Humanitarian, Motivational Speaker

Jim Tuman gives credit to Scarsdale High School for setting him on the road to serve humanity.  In his words, “It was there that I met people with a sense of social conscience.”

Television Executive

Carolyn Strauss’s career at Home Box Office (HBO) would be a Horatio Alger tale, only its starting point was Harvard University from which she graduated with a BA degree.  That said, at HBO Strauss truly did begin at the bottom and reach the top, the Presidency of HBO Entertainment, in less than twenty years. 

Journalist, War Correspondent

Karen Sloan began her journalism carrier earning a AB at Middlebury College and a masters degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.  Her first job with Associated Press (AP) was in Washington, D.C. where she served as a news editor and later as a newscaster.

Musician, Conductor

Stuart Malina’s Bandersnatch quote from W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, began, “Let the piano’s martial blast Rouse the echoes of the past.”

Journalist, Editor, Commentator

Robert Kuttner is an example of what can happen if a person of principles holds tight to his beliefs.  He is one of those few people who functions well when the wind is in his face.   At both Scarsdale High School and Oberlin College there were those who found Kuttner over the top, caring too visibly and much, much too far to the left.

Artist, Painter

From her first days in Scarsdale, Elen Feinberg seemed destined for a career in art.
Her four years at Cornell University confirmed that her talents and her dreams were perfectly matched. On graduation, she was presented with the Faculty Medal of Art.
Equally impressive, she was also voted Class Marshall by her classmates. Two years on full scholarship followed at Indiana University where Feinberg earned a Masters in Fine Arts.

Playwright, Performer, Activist

At first blush, it seems as if Eve Ensler has only existed for the past ten years, when her first great work The Vagina Monologues appeared.  Of course that couldn’t be further from the truth.  Ensler had been living the life of a woman pressured and abused by both society and by some players in her life, especially her father.  These experiences became the subject of much of her subsequent work.

Forensic Scientist

At the Academic Awards evening at Scarsdale High School in May, 1942, Ira Newlin, Chairman of the Science Department, announced that Joseph Davis was the winner of the Bausch & Lomb Science Award as the finest science student at SHS.  

Historian, Scholar

From her first days at Scarsdale High School, Liz Cohen was marked as a student of nearly limitless potential.   Prior to her senior year, she was selected an AFS student to Japan. In 1973, Cohen was admitted to Princeton University in the cohort of women who were the first to be enrolled there.  At Princeton she majored in History.  Her senior paper was entitled Beneath Cotton and Lace: the Plantation Legacy of the Southern Woman. 

Former Step Student, Educator, Foundation Officer, Advisor to Gates Foundation

Queen Booker grew up poor in the poorest county in the poorest state in the Union.  She had nine brothers and sisters.  All lived with their parents on a farm.  They eked out a living, a sharecropper’s existence in a world they couldn’t control.