Forward 50 2011
At 71, after a lifetime of public service, Ruth Messinger is still pushing to awaken our collective conscious to the needs and challenges of the developing world. As president and chief executive officer of the American Jewish World Service, she has elevated the organization into a service and advocacy titan, with programs in 32 countries,…
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…
New York Mets baseball fans are used to heartbreak, but nothing prepared them for the meltdown this year of the team’s principal owner, real-estate investor Fred Wilpon. Previously thought to be a major victim of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, Wilpon, 74, turned out to be one of the scam’s biggest beneficiaries. In December 2010, Wilpon…
For famed conductor James Levine, the wear and tear of 40 years of wielding the baton has taken its toll. In March, Levine announced he would resign in September as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a post he had held since 2004. During his tenure, Levine was plagued by a litany of health…
When historian Michael Hirsch set out on a quest to identify the last six victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, he had no idea that he was facing four years of painstaking research. To complete the list of the 146 victims of the 1911 fire, Hirsch read microfilm from New York City newspapers of…
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,…
