Sarah Hurwitz | |
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| Alma mater | Harvard University Harvard Law School |
| Occupation | Speechwriter |
| Website | SarahHurwitz.net |
Sarah Hurwitz is an American speechwriter. A senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, and head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama from 2010 to 2017, [1] [2] she was appointed to serve on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by Barack Obama shortly before he left the White House. [3]
Hurwitz is from Wayland, Massachusetts. She attended Harvard University and Harvard Law School, and began her career as an intern in Vice President's Al Gore's speechwriting office in 1998. She was Chief Speechwriter for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign and Deputy Chief Speechwriter for the Presidential campaigns of Senator John Kerry and General Wesley Clark. [4]
She was offered a job as a senior speechwriter for then-Senator Barack Obama in his presidential campaign days after Clinton conceded. Her first assignment for Michelle Obama was to work with her on her address to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. [2] She also wrote Mrs. Obama's speeches at the 2012 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions. [5] After a couple of years as a senior speechwriter for President Obama, Hurwitz became Chief Speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama and also worked on policy issues affecting young women and girls as a senior advisor to the White House Council on Women and Girls. [6] After leaving the White House in 2017, she served as a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.
The Forward included Hurwitz in their Forward 50 list as one of 2016's fifty most influential Jewish-Americans. [7] She was also named to the 2019 Forward 50 List.
Hurwitz's book, Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life -- in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There), about her rediscovery of Judaism, was published by Spiegel & Grau on 3 September 2019. [8] [9] [10] It debuted as the number 1 new release overall in the Jewish Life category on Amazon. [9] Its Kindle edition, which sold less than its hardcover edition, was also the second highest new Kindle seller in the Amazon Jewish Life category as well. The book was named a Finalist for the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in two categories: "Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice" and "Education and Jewish Identity," as well as a Finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
Newton Norman Minow is an American attorney and former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission. He is famous for his speech referring to television as a "vast wasteland". While still maintaining a law practice, Minow is currently the Honorary Consul General of Singapore in Chicago since 2001.
Michael John Gerson was an American journalist and speechwriter. He was a neoconservative op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, a Policy Fellow with One Campaign, a visiting fellow with the Center for Public Justice, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006, and was a member of the White House Iraq Group.
David M. Axelrod is an American political consultant and analyst and former White House official. He is best known for being the chief strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. After Obama's election, Axelrod was appointed as Senior Advisor to the President. He left the position in early 2011 and became the Senior Strategist for Obama's successful re-election campaign in 2012. Axelrod wrote for the Chicago Tribune, and joined CNN as Senior Political Commentator in 2015. Currently, Axelrod serves as the director of the non-partisan University of Chicago Institute of Politics. His memoir is titled Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is an American attorney and author who served as the first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017 as the wife of President Barack Obama. She was the first African-American woman to serve in this position.
A speechwriter is a person who is hired to prepare and write speeches that will be delivered by another person. Speechwriters are employed by many senior-level elected officials and executives in the government and private sectors. They can also be employed to write for weddings and other social occasions.
Matthew Scully is an American author, journalist, and political writer who has also written on animal welfare.
Samantha Jane Power is an American journalist, diplomat and government official who is currently serving as the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. She previously served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power is a member of the Democratic Party.
Aneesh Raman is Vice President and Head of The Opportunity Project at LinkedIn. A former CNN war correspondent and speechwriter to President Barack Obama, Raman is an experienced communicator, focusing his career in recent years on the expansion of economic opportunity. Prior to joining LinkedIn, Raman was a Senior Economic Advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Jodi Kantor is an American journalist. She is a New York Times correspondent whose work has covered the workplace, technology, and gender. She has been the paper's Arts & Leisure editor and covered two presidential campaigns, chronicling the transformation of Barack and Michelle Obama into the President and First Lady of the United States. Kantor was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her reporting on sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein.
Capers C. Funnye Jr. is an African-American rabbi, who leads the 200-member Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of Chicago, Illinois, assisted by rabbis Avraham Ben Israel and Joshua V. Salter.
Jonathan Edward Favreau is an American political commentator, podcaster, and the former director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama.
Valerie June Jarrett is an American businesswoman and former government official. She currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Obama Foundation. She previously served as the senior advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama and assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs from 2009 to 2017. Before that, she served as a co-chair of the Obama–Biden Transition Project.
The family of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, is a prominent American family active in law, education, activism and politics. Obama's immediate family circle was the first family of the United States from 2009 to 2017, and are the first such family of African-American descent. His immediate family includes his wife Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha Obama.
Joel Barry Pollak is a South African-American conservative political commentator, writer, and attorney. He currently serves as the senior-editor-at-large for Breitbart News. In 2010, he was the Republican nominee for U.S. Congress from Illinois's 9th congressional district, losing to incumbent Democrat Jan Schakowsky with 31% of the vote.
Yeshivat Maharat is a Jewish educational institution in The Bronx, New York, which was the first Open Orthodox yeshiva in North America to ordain women. The word Maharat is a Hebrew acronym for phrase manhiga hilkhatit rukhanit Toranit, denoting a female "leader of Jewish law spirituality and Torah". Semikha and the title of Maharat are awarded to graduates after a 3- or 4-year-long program composed of intensive studies of Jewish law, Talmud, Torah, Jewish thought, leadership training, and pastoral counseling. The ordination functions as a credentialed pathway for women in the Jewish community to serve as clergy members.
Cody Keenan is an American political advisor and speechwriter who served as the director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama. Keenan studied political science at Northwestern University. After graduation, he worked in the U.S. senate office of Ted Kennedy, before studying for a master's in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. After graduation, he took a full-time position on Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008. In 2009, he assumed the position of deputy director of speechwriting. After Jon Favreau left the White House in 2013, Keenan took over as director of speechwriting.
Jonathan Ira Lovett is an American podcaster, comedian, and former speechwriter. Lovett is a co-founder of Crooked Media, along with fellow former White House staffers during the Obama administration, Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor. Lovett is a regular host of the Crooked Media podcasts Pod Save America and Lovett or Leave It. As a speechwriter, he worked for President Barack Obama as well as for Hillary Clinton when she was a United States senator and a 2008 presidential candidate. Lovett also co-created the NBC sitcom 1600 Penn, and was a writer and producer on the third season of HBO's The Newsroom.
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Dylan Loewe is an American speechwriter, political strategist and author. In 2021, Loewe was named chief speechwriter to Apple CEO Tim Cook." He served as chief speechwriter to then-Vice President Joe Biden from 2012 to 2013. He has collaborated with several authors on their memoirs, including the former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2010, he authored the book Permanently Blue: How Democrats Can End the Republican Party and Rule the Next Generation.
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