Inspiring People

Q08
Is there something (a person, a cause, an idea) that you want to investigate more fully next year?

An inspirational person doesn’t have to be a role model. Just because you look up to President Obama doesn’t necessarily mean you want to be president one day. On the other hand, reading about lives remarkably different than our own can lead to inspiration, wonder, or simply the knowledge that people are doing different, and amazing, things with their lives, all over the world.

Support My Jewish Learning

Help us keep Jewish knowledge accessible to millions of people around the world.

Your donation to My Jewish Learning fuels endless journeys of Jewish discovery. With your help, My Jewish Learning can continue to provide nonstop opportunities for learning, connection and growth.

Donate

Here are a few of our favorites:

Franz Kafka This Czech writer may have been the weirdest writer of all time. Notoriously antisocial, and possibly a megalomaniac, he nonetheless emerged with a body of work that included everything from science fiction to fables.

Blu Greenberg Jewish women such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were pioneers of the modern feminist movement. They were inspirations to Blu Greenberg, an Orthodox Jewish feministwho’s raising awareness–and changing the Orthodox world from the inside out. As an Orthodox Jew herself, she’s both an activist and a participant in the culture.

Gershom Scholem The world that Gershom Scholem was born into in 1897 was one that had almost completely forgotten about Jewish mysticism. He almost single-handedly revived the study of Kabbalah outside insular Hasidic circles–simply because he loved the subject and couldn’t find any existing information on it.

Siona Benjamin A Bombay-based artist descended from the Bene Israel Jews of India, Benjamin pieces together her heritage and her history through creating art. Both a historian of painting and a contemporary painter, she’s informed by her history at the same time that she’s adding to it.

Fanny Brice A comedic precursor to Jerry Seinfeld, Gilda Radner, and Larry David, Fanny Brice affected a Yiddish accent to appear more stereotypically Jewish–and used her assumed persona to rise to the top of the Ziegfield Follies and the entertainment industry in 1920s America.

Moses Of course it’s easy to pick the original great Jewish leader, but there are tremendous reasons why. He’s been all over the place. His life story catches him at both his greatest and worst–a murderer who killed impulsively to protect the powerless, and a mystic whose intimacy with the Divine led him to fighting with God. Moses’ striking of a rock to get water, instead of speaking to it, was his ultimate downfall. The most powerful of the Children of Israel was brought down by his own vice of anger.

10Q

 is a national project that asks people to answer a question a day online for 10 days during the 

High Holidays

. It offers a new way for Jews and people of all backgrounds to slow down and reflect. Answers are emailed to a secure online vault just after 

Yom Kippur

; next year, just before 

Rosh Hashanah

 starts, answers are sent back to participants and the whole process begins again. 
Register here.