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How Norman Sugarman Became $50B Godfather of Charitable Funds
If you asked most people why the year 1969 was important in American life, few would mention that year’s federal Tax Reform Act. But Norman Sugarman’s fingerprints on that document may have had as much of a lasting effect on this country’s history as Neil Armstrong’s feet on the moon. More than $50 billion in…
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Sweeping Generational Change Looms as Leaders of Jewish Groups Near Retirement
The Anti-Defamation League saw its legendary leader, Abraham Foxman, step down after 28 years at the helm and replaced by 44-year-old outsider Jonathan Greenblatt. UJA-Federation of New York’s longtime CEO, John Ruskay, left last June. His successor, Eric Goldstein, came from the private sector. Within the past few years, a new top leader also took…
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Reform Leader Vows To Tighten Discipline After Rabbi Eric Siroka Flap
The leader of America’s largest rabbinical organization vowed to improve his group’s disciplinary process following a Forward investigation that highlighted failures to alert a Jewish community of alleged sexual misconduct by a Reform rabbi. In a series of private emails and Facebook posts to rabbis, obtained by the Forward, Rabbi Steve Fox said that the…
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Why Tajikistan’s Last Jews Are Staying Put Despite Waves of Change
The secret synagogue of Tajikistan is not hard to find once you know where to look. Like much in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s small and humdrum capital, the building is on a street whose name no one uses and where few strangers venture. From the outside it could be just another upscale house with a lush courtyard,…
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Defying Stereotypes, Jewish Life in the South Is Flourishing
When Courtney Ferriter arrived six years ago in the predominantly Protestant community of Auburn, Alabama, she needed a place where she felt like she belonged. “You feel like you’re a bit of an outsider, so the natural inclination is, you want to go find your people,” Ferriter said. Ferriter, a graduate student at Auburn University,…
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Presidential Candidates Head to Israel — But Who Foots the Bill?
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson visited Israel on a tour organized by a for-profit company that has since ceased most of its activity. Ted Cruz took the trip on the dime of a hawkish advocacy group with neoconservative ties. Rand Paul had an anti-gay Christian group pay his way to Jerusalem. And Carly Fiorina, a…
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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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