The Nahum Goldmann Medal

James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC (1916–1995) was a British Labour politician and Leader of the Labour Party. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the 1974 General Election resulted in a hung parliament. He is the most recent British Prime Minister to have served non-consecutive terms. Harold Wilson first served as Prime Minister in the 1960s, during a period of low unemployment and relative economic prosperity (though also of significant problems with the UK's external balance of payments). His second term in office began in 1974, when a period of economic crisis was beginning to hit most Western countries.

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. (1924 - 2024) is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the only U.S. President to receive the Prize after leaving office. Before his presidency, Carter served two terms as a Georgia State Senator and one term as Governor of Georgia (1971–1975). As President, he established two new cabinet-level departments: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He also implemented a national energy policy focused on conservation, price control, and new technology. In foreign affairs, Carter is best known for brokering the Camp David Accords. After leaving office, Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights. He has traveled extensively to mediate peace negotiations, observe elections, and promote disease prevention and eradication in developing nations. 

Stephen Samuel Wise (1874-1949) was born in Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the son and grandson of rabbis. He emigrated to New York as an infant with his family where his father became rabbi of Rodeph Sholom, a Manhattan Conservative congregation. Wise studied at the College of the City of New York, Columbia College (B.A. 1892), and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1901), and later pursued rabbinical studies. Rabbi Wise was an early supporter of Zionism, founding the New York Federation of Zionist Societies in 1897, which led to the formation of the national Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), a forerunner of the Zionist Organization of America. At the Second Zionist Congress (Basel, 1898), he was a delegate and secretary for the English language. Wise served as honorary secretary of FAZ, in close cooperation with Theodor Herzl until the latter's death in 1904.

Wise was a close friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who turned to Wise for advice on issues concerning the Jewish community in the United States. In addition, Wise had also acted a liaison to former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. With the rise to power of the Hitler regime, Wise took the position that public opinion in the United States and elsewhere should be rallied against the Nazis. He, along with Leo Motzkin, encouraged the creation of the World Jewish Congress in order to create a broader representative body to fight Nazism. He used his influence with President Roosevelt both in this area as well as on the Zionist question.

The medal was awarded in 1977 to his daughter Justice Wise Polier and to his son-in-law Shad Polier, who served as a member of WJC North America. 

Helmut Schmidt (1918 - 2015) was a German Social Democratic politician who served as Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. Prior to becoming chancellor, he had served as Minister of Defence and Minister of Finance in many German Western Federal Governments. He had also served briefly as Minister of Economics and as acting Foreign Minister. He is the oldest surviving German Chancellor and the last surviving person to have been solely Chancellor of West Germany (Helmut Kohl was Chancellor of both West Germany and reunified Germany). 

In 1982, Schmidt co-founded the annual AEI World Forum alongside former U.S. President Gerald Ford. The following year, he joined the national weekly newspaper Die Zeit as co-publisher and became its Managing Director in 1985. Also in 1983, together with former Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda, he established the Inter Action Council, an organization focused on fostering international dialogue and cooperation. Schmidt retired from the Bundestag in 1986 but remained active in European affairs. In December of that year, he played a key role in founding a committee that advocated for the European Monetary Union and the establishment of the European Central Bank. A prolific author, Schmidt has published numerous works on political leadership, foreign policy, and political ethics. 

Gerhart M. Riegner (1911–2001), was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Berlin, and eventually studied law in Germany, France, and Switzerland. He began in the WJC Geneva Office in 1936, before serving as the Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress from 1965 to 1983. On August 8, 1942, the “Riegner Telegram” was sent through diplomatic channels to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress. The message came after Riegner received alarming information from Eduard Schulte, the anti-Nazi owner of a prominent German company with close ties to high-ranking Nazi officials. The telegram marked the first official communication alerting the Allies to the Nazis' plan for the systematic extermination of the Jews—what would later be known as the Holocaust. Riegner was closely involved with the often-difficult process of improving relations with the Roman Catholic Church, and was present at the signing of the basic accord normalizing relations between the Holy See and Israel in 1993. He was also active at the United Nations, especially in the campaign to rescind the 1975 General Assembly vote that equated Zionism with racism. The resolution was finally annulled in 1991.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was born in Quebec, Canada but was raised in Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago, received his Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology. He then attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, and served in the Merchant Marine during World War II. Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man, was published in 1944, and his second, The Victim, in 1947. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent two years in Paris, where he began The Adventures of Augie March, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. Later books include Seize The Day (1956), Henderson The Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories (1968), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970).

