Forward 50 2011
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It has been a banner year for billionaire Sheldon Adelson, though some of his actions garnered a bunch of bad publicity, too. The casino mogul’s free newspaper, Israel Hayom, which has a strong right-wing slant, maintained its impressive reign as the largest Monday-through-Friday daily circulation newspaper in Israel. Adelson also made a foray into the…
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