Jewish

Singer-Songwriter

b. April 7, 1951

“Truth is not the enemy, and whatever does not kill us sets us free.”

Janis Ian is a folk singer-songwriter and lifelong activist. She has won three Grammy Awards and been nominated for 10.

Born in Farmingdale, New Jersey, to a liberal Jewish family, Ian grew up on a farm. She began playing piano at age 2 and guitar at age 10.

In 1965, at age 14, Ian wrote “Society’s Child” (“Baby I’ve Been Thinking”). The song was released the following year and reached No. 14 on the Billboard 100. Even so, Ian was harassed both on- and offstage for its lyrics, which depict an interracial relationship. In 1967 she was nominated for her first Grammy for Best Folk Performance.

In 1975 Ian performed on the premiere episode of “Saturday Night Live.” The following year she won two Grammy Awards, including Best Pop Female Vocalist, and was nominated for three more.

Ian married an abusive man in 1978 and divorced him five years later. She moved to Nashville “penniless, in debt, and hungry to write.”

In 1992 Ian came out as a lesbian and started her own label, Rude Girl Records. After a nine-year music-industry hiatus, she released the album, “Breaking Silence” (1993). It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Folk Album.

Ian became a columnist in 1994. She wrote for The Advocate until 1997 and for Performing Songwriter until 2001. In 1998 she and her future wife founded The Pearl Foundation in honor of Ian’s mother. Since its inception, the organization has donated more than $1.2 million in college scholarships to support returning students.

Ian’s mother, Pearl, put her lifelong dream of attending college on hold when she married at age 18. When Ian was 15, Pearl was diagnosed with MS. Ian then convinced her mother to return to school and paid for her tuition. Ian insists “the proudest thing” she ever did “was sending her to college.”

In 2001 Ian began publishing her science fiction short stories online. She was one of the first recording artists with a personal website and controversially maintained that “free Internet downloads are good for the music industry and its artists.”

In 2002 Ian’s debut song, “Society’s Child,” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2008 her hit single “At Seventeen” was also inducted. Ian’s autobiography, “Society’s Child” (2008), earned her a 2009 Grammy (Best Spoken Word) for the audiobook. She was nominated again in 2016 for her reading of the lesbian classic, “Patience and Sarah.”

Ian has been honored by the New York State Senate and the Human Rights Campaign. She lives in Nashville with her wife.

U.S. Congressman

b. July 15, 1961

“The American people deserve to know who will stand up and speak out for those on the margins of society.”

David N. Cicilline is a Democrat representing Rhode Island’s 1st District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Previously, he served two terms as the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, and four terms in the Rhode Island House of Representatives. He was the first openly gay mayor of an American state capital and the fourth openly gay member of Congress.

A native of Providence, Cicilline is the son of a Jewish mother and an Italian Catholic father. Cicilline regards himself as a practicing Jew. His father was a well-known attorney who had been an aide to Mayor Joseph Doorley Jr. and defended members of the mafia.

As an undergraduate at Brown University, Cicilline started a political club, the College Democrats, with fellow student John F. Kennedy Jr. Cicilline received his B.A. in political science in 1983. He earned his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, then worked as an attorney for the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C.

In 1996, after a failed senatorial bid, Cicilline won a seat in the Rhode Island House of Representatives. He came out publicly in 1999, insisting his sexuality was irrelevant to the campaign. He described himself as a “candidate who happens to be gay rather than a gay candidate.”

In 2002 Cicilline ran for mayor of Providence and won by landslide, carrying 84% of the vote. He became the city’s first openly gay mayor and the country’s first openly gay mayor of a state capital. He won reelection in 2006 by nearly an identical margin. As mayor, he cofounded a bipartisan gun-control coalition, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Cicilline was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010. He became the fourth openly gay member of Congress.

Throughout his political career, Cicilline has championed the rights of the middle class, vulnerable populations and the LGBTQ+ community. He has worked to ensure affordable health-care access and to protect social security and Medicare. Among countless other initiatives, he has authored the Assault Weapons Ban, introduced the Automatic Voter Registration Act and co-sponsored multiple pieces of environmental legislation.