In 1965, Bellow was awarded the International Literary Prize for Herzog, making him the first American recipient. A playwright as well as a novelist, Saul Bellow was the author of The Last Analysis and three additional short plays, collectively entitled Under the Weather, which were produced on Broadway in 1966.

During the 1967 Arab-lsraeli conflict, he served as a war correspondent for Newsday. He taught at Bard College, Princeton University, and the University of Minnesota, and was a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a philosopher, historian, political theorist, educator, and essayist. Born in Riga, Latvia, and a native Russian speaker, Berlin always emphasized his identity as a Russian Jew, even as he spent most of his life in Britain. He was renowned for his conversational brilliance, his defense of liberalism, his critiques of political extremism and intellectual fanaticism, and his accessible, incisive writings on the history of ideas. His essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958) sparked a revival of interest in political theory in the English-speaking world and remains one of the most influential and widely discussed texts in that field. Admirers and critics alike agree that Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative liberty remains, for better or worse, a foundational starting point for discussions on the meaning and value of political freedom. Later in life, growing access to his many essays led to renewed scholarly engagement with his work, particularly on the theme of value pluralism—an idea whose ambiguities have inspired ongoing philosophical debate. Berlin was also the founding president of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford.

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) was born in Brooklyn, New York City, American, was born in Brooklyn to a Ukrainian Jewish family. He was an astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and science communicator in the space and natural sciences. During his lifetime, he published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books. In his works, he advocated skeptical inquiry and the scientific method. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Sagan became world-famous for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote a book for to accompany the program. Sagan also wrote the novel Contact (1985), the basis for the 1997 film of the same name.

Yitzhak Navon (1921–2015) was born in Jerusalem to a Sephardi family whose roots in the Land of Israel stretched back to the 17th century. A lifelong public servant and cultural advocate, Navon played a central role in the formative years of the State of Israel. He served in the Arab Department of the Haganah, where he was active from 1946 to 1948. Shortly after the establishment of the State of Israel, he served in Israeli diplomatic missions in Argentina and Uruguay (1949–1950). Upon his return, he joined the government as political secretary to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett and later became head of the Prime Minister’s Bureau, serving under both David Ben-Gurion and Sharett from 1952 to 1963.

From 1963 to 1965, Navon directed the cultural division of the Ministry of Education and Culture, before entering politics as a member of the Knesset in 1965, initially with the Rafi party and later with the Labor Party. He rose to prominence as chairman of the General Zionist Council in 1972, and from 1974 to 1977, he led the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee.

In 1978, Navon was elected the fifth President of Israel, becoming the first Sephardi Jew to hold the office. His presidency was marked by efforts to bridge cultural divides, and in October 1980, he made history by visiting Egypt — the first official visit by an Israeli president to an Arab state.Following his presidency, Navon returned to politics in 1984, serving once again in the Knesset and as Minister of Education and Culture until 1990. 

Helen Suzman, DBE (1917–2009), was a South African anti-apartheid activist and politician. Born Helen Gavronsky, she studied as an economist and statistician at Witwatersrand University. At age 19, she married Dr. Moses Suzman, who was considerably older and died in 1994; they had two daughters. She returned to university as a lecturer in 1944, but eventually gave up teaching for politics, being elected to the House of Assembly in 1953 as a member of the United Party. She switched to the liberal Progressive Party in 1959 and represented the Houghton constituency as that party's sole Member of Parliament—and the sole parliamentarian unequivocally opposed to apartheid—from 1961 to 1974. She was often harassed by the police, who went so far as to tap her phone.

Suzman was noted for her strong public criticism of the governing National Party's policies of apartheid at a time when this was atypical of white South Africans, and found herself even more of an outsider because she was an English-speaking Jewish woman in a parliament dominated by Calvinist Afrikaner men. She visited Nelson Mandela on numerous occasions while he was in prison, and was present when he signed the new constitution in 1996.

Suzman was awarded 27 honorary doctorates from universities around the world, was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and received countless other awards from religious and human rights organizations globally. Queen Elizabeth II made her an honorary Dame Commander (Civil Division) of the Order of the British Empire in 1989. 

Sol Kanee, OC, OM (1909–2007), was a Canadian lawyer who served as the President of the Canadian Jewish Congress from 1971 to 1974. He was also the former Chairman of the World Jewish Congress Board of Governors and the longest-serving member of the Bank of Canada’s Board of Governors, holding the position for 17 years. Additionally, he served as the Chairman of the Federal Business Development Bank from 1975 to 1978.

