his blog, Afroculinaria, was one of the sites that people went to for passionate commentary on #BlackLivesMatter and the homophobic Florida nightclub shooting in June. Twitty, 39, is black, Jewish and gay, and has been writing about history,…
Judge Judy Still Tops After 20 Years Born Judith Susan Blum and known to the world as Judge Judy, Judith Sheindlin is an icon. Her television courtroom show, where she dispenses tough love with no nonsense, has made her ubiquitous and wealthy. 2016 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Emmy-Award winning show’s premiere. In that…
The New York AG Was a Vocal Trump Attacker New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, 61, learned earlier than most what Donald Trump and his allies were capable of. In August 2013, Schneiderman’s office sued Trump University, the GOP candidate’s now-defunct real estate seminar, for $40 million, claiming it had defrauded its students. The…
Bringing the (NSFW) Jew Flow to Hip Hop It’s been a big year for Lil Dicky (aka David Burd). In February, Forbes named the 28-year-old one of Hip-Hop’s 2016 Cash Princes. In June, the rapper was anointed one of hip-hop’s up-and-comers in XXL magazine’s annual “Freshman Class,” a list whose notable alumni include the likes…
Enough Was Enough In 2014, Danielle Berrin, the Hollywood reporter for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, was looking forward to her interview with Israeli author Ari Shavit, who was in America promoting his New York Times best-selling book “My Promised Land.” But the story that Berrin, 33, came away with was quite different from the…
The Most Important Democrat on Capitol Hill The electoral earthquake that derailed the political establishment on Election Day did not deliver to Sen. Chuck Schumer what he so desperately wanted — a Democratically controlled U.S. Senate. But Donald Trump’s triumph does leave Schumer in line to be the most important Democrat on Capitol Hill, perhaps…
Triumphant Return With a New Novel To a world that, despite his best-selling books and major movies of the millennium’s first decade, had moved on without him, Jonathan Safran Foer has recently announced, “Here I Am.” In 2002, when Foer published his first novel, “Everything Is Illuminated,” at the age of 25, he earned a…
Writing About Jews and Fighting for Gay Rights When Masha Gessen, 49, fled Russia as a teenage refusenik to come to America, she probably never imagined that she would someday become one of the Kremlin’s primary antagonists. But three decades on, she has emerged as one of the loudest and most eloquent critics of autocracy,…
Pinning the BridgeGate Scandal on Chris Christie If they made a movie about David Wildstein’s roller-coaster political career and ties to high school classmate Chris Christie, it might be called “Revenge of the Nerd.” In October, Wildstein, 55, abandoned his political guru when his testimony in the explosive Bridgegate trial helped prosecutors secure convictions against…
