Jews Impact launches: a home for the lives shaping our world
A free, independent website celebrates how Jewish people, past and present, have made the world better for everyone, and invites everyone to make an impact of their own.
: Jews Impact (jewsimpact.com) launches today with a simple purpose: to show, through true stories carefully checked against published sources, how Jewish people have healed, fed, taught, defended and inspired the world, and to encourage readers of every background to do the same in their own lives.
The site opens with 391 in-depth profiles of scientists, doctors, inventors, artists, writers, judges and humanitarians, 1,223 researched facts, a daily Jews in the News section with 178 stories from 2026, 25 long-form uplifting stories, and 252 sourced quotations. Everything is free to read, with no advertising, and every page lists its sources.
A strict test for who belongs
Every person on Jews Impact has to pass one question: what did this person contribute that made the world a better place for everyone, not just for themselves or for other Jews, and is it significant? Fame, wealth, sports records, prizes, power and entertainment alone do not qualify anyone, and neither does work that served mainly one community. The contribution must be documented in published sources, significant and still reaching people today, and people mainly known for crime, scandal or hatred, or current politicians, are not included.
Each profile opens with a short line on how they helped the world, and the whole site, including its facts, quotations and news, is reviewed against the same test. “When in doubt, we leave someone out,” the site explains. “A smaller collection of clearly world-changing lives is better than a larger one.” The full criteria are published on the About page.
For people of every faith
Jews Impact is written for everyone. Its focus is not on religion or politics, but on what individuals did for the world: the cures they found, the children they rescued, the injustices they challenged, the art they made and the knowledge they gave away. The vaccines, medicines, inventions, laws and stories described on the site have helped people of every faith and of none.
The idea at the heart of the site, tikkun olam, the repair of the world, has close cousins in nearly every tradition: the Golden Rule, compassion for all living beings, care for the stranger. Readers of any background are invited to see themselves in these lives and to ask what they, too, can do for the people around them.
Who you will meet
Jews Impact spans more than two thousand years, but its heart is people whose work still touches daily life.
In medicine, readers meet Jonas Salk, who developed the first successful polio vaccine and declined to patent it; Gertrude Elion, a chemist without a doctorate whose drugs for leukaemia, organ transplants, gout and herpes earned the 1988 Nobel Prize; Rosalyn Yalow, who co-developed radioimmunoassay and in 1977 became the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine; and Drew Weissman, whose mRNA discoveries, recognised with the 2023 Nobel Prize, made the COVID vaccines possible.
In science, there is Albert Einstein; Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images of DNA were crucial to the discovery of the double helix; Rita Levi-Montalcini, who ran a secret laboratory in her bedroom under Mussolini’s race laws and later won the Nobel Prize for discovering nerve growth factor; and Ada Yonath, who spent two decades solving the structure of the ribosome and became the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize.
In justice and public life, readers find Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer of equal rights for women and men before she joined the US Supreme Court, René Cassin, a principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide” and campaigned until it became a crime under international law.
In kindness and rescue, there is Lillian Wald, who founded public health nursing and brought care to the poor of every background in New York; Julius Rosenwald, who helped build nearly 5,000 schools for Black children across the segregated American South; and Emma Lazarus, whose sonnet “The New Colossus” gave the Statue of Liberty its welcome to the world’s immigrants.
In the arts, Leonard Bernstein opened classical music to a generation of children through his Young People’s Concerts, and Steven Spielberg founded what is now the USC Shoah Foundation, which preserves tens of thousands of survivor testimonies used to teach tolerance worldwide.
Stories that lift the heart
The site’s Stories section tells true, uplifting accounts of impact around the world, among them Save a Child’s Heart, the Israeli charity that has given free heart surgery to thousands of children from dozens of countries; drip irrigation, which helps farmers grow more food with less water; the Rosenwald Schools; and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, where young Israeli and Arab musicians play side by side.
Honouring those who have passed
Profiles of people who have died carry a gold frame and the traditional blessing in English and Hebrew, “may his memory be a blessing” or “may her memory be a blessing.” A dedicated page, In Loving Memory, explains the words and the Jewish traditions of remembrance.
The idea behind it: tikkun olam
Jews Impact is built around tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world. Every life on these pages is a reminder that one person can change the world for the better. The site hopes readers leave not only informed, but inspired to give, teach, volunteer, invent and help in their own way.
How it is made
Jews Impact is independent and non-commercial. Its profiles, facts and stories are researched from published sources and checked against those sources, which are listed on every page, and everything on the site is reviewed against its published inclusion criteria. Readers can suggest corrections and nominate people through the site.
About Jews Impact
Jews Impact is a free online archive of Jewish lives and contributions to science, medicine, the arts, justice and human kindness, past and present. Its tagline is “Lives shaping our world.” Visit jewsimpact.com.
Media contact
Please use our contact form and choose “Press & media”. Share images of every page are available through the Share button.
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