Sol Kanee devoted much of his energy to improving the status of Jews around the world, passionately supporting and advocating for the state of Israel. Using his connections in Canadian politics, he convinced C.D. Howe to sell arms to Israel at discounted rates and later procured planes and cargo to supply relief to the newly-established country. His international humanitarian efforts also included fighting to secure reparations from Germany and persuading the Russian government to ease restrictions on Russian Jewish emigration to Israel. In recognition of his contributions, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1977 and awarded the Order of Manitoba in 2000 for his "unparalleled record of service to Winnipeg and Canada’s Jewish community."

Richard Holbrooke (1941 – 2010) was an American diplomat, magazine editor, author, professor, Peace Corps official, and investment banker. He was the only person to have held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions of the world, serving in Asia from 1977 to 1981, and in Europe from 1994 to 1996.

From 1993 to 1994, he was the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Long well known in diplomatic and journalistic circles, Holbrooke achieved great public prominence when he, together with former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, brokered a peace agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia that led to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995.

From 1999 to 2001, Holbrooke served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, before becoming an advisor to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004. In January 2009, Holbrooke was appointed as a special advisor on Pakistan and Afghanistan, working under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an assignment which was said to have caused his health to deteriorate. He served until he died from complications of an aortic dissection on 13 December 2010.

Stuart Eizenstat (1943) was U.S. President Jimmy Carter's Chief Domestic Policy Adviser and Executive Director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff From 1977 to 1981. He received his Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1967. He served as a law clerk for the Honorable Newell Edenfield of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Prior to entering law school, he earned an A.B. cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Eizenstat served as the United States Ambassador to the European Union from 1993 to 1996 and co-chairman of the European-American Business Council (EABC). He then became the Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade at the International Trade Administration (ITA) from 1996 to 1997, followed by his role as Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 to 2001, he served as U.S. President Bill Clinton's Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Eizenstat's article for Quarante magazine, "The Quiet Revolution," made him the first to describe the "feminization of poverty." Today, he is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Global Panel Foundation.

In 2008, the Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat Distinguished Professorship in Jewish history and culture was endowed in Eizenstat's honor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mordechai Arbell (1929–2016) was an advisor to the World Jewish Congress and devoted much of his life to documenting the history of Jews in the southern part of the New World. Born in Bulgaria, he moved to Israel with his family during the Second World War. After studying at Hebrew University and the University of Paris (France), he joined the Foreign Ministry of the State of Israel, serving in various diplomatic posts, including as Consul in Bogotá, Colombia, and as Ambassador to Panama and Haiti. From 1972 to 1975, he served as a non-resident ambassador to Haiti, visiting the country on several occasions for community projects.

Arbell was a Research Fellow at the Ben-Zvi Institute and served as chairman of Sefarad, an organization dedicated to preserving Spanish-Portuguese Jewish heritage. He published numerous books and research papers on Sephardic history in the Americas, Austria, Albania, Croatia, the Philippines, and India. Among his notable works are The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica (2000) and The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean (2002).

Manuel (Mendel) Tenenbaum (1934 - 2016) was born in Montevideo to Jewish immigrants from Bialystok (modern-day Belarus). He was a Senior Adviser to the Latin American branch of the World Jewish Congress, having previously served as its Director for 30 years. He also represented the World Jewish Congress at the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Conference on Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. He served as President of B’nai B’rith and the Jewish Committee of Uruguay, and was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York. 

He lectured on Jewish themes at Catholic universities in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Uruguay. At the University of Belgrano in Argentina, he offered courses on the history of Israel and Jewish history in the twentieth century.

Tenenbaum served as the Coordinator on behalf of the American Jewish Congress for meetings in Washington, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank, focusing on poverty reduction. His work earned him several prestigious honors, including the Merit Award from the Professional Association of Jews of Argentina—an honor granted to only four individuals to date. In 2004, AMIA (Argentina) awarded him the "People Who Make Us Proud" Prize, and in 2006, the Israeli Center for Ibero-Latin American Communities (CYCLES) recognized him with its Outstanding Service Award. 

Michael Häupl (1949) is an Austrian politician affiliated with the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ). He served as the mayor and governor of Vienna from 1994 until 2018. ​Häupl studied biology and zoology at the University of Vienna and worked as an academic assistant at the Vienna Natural History Museum from 1975 to 1983. He was the State Chairman of the Socialist Students of Austria, the student organization of the SPÖ, from 1975 to 1978. In 1983, he became a member of the Viennese Municipal Council and served as the town councillor for environment and sport until 1994. Häupl also held the position of Deputy Federal Party Chairman of the SPÖ. In 2004, he was elected unopposed to succeed Valéry Giscard d’Estaing as President of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions. Häupl is married to Helga Häupl and has two children.

