The Next Jewish Community
The push, they prod, they inspire, they innovate, they pull a crowd with their ideas. Now in its sixth year, The Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36” section has honored young people in our community who have dared to challenge conventional thinking and follow their inner compass.
Artists, businesspeople, clergy, educators, journalists and those in helping professions, as well as activists and philanthropists, each year’s 36ers have put their Jewish values into practice to help repair a busted world.
We did a little trend spotting about the new crop. And perhaps not surprisingly, given our media-saturated age, this year’s list contains a healthy dose of media (and media-savvy) people — be it a school psychotherapist who created multimedia programming to combat bullying and assist the substance-addicted; young journalists who are fighting bias against the Orthodox and gays via their writing; or a young documentary filmmaker, educated in Jewish day schools, who produced an award-winning film about China’s great dissident artist Ai Weiwei, amplifying his cry for human rights throughout the world.
As media people ourselves, we hope we’re not being self-serving here. But the nerve to see new possibilities, and the ability to communicate that vision, may be what defines a leader in these days of blink-and-you’ve-missed-it change. Welcome to the future.
Profiles by Heather Robinson, Elicia Brown,
Helen Chernikoff, Adam Dickter,
Hannah Dreyfus, Chavie Lieber, Jonathan Mark,
Steve Lipman and Julie Weiner.
Section curated by Heather Robinson
Special thanks to Israel Bonds, for sponsorship of this issue and their support of young leadership.