News

Eric Cantor

The Republican landslide in the midterm elections catapulted Eric Cantor to a spot no Jew has ever held before — majority leader of the House of Representatives. It could be a coincidence that the highest position a Jewish lawmaker has ever reached in Congress went to the sole Jewish Republican in the House, but it…

Michael Sussman

The sleepy village of Goshen in upstate New York’s Orange County seems an improbable place to find someone shaking up the Jewish world. But civil rights attorney Michael Sussman, 57, is doing just that through lawsuits against two redoubts of ultra-Orthodoxy ensconced in the Catskills. The suits threaten, for better or worse, to upend what…

Sheryl Sandberg

When Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s second-in-command and chief operating officer, took the stage at the Barnard College commencement this past June, the executive pulled no punches. In her speech, she encouraged the all-female graduating class to eschew fear and to make fewer compromises when balancing their professional and personal lives. The women of her generation had…

David Yerushalmi

Over the last 18 months, about two dozen state legislatures have taken up bills that would restrict judges from consulting Shariah, or traditional Islamic law, in their rulings. Three states have passed such laws. It is a wave that began five years ago in the Crown Heights office of lawyer David Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Lubavitch-affiliated…

Jennifer Rubin

Jennifer Rubin, 49, came to journalism late in life, after two decades as a California labor lawyer, but she’s made up for lost time. In February 2007, after she and her family moved to northern Virginia, Rubin pitched a story to the conservative Weekly Standard on the abortion flip-flops of outgoing Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney….

Natalie Portman

Jared Cohen

For his first initiative as head of Google’s new think tank, Google Ideas, Jared Cohen convened a meeting of 80 one-time violent extremists to talk about what had drawn them to radicalism and what had made them leave it behind. The meeting was a bold venture that made some leading academics nervous, but Cohen, 29,…

David Graeber

As the Occupy Wall Street movement swept across the country in September, activist David Graeber became a public face for a resurgent leftism based on radical, direct-action protest. Graeber, 50, describes himself as a “small-a anarchist,” meaning that he is interested in promoting anarchist principles without binding himself to a specific school of anarchist thought….