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Forward 50 2014
Berel Lazar
In a year where the conflict between Ukraine and Russia was fought not only with weapons but also with rhetoric about opposing anti-Semitism, Berel Lazar has been Vladimir Putin’s Jewish point man in the propaganda war. Following a spate of anti-Semitic incidents that accompanied Ukraine’s February revolution, the Russian president smeared Ukraine’s revolutionaries as “anti-Semites…
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Forward 50 2014 Einat Admony
New York is in the midst of an Israeli food movement, and one 5-foot mother of two, who zips between her Brooklyn home and her downtown Manhattan restaurants on a candy-pink Vespa, is leading the charge. By the end of 2014, Tel Aviv-born but naturalized American Einat Admony, 43, will have been a New York…
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Forward 50 2014 Jeff Jacoby
Who would’ve thought one Tweet from a worried father could turn the Jewish world upside down with equal parts compassion and fear? The social media post from Jeff Jacoby, 55, a Boston Globe columnist, included a photo of his 16-year-old son, Caleb Jacoby, and a plaintive plea: Help me find my boy. Soon thousands were…
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Forward 50 2014 Amy Cohen
Amy Cohen’s life changed irrevocably one evening last fall. The Brooklyn social worker’s 12-year-old son, Sammy Cohen-Eckstein, was walking back from a soccer game in leafy Prospect Park when he was struck and killed by a passing van directly in front of his apartment building. Anyone would be grief-stricken, especially since Sammy, a popular eighth-grader,…
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Forward 50 2014 Ivan Orkin
How does a self-described terrible student who got kicked out of Hebrew school end up at the top of his field? If you’re chef Ivan Orkin, 51, owner of two wildly successful ramen joints in Tokyo and two steaming hot bôites in New York, it took a long, strange trip — one that spanned continents…
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Forward 50 2014 Loretta Weinberg
Don’t mess with Loretta Weinberg. The Senate Majority Leader of the New Jersey Senate may be 79 years old, but she still knows how to throw a political punch. Three years ago, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie suggested that the press “take the bat out on” Weinberg. This year, he’s been dodging her blows. Weinberg…
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Forward 50 2014 David Saperstein
If partisan politics doesn’t interfere, Rabbi David Saperstein will be confirmed soon as the U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom. A lawyer and rabbi, Saperstein, 67, will be the first non-Christian to hold this position, which was created in 1998 and is entrusted with combating religious persecution and discrimination across the world. It…
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Forward 50 2014 Steven Sotloff
Steven Sotloff should be ineligible for the Forward 50. Our list honors the living. But Sotloff, who was murdered by Islamic militants in the summer, merits special inclusion. To the end, he held fast to his beliefs, both as a journalist and as a Jew. If not for the fanatical ideology of his murderers, Sotloff…
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Forward 50 2014 Alan Blassberg
Alan Blassberg can’t enter a Cheesecake Factory restaurant without thinking about breast cancer. That’s where he was lunching when he got the call that his sister Sammy Blassberg had been diagnosed. The call would turn Blassberg from documentary filmmaker to activist. Sammy Blassberg died in 2010, at age 47. That same year, Blassberg’s other sister…
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Forward 50 2014 Scarlett Johansson
The 29-year-old actress who hates to be known as “ScarJo” had a busy year, what with starring in several films, recording soundtracks, and giving birth to a baby girl with her fiancé Romain Dauriac. Yet she found time to become a symbol both praised and derided in the Jewish world for her persistent promotion of…
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Forward 50 2014 Susan Talve
When Rabbi Jill Jacobs, head of the rabbinic social justice group T’ruah, wanted to travel to Ferguson, Missouri to support protesters, she got in touch with Susan Talve. Talve, 61, is rabbi and spiritual leader of Central Reform Congregation, located a few miles from Ferguson, in downtown St. Louis. Ever since the August death of…
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