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Forward 50 2011
Michael Tilson Thomas
The Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway is well documented, but this year, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas showed that its legacy stretches to the concert hall as well. Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony and founder and artistic director of Miami Beach’s New World Symphony Orchestra, paid tribute to his grandparents, Yiddish theater…
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Forward 50 2011 Leslie Jacobs
Leslie Jacobs isn’t afraid to rock the boat, and tens of thousands of public school students in New Orleans are better off for it. Jacobs has been beating the drum for education reform in Louisiana for more than two decades. She first preached her ideas from an elected seat on the Orleans Parish School Board,…
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Forward 50 2011 Joel Klein
One year ago, Joel Klein had the most thankless job in New York City. He’s since moved on to what may be the most thankless job in the world. In January, Klein, 65, ended nearly a decade as New York City Schools Chancellor. Despite gains in graduation rates and college enrollments, Klein was known as…
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Forward 50 2011 Adam Mansbach
Poet and author Adam Mansbach, 35, first thought of the idea behind “Go the F**k to Sleep,” a children’s book for adults, when he was having a particularly difficult time trying to get his 2-year-old daughter to close her eyes. The book’s cheeky rhymes detail a parent’s struggle to put his child to sleep while…
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Forward 50 2011 William Kristol
In founding the Emergency Committee for Israel, William Kristol and his partners took a page from J Street, an advocacy group on the opposite end of the Jewish political spectrum that has succeeded in creating a big buzz with relatively few resources. Kristol, the most prominent among three board members, set up the ECI to…
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Forward 50 2011 Joy Levitt
Just days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Rabbi Joy Levitt went ahead with opening the nursery school of the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan in its new building on the Upper West Side. And just days after that, she presided over the funeral of Douglas Gardner, executive managing director of Cantor Fitzgerald,…
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Forward 50 2011 Tony Kushner
Dignity in the limelight has been the watchword for this key year in playwright Tony Kushner’s career. A retrospective season at the Signature Theatre Company saw the first major restaging of both parts of his 1990s masterpiece, “Angels in America” — which won both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 — as…
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Forward 50 2011 Jay Sanderson
Jay Sanderson is shaking up America’s second-largest Jewish federation in important ways. This year, on the 100th anniversary of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, Sanderson gave out the first grant in his Next Big Jewish Idea competition, which invited new philanthropies that have never received federation funding to make their pitch for a…
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Forward 50 2011 Michael Arad
In 2004, when Michael Arad won the competition to design the memorial at Ground Zero, he was an unknown architect working for the New York City Housing Authority. As several newspapers detailed, the path between his proposal and its realization was anything but smooth. However, despite the hurdles of spiraling costs, logistical difficulties and personality…
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Forward 50 2011 Richard Morgenstern
By all accounts, Richard Morgenstern is the keeper of George Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I., but he has shown no interest in sharing it with the world. The letter — in which the first president of the United States vowed that the fledgling nation would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution…
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Forward 50 2011 Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi
In the crowded field of Israel advocacy, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder and president of The Israel Project, stands out, and not just because she is one of the few women leaders doing this kind of work. In the nearly 10 years since she founded TIP, the organization has grown from a Washington-based start-up to a…
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