Forward 50 2012
With no Jewish politician vying for a major national post this election year, it has fallen once again to Jon Stewart at the helm of “The Daily Show” to keep the fight fair and the conversation haimish. Stewart, born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz in Lawrenceville, N.J., wears his loyalties to New Jersey, Judaism and honest (though…
It had been too long since Michael Chabon, 49, one of his generation’s most gifted prose stylists, set his sights on contemporary America. Chabon’s most recent full-length novels had seen the author exploring the lives of comic book artists in the 1940s (Pulitzer Prize–winner “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”) and an alternative Jewish…
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the American deli was in dire straits. The last quality holdouts, like the iconic Katz’s Deli in New York and Langer’s Deli in Los Angeles, were still going strong, but the deli landscape overall was rather desolate. Even in New York — dotted with as many…
To be the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times is one of the toughest jobs in American journalism. All sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remain perpetually convinced that whoever holds the position is sympathetic to their opponents, and are eager to prove it. Ethan Bronner passed the highly charged post on to Jodi…
The man who discovered teenage megastar Justin Bieber is Scooter Braun, a 31-year-old talent manager from Greenwich, Conn. Braun is known for finding promising acts on YouTube, drumming up an early fan base with more YouTube videos and then releasing his talent to the broader public with big name endorsements (which in Bieber’s case came…
Until last January, Andrew Adler, 58, was the little-known publisher of a little-known weekly paper called the Atlanta Jewish Times. Long active in the Atlanta community, he had bought the publication, which has a circulation of about 4,000, about two years earlier. Then came the column. In a January 13 opinion piece, Adler wrote that…
At only 29 years old, Ross Perlin has an impressive stack of accomplishments to his name. What’s more impressive is the effect his work is having, from media empires in Manhattan to tiny villages in southwest China. A graduate of Stanford University, Cambridge University, the University of London and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, New York…
When Bassie Shemtov co-founded the Friendship Circle with her husband, Levi, in 1994, her aim was simple: to pair teenagers and special needs children, the idea being that each had much to learn from the other. Eighteen years later, Shemtov, now 40, has given rise to an international phenomenon, with 79 Friendship Circles across North…
The motto of the 2012 Washington Nationals was “Natitude,” a reinvigorating ethos for a long-suffering baseball franchise. Young, talented and brash, the team dominated the National League during the regular season, winning a Major League-leading 98 games. It had taken eight years for the Nationals to go from a new franchise to contenders, but they…
There was some shock, but little surprise, when in 1998 the best-known brand in Israeli Haredi journalism — the venerable daily newspaper Hamodia — appeared in an English-language American version with a woman at the helm. Women generally don’t mount the ultra-Orthodox public stage, particularly in the stringent Ger community, Israel’s largest Hasidic sect, which…
Perhaps because the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation is in Baltimore, outside the usual power centers of American Jewry, it has often been overlooked, despite its $2 billion in assets and the $100 million it gives away annually. That low profile began to rise this year, thanks to its dynamic president, Rachel Garbow Monroe. Monroe,…
