Forward 50 2014
Perhaps the most famous event in modern klezmer happened when Henry Sapoznik, 61, went to North Carolina as a young man to study banjo with oldtime player Tommy Jarrell. Jarrell, realizing that Sapoznik was Jewish, asked the younger musician, “Don’t your people got none of your own music?” That question helped launch the klezmer revival,…
Tell someone to picture the CEO of a Jewish not-for-profit organization and they probably won’t envision a woman with a tattoo, a black belt in kung fu, a history of demonstrating against Israeli policies and experience dancing at a sex club. But Stosh Cotler has all that and more. Cotler, 46, took over as CEO…
“When your parents are dying, it’s not like a baby, where people want to come over and play with the baby. Somebody comes over and brings you a little onesie or stretchy…. What are they going to do — bring Depends? Or a case of Ensure?” That’s Roz Chast, 59, perhaps best known for her…
He was born in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba as Sharon Even-Haim and lived a typical Israeli life, which included serving as an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and harnessing the Israeli entrepreneurial spirit to launch a successful real estate business. Less typical, however, was his move to America. Evenhaim immigrated to Los…
Los Angeles native Micah Wexler, 32, cooked in some pretty posh joints — Craft in L.A. and L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Las Vegas — before opening his own place, the Middle Eastern-focused Mezze, in March 2011. The restaurant received plaudits but lasted barely a year, due to issues with a neighboring construction site. Last…
It’s been said that sophomore albums and second novels form one of the least-loved and most-overlooked categories in the arts. We remember the flashy debuts and frequently forget the inevitably disappointing follow-ups. Which is why authors and readers alike welcomed the news that Slate and the Whiting Foundation would be assembling a list of “best…
“The connection I have with Judaism, to me, is very special,” explained Chava Karen Knox, 48. “When you recognize that God is in everything around you, it centers you in who you are.” Knox is an African-American woman who was born and raised in Detroit and always felt a strong connection to Judaism. She converted…
General managers of opera companies, even ones as prestigious as the Metropolitan Opera, rarely find themselves on the front pages of tabloid newspapers. But it isn’t every year that the Met chooses to showcase “The Death of Klinghoffer,” the opera by John Adams with a libretto by Alice Goodman that dramatizes the murder of a…
Leah Vincent, 32, became the new face of the burgeoning ex-Orthodox community this year with the publication of her feted memoir, “Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood.” Vincent is just one of several formerly Orthodox authors to tell their stories in recent books. But in addition to describing her own experiences,…
Shmuel Lefkowitz, 68, leads the Orthodox fight to allow Jewish people to die according to their religious beliefs. But as the Forward showed this year, Lefkowitz’s organization, Chayim Aruchim, also believes in challenging a patient’s or relative’s wishes if those wishes contravene Jewish law. In one case, a lawyer to whom Chayim Aruchim refers cases…
Saul Zabar is not a romantic. “There’s nothing poetic about this business,” he told The New York Times in 2008. Try telling that to the crowds swarming his Upper West Side store each Friday: grandmas shoving yuppies, yuppies shoving grandmas, everyone salivating over the lox. Zabar’s turns 80 this year, and Saul Zabar, its 86-year-old…
