The 2000 Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer Risk-Taker Awards celebrated JFREJ’s 10th Anniversary and honored JFREJ’s co-founders, Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark and Donna Nevel. 

Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark, a long-time activist on such global issues as anti-militarism, US intervention in Latin America, and Israel-Palestine peace, has been acting locally for the last decade through JFREJ, which she co-founded with Donna Nevel.  As is well-known by listeners to the weekly JFREJ radio program she co-hosts with Esther Kaplan, Beyond the Pale: The Progressive Jewish Radio Hour, Marilyn is also a perceptive analyst of political and economic affairs.  In her day job, she is a Professor of Accountancy at Baruch College-CUNY; her research ranges across issues in critical accounting, business ethics, and the corporatization of higher education.  She is an organizer at Baruch, too, as a member of the Delegate Assembly of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of CUNY faculty and staff. 

Donna Nevel, co-founder of JFREJ with Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark, is a community educator and organizer who has translated a consuming passion for fairness and justice into 25 years of political and social engagement.  During that time, she has organized Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts; worked in Costa Rica with an indigenous human rights group; been involved in feminist organizing around economic empowerment; and coordinated education projects for social change with cultural and community groups, parents, and young people.  She is currently co-coordinator of the Center for Immigrant Families, which she founded in 1996.  Inseparable from her deep commitment to social justice activism is her intensely passionate love for her family, for her friends, and for music and dance.