After the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage, Cicilline proposed the Equality Act to prohibit LGBT discrimination nationwide. In 2018 he co-authored the Gay and Trans Panic Defense Prohibition Act to prevent lawyers from using victims’ LGBTQ+ identity to justify crimes against them.

Cicilline serves as chair of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee and vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. In January 2021 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Cicilline a co-manager of the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.

National Rabbinical Leader

b. February 20, 1967

“Creating a world that goes beyond inclusion, that embraces people in their unique differences, is work for us all.”

Rabbi Deborah Waxman is the first woman and the first lesbian to lead a Jewish seminary and national congregational union. She serves as president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) and of Reconstructing Judaism, the leading organization of the Reconstructionist movement.

Waxman was born to conservative Jewish parents in West Hartford, Connecticut. Her father was a traveling salesman and her mother was the president of their synagogue’s sisterhood.

Waxman earned her bachelor’s degree in religion from Columbia University, her Master of Hebrew Letters from the RRC, and her doctorate in American Jewish history from Temple University. She also completed a certificate in Jewish women's studies from the RRC in conjunction with Temple University.

In 1999 the RRC ordained Waxman. She began teaching at the seminary and served as the rabbi of Congregation Bet Haverim in New York, before becoming vice president for governance of the RRC. In that role, she merged the RRC and the Jewish Reconstructionist Communities. Together, they form the Jewish Reconstructionist movement. In 2014 she became its president.

Waxman won grants from prominent donors, such as the Kresge, the Wexner, and the Cummings Foundations. She led initiatives to create interactive digital content, to bolster Reconstructionist Judaism’s ties to Israel and to help young people through camping programs.

Waxman is regarded as the Reconstructionist movement’s thought leader. She has provided an important voice for feminism in Judaism, encouraging gender equality in Jewish leadership. A member of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, she researches, writes and speaks at conferences about Jewish identity, women in American Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism. Publications such as The Times of Israel, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, HuffPost, Forward, and other media and academic outlets have published her articles. She also created and hosts the podcast “Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings on Resilience.”

In 2015 Waxman was named to the “Forward 50,” a list of Jewish Americans “who have made a significant impact on the Jewish story.” She was interviewed by MSNBC following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, and she wrote an opinion piece on Jewish values amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Waxman lives in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, with her partner, Christina Ager, a professor at Arcadia University.

Award-Winning Theater Director

b. November 21, 1963

“Art is a great prism through which we can understand history and current events.”

Moisés Kaufman is an award-winning theater director and playwright. His work is known for its bold, perceptive portrayals of contemporary social issues, particularly those of sexuality and culture. His groundbreaking play, “The Laramie Project,” inspired by the brutal killing of a gay college student, Mathew Shepard, generated worldwide empathy and dialogue around LGBT hate crimes.

Born in Venezuela, Kaufman grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family. As a youth, he was exposed to avant-garde theater. While working toward a business degree in Caracas, he joined an experimental theater group and toured as an actor.

In 1987 Kaufman moved to Manhattan to study theater direction at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Recognizing the originality of Kaufman’s ideas, Arthur Bartow, the university’s dean, advised him at graduation, “No one will hire you. You should start your own theater company.”

In 1991 Kaufman and his husband, Jeffrey LaHoste, founded the experimental Tectonic Theater Project, dedicated to developing consciousness-raising, innovative works that push the boundaries of theatrical language and form. In its early years, the cash-strapped troupe rehearsed in the couple’s apartment. Under Kaufman’s artistic direction, Tectonic eventually flourished. The theater company has since created and staged more than 20 plays and musicals. Many, including the “The Laramie Project,” “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde” and “33 Variations,” have garnered international acclaim.

Shortly after the murder of Mathew Shepard in 1998, Kaufman took his Manhattan-based theater company to Laramie, Wyoming, the small college town where the crime occurred. They conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with 200 local residents. Kaufman used the conversations to write and produce “The Laramie Project.” The play, which premiered in 2000, became one of the most-produced works of the decade. It has been performed worldwide in theaters and schools and used to educate people about homophobia. Kaufman also wrote and directed a screen adaptation that was released on HBO in 2002.

