Forward 50 2011
This has been a challenging year for Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, but the upcoming year will be even tougher. As chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, the 45-year-old Wasserman Schultz has been spending her time in the political trenches, fighting Republican attacks and crisscrossing the country on behalf of struggling Democratic candidates….
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….
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…
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,…
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….
Until recently, if you craved sophisticated Israeli fare, there was no way to sate your appetite other than to board a plane to the Holy Land or cook it yourself. Michael Solomonov, the chef and co-owner of Zahav restaurant in Philadelphia, is changing that. In 2008, he opened the restaurant to much national acclaim, and…
Simon Greer would like to be known as the man who took down the provocative political commentator Glenn Beck. As the president and CEO of Jewish Funds for Justice, Greer led a campaign to get Beck booted from his Fox News show over Beck’s allegedly anti-Semitic rhetoric and his invocations of the Holocaust. In a…
Jill Abramson, 57, became perhaps the most influential media professional in the world in September when she ascended to the executive editorship of The New York Times. That a Jewish person has been made top editor of the Times, an institution that once went to great lengths to play down its own Jewish ownership, is…
