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Turning dining hall dollars into food for the hungry, Rachel Sumekh has empowered college students to address food insecurity in their communities and has shined a light on hunger on university campuses.
A political operative who served as deputy director of issues and research for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, Sara Teitelbaum Ehrman had an inadvertent brush with history when she drove Hillary Rodham to Arkansas while urging her not to marry Bill Clinton.
When her husband was murdered during Freedom Summer in 1964 in Mississippi, Rita Levant Schwerner Bender used the ensuing media attention to focus the public’s awareness on the importance of civil rights.
Veronika Wolf Cohen has shaped Israeli minds in two very different ways, by developing national music curricula and by leading innovative Israeli-Palestinian dialogue groups.
Edie Windsor struck a historic blow for gay rights in 2013 when the Supreme Court ruled in her favor in United States v. Windsor, granting same sex couples recognition by the federal government.
Zionist Vitka Kempner-Kovner helped found the United Partisan Organization (FPO) in the Vilna Ghetto and struck a blow for freedom by blowing up a Nazi train.
Rabbi Barbara Penzner has been a moral force for her congregation, leading it in multiple actions to uphold human rights around the world and in the local community.
Throughout her career, Rabbi Avis Miller has searched for new ways to educate, engage, and support unaffiliated Jews and those on the margins of the Jewish community.
As president of Guyana for two years, Janet Rosenberg Jagan was the first American-born woman to serve as president of any country. Jagan was a student at the Cook County Nursing School in Chicago when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student.
Mary Loeb Gendler has helped shape social justice movements in indirect but effective ways, from crafting new rituals for Jewish feminists to helping Tibetan exiles leverage the tools of nonviolent protest.
When Nadine Gordimer’s depictions of apartheid earned her the Nobel Prize for Literature, she used her fame to fund HIV prevention and treatment in her native South Africa.
At a time when women were banned from universities, Henriette Benas Goldschmidt championed women’s education as a crucial building block of a healthy society.
Years of covering Putin’s regime in Russia made journalist Maria Alexandrovna “Masha” Gessen uniquely qualified to point out uncomfortable parallels between Putin’s leadership style and that of President Trump.
After the 2016 election, journalist Laura Moser created Daily Action to mobilize and coordinate people who wanted to become active in resisting problematic policies of the Trump administration.
Hari Nef, the first trans woman model to be signed to the prestigious IMG modeling agency, has used her public platform to speak out on issues that affect other transgender people.
