The Forward 50 is a list is compiled each year by the Forward's staff, based on what we have reported over the past year, what we have heard from community members speaking about other community members and whatever objective signposts ― rising or falling budgets, book sales, published buzz, adoption of new laws or proposals ― can be deemed to indicate public influence.
Membership in the 50 doesn't mean that the Forward endorses what these individuals do or say. We've chosen them because they are doing and saying things that are making a difference in the way American Jews, for better or worse, view the world and themselves.
Abraham Foxman
Accused by The New York Times Magazine of crying wolf on antisemitism, by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt of stifling debate on Israel and by Armenian groups of denying the truth of the Armenian genocide, it's been a rough year for Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Yet, despite all the barbs, Foxman, 67, shows little sign of slowing down. He is at once a lightning rod and a battering ram - with Foxman, the metaphors come easily - and quite possibly the most influential figure at work in the Jewish organizational world today. Though his most trusted medium remains the sharply worded press release, Foxman this year published a book, "The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control," that offers a sustained, sober retort both to Walt-Mearsheimer and to Jimmy Carter's "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."
But perhaps the most bruising battle of the year, both for Foxman and the organization he has headed for 20 years, was the debate over the Armenian genocide. The ADL, like other major Jewish organizations, has long avoided the term "genocide" in referring to the World War I-era massacres of Armenians, in deference to Turkey's role as Israel's most important friend in the Muslim world. But when Armenian groups in Massachusetts began to press for a boycott of an ADL anti-bigotry program - and when the ADL's own regional leadership repudiated the national organization's policy - Foxman was forced into an awkward about-face. It was an issue rife with painful ironies. The ADL, normally so vigilant when it to comes to the language of genocide, suddenly let such sensitivities fall by the wayside. It was the Armenians who seemed to be using the ADL's usual playbook. And yet, when the House Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution calling the massacres genocide - and Turkish-American relations became strained overnight as a result - Foxman's concerns suddenly seemed prescient.
Andrew Tarsy
For all but a few days this past year, Andrew Tarsy, 38, was the New England regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. But it's those missing few days that are the key. In an August 16 phone conversation with the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, Tarsy labeled "morally indefensible" the organization's unwillingness to describe the World War I-era massacres of Armenians as "genocide." He was fired the next day. But just four tumultuous days later, Foxman, facing an uprising from Boston Jewish leaders galvanized by Tarsy's act of defiance, changed course and called what happened to the Armenians "tantamount to genocide." Tarsy was reinstated soon thereafter. Tarsy, who served in the Civil Rights Division of the Clinton Justice Department before joining the League, showed that, contrary to popular belief, the ADL is more than just a platform for Foxman: It can be a forum for debate and dissent, capable of being nudged in the right direction when it strays.
Foxman and Tarsy on The Forward 50
