Forward 50 2012
The February fight over whether a Brooklyn supermarket should boycott Israeli goods may not have been the most important battle in the debate over the international movement to impose boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. It may, however, have been the most visible. That’s because the supermarket was the Park Slope Food Co-op, the venerable…
It’s one thing to be an acknowledged master of one instrument and musical style; it’s quite another to be a master of two. For more than 40 years, Andy Statman has been a celebrated player of bluegrass mandolin and klezmer clarinet — and all combinations thereof. This year, on the heels of his critically acclaimed…
With the Israel debate roiling college campuses around America, there has been no shortage of hand-wringing from the organized Jewish community about the welfare of Jewish students. Ken Marcus has taken a different approach. A former staff director at the U.S. Department of Education, Marcus, 46, has emerged as a vocal proponent of using federal…
Her position as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee has brought Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz plenty of attention, some for better and some for worse. She was in the national spotlight chairing the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte and took center stage at one of the convention’s most moving moments, when she accompanied her…
It took more than 30 years of writing and research, but “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power” represented the culmination of work that veteran San Francisco journalist Seth Rosenfeld began when, as a reporter working for the student newspaper The Daily Californian in the early 1980s, he tried to…
In the less than two years since she grabbed the reins of the National Council of Jewish Women, Nancy Kaufman, 61, has injected energy and purpose into the venerable organization. Her native Boston accent is still strong, but Kaufman is now playing on the national stage, using her network of 90,000 members and supporters to…
Brad Sherman is a survivor. Left for dead in the fiercest Jewish political battle of the 2012 election cycle, the 58-year-old California Democratic Congressman defied a fundraising deficit and an embarrassing viral video to pull off a convincing victory over his foe Howard Berman. Sherman shouldn’t have had to fight for his spot in Congress….
When prize-winning teacher and poet Jay Ladin got tenure at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women in 2006, he knew he could finally have the gender reassignment procedures that would free him from a body he had never felt at home in, without risking his job. Life was tough as a man, but there’d be…
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…
