Forward 50 2012
After a period of relative restraint, Judy Gross this year dramatically ramped up the campaign to liberate her husband from a Cuban jail. With the help of a top Washington PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, and subsequently a specialist human rights firm Perseus Strategies, Gross, 63, began to use the American media to call on the Cuban…
Dan Senor might be the one Jewish Republican who had more of an impact on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign than even billionaire political donor Sheldon Adelson. A rising young foreign policy hawk, Senor, 41, speaks both the language of the neoconservative old guard and the language of the Tea Party. He served dual roles for…
Armed with a day school education and a college history degree, Alison Klayman, now 28, graduated from Brown University in 2006 and headed for Beijing, to learn the language and explore the culture. She told her parents that she’d stay for a few months; six years later, she is garnering international acclaim for her documentary…
Ayelet Galena’s January death, at the age of 2, from a rare bone marrow disease, set off a wave of mourning that spanned time zones and oceans. Some 14,000 people around the world had been following the little girl’s fight for her life on the family’s Eye on Ayelet blog. For months, as Ayelet was…
Since January, Jacob (Jack) Lew has officially been the Jew closest to the ear of the president. As White House chief of staff, Lew is not only the Oval Office gatekeeper, but also a key voice on policy issues, especially those relating to his field of expertise — budget and economy. Lew is the first…
Errol Morris might just have a genetic predisposition to seek justice. After all, earlier this year, the Academy Award–winning documentary filmmaker and author, who became a bar mitzvah at the Conservative Congregation Sons of Israel in Woodmere, N.Y., revealed to the Forward that he is the great-grandson of a Talmud scholar. Long before the term…
Eilenberg trimmed his beard on Tuesday and did not leave home until Friday. It was his wife, my good friend Gitty, who put an end to it — she who could not understand him. “You wanted to trim your beard for over a year,” she screamed, exasperated. “Why are you crying now like you lost…
For the highest-ranking Jewish representative in Congress, elections are mainly about helping others. Majority leader Eric Cantor crisscrossed the country this election year, helping out struggling fellow Republicans with a boost of energy and campaign cash. At 49, Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, has established himself as a political powerhouse mentioned in any…
Though Nathan Englander may identify himself as an “apostate,” one of this 42-year-old author’s greatest talents is his ability to capture the spectrum of Jewish experience. In this year’s story collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” Englander channeled voices of Israeli settlers, Jewish children and senior citizens, and, in the…
On the spectrum of Jewish foods, gefilte fish is at the extreme end of iconic Ashkenazi fare. And bacon? Well… it’s not even on the spectrum. But the two are brought together in the passions and profession of Brooklynite Jeffrey Yoskowitz. Along with Liz Alpern and Jackie Lilinshtein, Yoskowitz, 28, launched an artisanally crafted, sustainably…
The publication this year of the Forward 50 has happened differently from previous years. This entry includes the final video of this year’s Top 5: those American Jews who we think have had the most significant impact on the news in the past year. Whether you love him or hate him for it, Sheldon Adelson,…