Kaufman has earned numerous accolades for his work, including an Obie Award for his Broadway directorial debut, “I Am My Own Wife”; two Tony Award nominations: one for “I Am My Own Wife” and one for “33 Variations”; the Outer Critics Award for “Gross Indecency”; and two Emmy nominations for “The Laramie Project.” In 2009 President Obama invited Kaufman and Techtonic to witness the signing of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. In 2016 President Obama presented Kauffman with the National Medal of Arts.

Community Nursing Founder

b. March 10, 1867
d. September 1, 1940

“Nursing is love in action ...”

Lillian Wald was a social reformer and the founder of the American community nursing movement. Her visionary leadership in public health; women and children’s welfare; and labor, immigrants’ and civil rights led to the formation of countless institutions worldwide.

Wald was born to a German Jewish middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio. After graduating in 1891 from the nursing program at the New York Hospital Training School, she took a job at the New York Juvenile Asylum, an orphanage, where she quickly grew disillusioned with institutional methods of child care. As her biographer and friend, R. L. Duffus, commented, “She had too much individuality to be willing to lose herself as a cog in an established institution. Instinctively, she wanted to change things—to do better.”

Wald attended medical school briefly. During this time, she witnessed firsthand the poverty and hardship endured by immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. She resolved to bring affordable health care to those in need.

In 1893 Wald quit medical school and organized the Henry Street Settlement, otherwise known as the Visiting Nurse Society (VNS) of New York. The VNS operated on a sliding fee scale to provide all city residents with an opportunity to access medical care. Wald pioneered, and coined the term, “public health nursing” with the belief that the nurse’s “organic relationship with the neighborhood should constitute the starting point for a universal service to the region.” By 1913, through her tireless efforts, the VNS grew from 10 to 92 nurses, making 200,000 visits annually. It became a model for similar entities across the nation and around the globe.

Wald became a highly influential advocate at the city, state and national levels. She persuaded the New York Board of Education to initiate the first American public school nursing program in Manhattan. She successfully lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to create a Federal Children’s Bureau to protect children from abusive child labor, and she helped form the Women’s Trade Union to protect women working in sweatshops. She campaigned for women’s suffrage and supported racial integration, helping to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Upon her recommendation, The New York Commission on Immigration was formed to investigate the living and working conditions of immigrants.

Wald did not marry and maintained her closest relationships with women. Although she did not self-identify as a lesbian, her letters reveal the intimate affection she felt for at least two of her companions, Mabel Hyde Kittredge and Helen Arthur.

Wald died of a stroke at the age of 73.

Governor of Colorado

b. May 12, 1975

“I'm in this fight to build a Colorado economy that works for everyone.”

A member of the Democratic Party, Jared Polis is the first openly gay person—and only the second openly LGBT person—to be elected governor in the United States. A gifted entrepreneur and well-known philanthropist, he previously served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Colorado State Board of Education.

Polis was born to a Jewish family in Boulder, Colorado. He studied politics at Princeton University and started his first business, American Information Systems, in his college dorm room. By age 30, he had launched and sold three successful companies, including ProFlowers, one of the world’s leading online flower retailers. Passionate about education, he founded two innovative charter schools serving at-risk and immigrant youth and the Jared Polis Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports Colorado educators. He has used his wealth to generously support progressive causes.

Polis entered politics in 2000. In one of the closest races in Colorado history, he was elected to the State Board of Education, where he served until 2007. In 2008 he won a heavily contested election for U.S. representative of Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District. In his five terms in Congress, he co-introduced numerous legislative measures concerning education and affordable housing, including the 2011 Race to the Top Act, which rewards innovation and reforms in K-12 education. One of the first openly gay people and the first gay parent elected to the House of Representatives, he served as co-chair of the LGBT Equality Caucus and pushed for repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.

In 2018 Polis was elected the 43rd governor of Colorado in a double-digit landslide. He campaigned to build a state economy that “works for everyone” and on issues such as education, lowering the cost of health care and transitioning to renewable energy. One of his top legislative priorities, state-paid full-day kindergarten, was signed into law in 2019.

On September 15, 2021, Polis married his longtime partner, Marlon Reis. The wedding was the first same-sex marriage of a sitting governor in U.S. history. Polis and Reis have two children.