José María Alfredo Aznar López (1953) served as the Prime Minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004, following the electoral victory of the Partido Popular. With the party’s subsequent electoral victory in 2000, this time with an absolute majority, he led the country again for a new term. His time as prime minister lasted up until the elections of 2004, when he voluntarily chose not to run for office again.

Hella Moritz (1929–2010) was born in Saarbrücken, a former League of Nations mandate now part of Germany, before moving with her family to Brazil, fleeing the Nazis. There she worked as the head of a Jewish Girl Scout group that met with Israel’s diplomatic representative to Brazil David Shaltiel, formerly a leader in Israeli intelligence. Moritz translated the meeting, and Shaltiel, impressed with her skills, hired her. When World Jewish Congress President Nahum Goldmann visited Shaltiel in Sao Paulo, he observed Moritz and offered her a position at the WJC. For 45 years, until the end of her career in 2009, Hella Moritz served as chief secretary under World Jewish Congress Presidents Nahum Goldmann, Philip M. Klutznick, Edgar M. Bronfman and Ronald S. Lauder, operating in Paris, Geneva and New York.

Michael Schneider (1939–2022) served as Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress from 2007 to 2011. Prior to this role, he had a long and distinguished career with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), where he served as Executive Vice-President and Chief Executive Officer from 1987 until 2002. In this capacity, he directed one of JDC's largest operations in the field of Rescue, Relief, and Reconstruction.

Born in South Africa, Schneider began his career with JDC in 1978 after ten years as Chief Welfare Officer of the London Jewish Welfare Board. His first posting was as resident Country Director in Iran during and after the Khomeini revolution. He later continued work for Iranian Jewry from JDC’s Rome office. In 1979 and 1980, he became Country Director for Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. In 1982, he was sent to Ethiopia following the expulsion of ORT by the Mengistu regime, securing permission for JDC to assist Jewish villages in Gonder Province. As Executive Vice-President, he played a key role in negotiations for the exit of 14,000 Jews during Operation Solomon.

Schneider also served as Director-General of JDC’s Israel office from 1983 to 1987, before relocating to New York. Under his leadership, JDC supported 50,000 Soviet Jewish migrants in Vienna and Ladispoli, officially returned to the Soviet Union in 1990, and established the "Hesed" welfare programs that served some 260,000 elderly, impoverished Jews. He stepped down as CEO in May 2002.

Miklós Németh (1948) served as Prime Minister of Hungary from 1988 to 1990. He was one of the leaders of the Socialist Workers' Party, Hungary's communist party, in the tumultuous years that led to the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe. He was the last Communist Prime Minister of Hungary. After being promoted to prime minister, Németh took the controversial decision to allow East Germans, long held captive by their country's communist regime, to travel through Hungary en route to freedom in West Germany. In 1989, Németh was instrumental in opening the Iron Curtain and helping to secure the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union.    

Yehuda Bauer (1926–2024) was an Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He was a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was also one of the founders of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). A native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, Bauer was fluent in Czech, Slovak, and German at an early age, and later learned Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, and Polish. On the day Nazi Germany annexed Czechoslovakia, his family migrated to Palestine.

Bauer attended high school in Haifa, and at 16, inspired by his history teacher Rachel Krulik, he decided to dedicate himself to studying history. He received his doctorate in 1960 for a thesis on the British Mandate of Palestine. He was the founding editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and served on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published by Yad Vashem in 1990. The following year, he began teaching at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University; eventually, he went on to become a visiting professor at Brandeis University, Yale University, Richard Stockton College, and Clark University.

Colette Avital (1940), was born in Bucharest, Romania and immigrated to Israel at the age of 10. After completing her army service and earning a BA in Political Science and English Literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she joined the Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Over the years, she held prominent diplomatic posts both in Israel — where she served as Head of Training, Deputy Director General for Media and Culture, and for European Affairs — and abroad, including in Montreal, Brussels, Boston, Paris, Lisbon, and New York, where she served as Consul General and Ambassador.

In 1999, Avital entered politics, serving in the 15th, 16th, and 17th Knesset for the Labor Party. She chaired multiple committees, served as Deputy Speaker, and was the first woman to run for President of Israel in 2007. Post-politics, she led the Berl Katznelson Foundation’s Educational Center and continues to champion Holocaust survivor rights and Jewish restitution efforts. Currently, she holds leadership roles in several organizations including the Center Organization of Holocaust Survivors, the Claims Conference, and WJRO. Avital has received numerous honors, including France’s Légion d'Honneur, Italy’s Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Repubblica, Romania’s National Order for Merit, and Portugal’s Gran Cruz do Infante Dom Henrique.