Forward 50 2011
For many people, Mark Bittman’s name is synonymous with “The Minimalist,” the food column he wrote in The New York Times for 13 years, and later, the accompanying video series in which he prepared simple recipes for the Times’ Dining section. Through his column and numerous cookbooks, including “How To Cook Everything,” Bittman has made…
John Zorn, one of the most interesting forces in Jewish music today, is something of a legend as a saxophonist and composer in New York City’s downtown avant-garde music scene. This year saw Zorn, 58, present his expansive “Masada” collection of compositions with 12 different ensembles at Carnegie Hall — a few steps removed from…
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein was rehearsing at the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival in September when she learned that she’d been named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. Noting her “technical precision” and “impassioned musicianship,” the MacArthur Foundation described her as “a consummate performer.” The $500,000 “genius grant” came during a year in which the 29-year-old hit her…
When the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City broached a plan to establish a “YIVO room” at the Lithuanian National Library in Vilna, passions were ignited among a small but significant group of scholars, historians and Holocaust survivors. Leading the charge was 55-year-old Dovid Katz, a former professor of Yiddish language, literature…
Holocaust literature and comics aren’t genres that obviously fit together, but by combining the two, one artist has created a revolution in both. Twenty-five years ago, Art Spiegelman, then an important but obscure figure in the underground comix scene, published “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” a graphic novel about the World War II experiences of his…
“I’m asking myself where is everybody and how loud do I have to yell and from what mountaintop,” Caryl Stern told The New York Times in August, when it appeared that the famine in the Horn of Africa would reach epic proportions. “The overwhelming problem is that the American public is not seeing and feeling…
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…
Thirty years after taking up the position of director of New York’s Jewish Museum, Joan Rosenbaum stepped down in August. In that time, her influence on the institution and the cultural life of the American Jewish community has been immeasurable. Before moving to the Jewish Museum, Rosenbaum had worked for seven years at the Museum…
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…
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…
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….
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