LGBT Historian

b. July 18, 1940

“My writing has been my activism.”

Commonly known as the mother of LGBT history, Lillian Faderman is an internationally recognized pioneering lesbian scholar and historian. Her award-winning books have been translated into numerous languages.

Faderman was born in New York during World War II and raised by her mother and aunt, Latvian Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry. The remainder of her family died in Europe during the Holocaust.
 
After moving with her mother and aunt to Los Angeles in her teens, Faderman began acting and modeling and discovered the underground gay bar scene. She bravely came out as a lesbian in 1956 during the Lavender Scare, a challenging period for gay Americans that was closely tied to McCarthyism.

Faderman went on to study at UC Berkeley, where she paid for her education working as a stripper. She then attended UCLA. She became an English professor at California State University Fresno, where she sought to address long-ignored populations. Toward that end, she co-edited her first published work, an anthology of multi-ethnic literature for the college classroom. Released in 1969, it was one of the first anthologies of its kind.

Although Faderman longed to write about sexual minorities, homophobia in the 1960s made such work difficult. In the 1970s, however, as feminism entered serious academic discourse, Faderman became one of the first academics to publish books about female same-sex relationships.
 
A pioneering authority on LGBT history and literature, Faderman has written 11 books. Among other recognition, she has received six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards and several prestigious lifetime achievement awards for her scholarship, including the James Brudner Award from Yale University. The New York Times honored her books “Surpassing the Love of Men” (1981),“Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” (1991) and “The Gay Revolution” (2015) on its list of Notable Books of the Year. The Guardian named “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers,” about lesbian life in the 20th century, one of the Top 10 Books of Radical History and “The Gay Revolution” one of the Six Top Books of LGBT Life. “Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death,” her book about the slain gay San Francisco politician, was named Most Valuable Biography of 2018 by The Nation. In addition to her scholarly work, Faderman has published creative nonfiction, including her own memoir and a reconstructed memoir of her mother’s life.

Faderman retired in 2007 and serves as historian in residence for the Lambda Archives of San Diego. She has a son, Avrom, and lives with her partner of more than 45 years, Phyllis Irwin.

Gay Pioneer

b. April 26, 1939

“Growing up in the Bronx and on the streets of the Bronx … you hear everything. And then you can get your first word of faggot and queer. It scared the hell out of me.”

Joyce Hunter is a gay pioneer who helped organize the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and cofounded the first public high school for LGBTQ students.

Hunter survived a difficult early life, growing up in the Bronx, New York. The child of an unwed Orthodox Jewish mother and an African-American father, she spent much of her childhood in an orphanage. She married and became a mother in her 20s. By her 30s she had established herself as a trailblazing LGBT activist. 

In the 1970s, based on the black civil rights movement, activists sought to create a national march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights. In the summer of 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk assumed leadership of that vision. After his assassination in November 1978, approximately 300 activists, Hunter included, convened the Philadelphia Conference to fulfill Milk’s dream of a march on the National Mall. Plans proceeded under the joint leadership of Hunter and Steve Ault.

On October 12, 1979, more than 100,000 activists attended the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The demonstration helped define a national civil rights movement. 

Also In 1979, Hunter became a founding member of the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York, created chiefly to serve at-risk LGBT youth. As the Institute’s director and clinical supervisor of social work, she helped create a counseling program, a drop-in center and an outreach project.

In 1985 with the Hetrick-Martin Institute and Steve Ashkinazy of the Stonewall Democratic Club, Hunter cofounded the nation’s first LGBTQ high school, the Harvey Milk High School, in New York City’s East Village. The same year, as a co-leader of the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, Hunter helped successfully lobby New York City Council for a gay and lesbian nondiscrimination ordinance—one of the first municipal ordinances of its kind in the nation.

Hunter has served as Human Rights Commissioner of New York City and on the New York State Governor's Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Concerns. She founded the Women’s Caucus of the International AIDS Society. 

Hunter earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees in her 40s and her doctorate in social work in her late 50s. She is an assistant clinical professor of sociomedical sciences in psychiatry and psychiatric social work and a research scientist at the HIV Center at Columbia University. She conducts HIV behavioral research and is the principal investigator of a community-based HIV prevention project for LGBT students. 

