Global antisemitism has reached levels that alarm Jewish communities, governments, and civil society organizations alike. Hate crimes targeting Jewish individuals and institutions have spiked across the United States, Europe, and beyond, and the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel generated a pronounced new wave of hostility directed at Jewish communities worldwide. Responses have varied: legislative action, community organizing, diplomatic pressure, public condemnation, and sadly, indifference.
Yet Stan Polovets, co-founder and chairman of The Genesis Prize Foundation, pointed to an underused tool: celebrating Jewish achievement.
“We are living in a time where assimilation and antisemitism have inhibited open expressions of Jewish identity around the globe,” Polovets has said. “The foundation saw an opportunity to use a new tool for fostering that pride, spotlighting Jewish individuals who have achieved unparalleled professional success while speaking openly and positively about their Jewish identity.”
That conviction has guided the Genesis Prize since 2013. The foundation Polovets leads has spent more than a decade building an answer to a deceptively simple question: What does it look like when a global institution treats Jewish achievement as something worth actively, consistently celebrating?
The Vision Behind the Prize
The Genesis Prize Foundation was established with a $100 million endowment and a mandate to honor exceptional Jewish individuals whose professional achievements and commitment to Jewish values serve as models for future generations. The prize, dubbed the “Jewish Nobel” by Time magazine, awards $1 million annually, funds that each laureate redirects to philanthropic causes rather than keeping.
Stan Polovets puts it directly: “The more Jews feel proud and connected to their identity and see highly accomplished individuals demonstrating the same, the stronger our global community will be heading into the future.” Role models matter. Public acknowledgment of achievement matters. And in a world where Jewish identity is frequently the target of distortion, actively celebrating that identity is itself a meaningful act.
The prize’s selection criteria reflect this philosophy. Laureates are chosen based on professional accomplishment, contribution to humanity, and demonstrated commitment to Jewish values, particularly tikkun olam, the ancient Jewish principle of repairing the world. The Selection Committee recognizes people whose lives embody the belief that Jewish identity and global impact are inseparable rather than competing concerns.
Over twelve years, the Genesis Prize has honored figures who span an extraordinary range of fields: Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, human rights activist Natan Sharansky, Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla, and entertainers Barbra Streisand and Gal Gadot. Argentine President Javier Milei, named the 2025 laureate, became the first head of state and the first non-Jewish individual to receive the prize, honored for his public and sustained support of Israel and his efforts to confront antisemitism. The breadth of this list is itself a statement about how widely Jewish values and Jewish achievement extend across the human project.
A Historical Record Worth Telling
The Jewish people number approximately 15 million worldwide, less than 0.2 percent of the global population. Yet their representation among Nobel laureates, Fields Medal recipients, Oscar, Grammy, and Tony honorees, and Pulitzer Prize winners has been remarkable across generations and disciplines. The Genesis Prize Foundation has invested in making that record visible through a dedicated Jewish Achievement content hub featuring a cinematic film series documenting Jewish contributions to medicine, music, film, and sports.
These productions rest on the conviction that significant stories deserve significant presentation. “Jews in Medicine,” profiling figures including Paul Ehrlich, who pioneered chemotherapy; Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who developed the polio vaccine; and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who led the development of the first widely effective COVID-19 vaccine, won a Telly Award in 2023. “Jews in Sports” won a Telly Award in 2020, honoring athletes and figures from Hank Greenberg to Aly Raisman to Robert Kraft.
The breadth of these contributions, across science, art, athletics, and public service, reflects a pattern that The Genesis Prize Foundation has made central to its identity. For the foundation’s leadership, surfacing this history is both a cultural obligation and a strategic response to forces that work to minimize or erase it. The stories are real and inspiring, and they remain insufficiently known, even within Jewish communities themselves. Making them accessible requires sustained effort across multiple platforms and formats, which is precisely what the foundation’s content strategy is designed to produce.
Visibility as a Counterforce
The relationship between visible achievement and community resilience is well-established in social research. When members of a group see individuals they identify with succeeding in visible, respected fields, it reinforces individual identity and collective pride. For Jewish communities facing the dual pressures of external hostility and internal assimilation, that dynamic carries particular weight.
The Genesis Prize has operated on this insight from the beginning. Michael Bloomberg, the inaugural laureate in 2014, used his recognition to establish the Genesis Generation Challenge, a global competition that empowered young social entrepreneurs to address pressing challenges. That choice signaled what the prize could accomplish beyond the ceremony: a laureate’s platform, properly used, can mobilize energy and resources across the world.
Itzhak Perlman, honored in 2016, drew from his own experience with polio to champion disability inclusion, directing his prize funds toward accessibility organizations. Robert Kraft, the 2019 laureate, used his recognition to launch the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism with a personal pledge of $20 million. Barbra Streisand, the Tenth Anniversary Laureate in 2023, has spent decades weaving Jewish identity into global advocacy for women’s health, environmental protection, and civil liberties.
Each story connects the Jewish heritage of a particular individual to a universal cause – demonstrating, through specific and credible examples, that Jewish identity is a source of world-changing commitment rather than a parochial one.
The Urgency of This Moment
The escalation of antisemitism globally has intensified the Genesis Prize Foundation’s investment in this work. At the 2024 groundbreaking ceremony for the Holocaust Museum of Greece, where the foundation contributed $1 million in honor of laureate Dr. Albert Bourla, Polovets spoke to that urgency. “The memory of the once-vibrant Greek Jewish community and its near destruction by the Nazis, especially during the current wave of rising global antisemitism, must never be erased,” he said.
That museum project, which will document the near-total destruction of 38 Greek Jewish communities during World War II, reflects a parallel strand of the foundation’s mission: preservation alongside celebration. Holocaust remembrance and Jewish achievement storytelling are, for The Genesis Prize Foundation, two aspects of a single commitment to ensure that Jewish history, both its tragedies and its contributions, remains visible and understood by successive generations.
“The vision of the Genesis Prize,” Polovets has explained, “is a strong and vibrant Jewish people, aware of its roots while looking to the future, a Jewish community flourishing in diversity yet united in appreciation of Jewish values and support for the Jewish state.”
The model he has built, combining an annual prize with sustained content production, grant-making, and public advocacy, represents a distinctive approach to that vision. Since 2013, more than $50 million has been granted to over 230 nonprofit organizations across 31 countries, a network that shows what’s possible when Jewish achievement is treated as a subject deserving serious, ongoing attention.
What The Genesis Prize Foundation has constructed is, at its core, a statement, made through selection, funding, storytelling, and advocacy, that Jewish identity is something to be demonstrated and celebrated openly, and that doing so has consequences far beyond the Jewish community itself.
Given the current global climate, that statement could hardly be more timely.
