A Year of Curses and Many Blessings
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Craft of The Atlantic’s New Editor Washington journalist Jeffrey Goldberg had a productive 2016. In March, he published “The Obama Doctrine,” a 20,000-word essay on President Obama’s foreign policy, in The Atlantic. Drawing on hours of conversations with Obama and dozens of aides, critics and foreign leaders, the piece aimed “to see the world…
Helping Us Age Wisely When Rabbi Rachel Cowan turned 75 earlier this year, she threw herself a birthday party in keeping with her character. She asked friends and family members to celebrate with her at The Brotherhood Sister Sol, a nonprofit focused on youth development in Harlem, on whose board she sits. She fed and…