Hunter donated her collection of LGBT civil rights papers to the archives of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of New York City. The “Making Gay History” podcast series featured her story. 

Now a great-grandmother, Hunter resides in Queens, New York.

Israeli Gay Pioneer and Scientist

b. October 18, 1940

“You no longer have to be ashamed. You can even be elected.”

A pioneering advocate for LGBT rights in Israel, Uzi Even became the first openly gay member of the country’s parliament, the Knesset, in 2002. He is a professor emeritus of physical chemistry at Tel Aviv University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in physics and molecular chemistry. 

Even worked for the Israeli army at the Nuclear Research Center. When the Israel Defense Forces discovered he was gay, Even was stripped of his security clearance and his rank as a lieutenant colonel. His testimony about the matter led Yitzhak Rabin’s government to change the law in 1993, thus allowing open homosexuals to serve in any position in the armed forces. The same year, under President Bill Clinton, the U.S. Department of Defense issued "Don't Ask Don't Tell," which remained official military policy until 2011.

Even first ran for a seat in the Knesset in 1999. He lost, but in 2002 was appointed to a vacant seat. During his tenure in parliament, he helped to advance LGBT rights and brought attention to important social issues related to the gay movement. 

Even also helped to advance same-sex spousal protection on the university level, advocating for health care coverage for his partner. He brought same-sex adoption into the spotlight when he and his partner became the first gay couple in Israel to legally adopt (by then) their 30-year-old foster son—a young man who had been kicked out of his home at 16 for being gay. “We opened a door, … a window for others,” said Even’s son, Yossi Even-Kama, “an opening of hope for the couples that will follow.”

In 2006 Even joined the Labor Party in hopes of further advancing LGBT rights. “As a community, it is important that we be involved in a major party,” he said. 

Six years later, Even set another legal precedent when he divorced his partner, whom he married in Canada in 2004. Because the Rabbinical Court does not recognize same-sex marriage, the divorce was granted in Family Court, paving the way for both straight and gay couples to bypass religious law in marriage matters. 

Even hopes his coming out and public advocacy on behalf of LGBT people will inspire others to do the same. “It’s a symbolic act,” he said. “I’m the one breaking the glass ceiling.” 

LGBT rights in Israel are the most advanced in the Middle East. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country to recognize same-sex marriage.

Neurologist and Author

b. July 9, 1933
d. August 30, 2015

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think.”

Oliver Sacks was a British-born physician and best-selling author who specialized in neurology. He spent most of his professional life in the United States. The New York Times called him “the poet laureate of medicine.” 

Sacks came from a long line of scientists. His father was a physician and his mother was one of the first female surgeons in England. Sacks’s first autobiography, “Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood,” chronicles his early experiences escaping the Blitz during World War II and being enrolled at a cruel boarding school. 

Sacks graduated in 1956 from Queen’s College, Oxford, with a degree in biology and physiology. He came to the United States in the 1960s to complete a residency at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco. He pursued fellowships in neurology and psychiatry at UCLA. As part of his 2012 book, “Hallucinations,” he discussed his experimentation with recreational drugs and its effects on his brain.

After moving to New York City, Sacks began documenting his observations about neurological diseases, which led to his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” His treatment of patients suffering from a rare illness became the basis of “Awakenings,” which was adapted into a 1990 Academy Award-nominated film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. His book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” also inspired a film, “Musical Minds,” on the PBS series “Nova.” Sacks created the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, where he served as a medical adviser. 

Sacks regularly contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books, as well as many medical publications. The recipient of numerous honors, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996 and was named a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1999. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature in 2008. 

Sacks lived alone for most of his life. He spoke about being gay for the first time in his 2015 autobiography, “On the Move: A Life.” He said he was celibate for 35 years before beginning a long-term relationship with writer Bill Hayes in 2008. “It has sometimes seemed to me that I have lived at a certain distance from life,” he wrote. “This changed when Billy and I fell in love.” They were together until his death.

Sacks wrote about his uveal melanoma, which affects the eye, in his 2010 book, “The Mind’s Eye.” When in 2014 the cancer returned in his liver and brain, he announced it in The New York Times. He died at age 82.