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Forward 50 2015
Haim Saban
The Israeli-American entertainment mogul’s political loyalty was put to a test this year. Haim Saban, a top financial backer and personal friend of Hillary Clinton, and a hawkish supporter of Israel, was faced with a dilemma posed by the proposed Iranian nuclear deal: Clinton was for it; Israel was against it, as was AIPAC, the…
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Forward 50 2015 Bernie Sanders
The only serious challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination has a Brooklyn Jewish accent that makes even the most comfortably assimilated Jews ask: “Hold on, that guy is running for president? Of the United States?” Bernie Sanders, who pronounces fewer r’s than Uncle Leo on “Seinfeld,” is polling surprisingly well after nearly…
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Forward 50 2015 Tom Frieden
For six months up to April 2015, Tom Frieden, 55, felt the weight of America’s panic. As the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Frieden was the government’s principal contact in stopping the Ebola virus epidemic in America. Starting in 2013, Ebola had ravaged West Africa, killing thousands. Proving difficult to quarantine,…
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Forward 50 2015 Leon Rodriguez
His grandparents fled a crumbling Ottoman Empire and rising anti-Semitism in Poland to seek refuge in Cuba. His parents left the island’s oppressive communist regime for a better future in the United States. Now, Leon Rodriguez, who grew up in a Cuban-Jewish enclave in Florida, has come full circle: 2015 is his first full year…
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Forward 50 2015 Tom Sosnik
Thirteen-year old Tom Sosnik, one of the youngest people on this year’s Forward 50 list, made headlines in March when a video of him coming out to his class as transgender went viral. Sosnik decided to make his brave speech after reading about Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen who died by suicide in 2014 after…
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Forward 50 2015 Marina Rustow
Marina Rustow got the phone call informing her that she was officially a genius while shopping for clothes with her 4-year-old. Rustow, 46, a Princeton University professor who has plumbed unexplored depths of the Cairo Geniza, this year became the first academic expert in Jewish studies to win one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants”…
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Forward 50 2015 Capers Funnye
In sermons, Rabbi Capers Funnye quotes from spirituals and the Talmud, from Abraham Joshua Heschel and from black nationalist Marcus Garvey. It’s a preaching style well suited for Funnye’s role as the newly installed chief rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis — the main rabbinical body in the Hebrew Israelite community. And it…
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Forward 50 2015 Deborah Waxman
In the long communal discussion over how to relate to Jews who marry non-Jews, those in the “be welcoming” camp won a major battle this year, thanks in large part to Rabbi Deborah Waxman. Waxman is president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary, which, after more than a year of deliberation, decided in a September faculty…
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Forward 50 2015 Charles Schumer
Chuck Schumer was in a tough spot. The Iran nuclear deal was coming before Congress for approval, and the United States senator from New York had an unenviable decision before him. On the one hand, Schumer was getting an earful from deep-pocketed Jewish donors and activists who opposed the deal. On the other hand, the…
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Forward 50 2015 Mendy Reiner
It’s a rare group of people who can say they saved another person’s life. But dozens of Jews, most of them ultra-Orthodox, are saving lives every year by committing a profound act of altruism — becoming a live kidney donor to a stranger. That’s thanks to Mendy Reiner, 38, a soft-spoken ultra-Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn….
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Forward 50 2015 Alan Gross
When Alan Gross was released from a Cuban jail in December 2014, people would have forgiven him if all he wanted was to retire to his Maryland home for a quiet life with his wife, Judy. During his five years in captivity, he lost 100 pounds, considered committing suicide and missed saying goodbye to his…
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