Six degrees of separation from Regina Jones, the first woman rabbi

Regina Jonas is the subject of the documentary The First Woman Rabbi, which was screened last Thursday at the Asia Society. Born to a poor Orthodox Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, Jonas made history in 1935 when she, as the film title suggests, became a rabbi. In 1942, Jonas and her mother were deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she continued to preach. In late 1944, the two women were sent to Auschwitz and likely killed the same day. Between 1940 and 1943, Auschwitz was commanded by German SS Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoss …

A Harvard graduate, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and "humanitarian hawk", Bass tried his hand at journalism, as a reporter for The Economist, before settling on academia. In 2013, he penned Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blood Telegram, which tells "the terrible and little-known story of the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, and of the sordid and disgraceful White House diplomacy that attended it". In it, he gives a damning account of the United States' former national-security adviser Henry Kissinger …

Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, as a schoolboy King was not a great orator: he got a C in public speaking during his first year at seminary school. In 1963, however, he delivered the famous "I Have A Dream" speech, which helped pave the way towards America's Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. A prolific writer, Strength to Love, a book of his meditative and sermonic musings, some of which were composed in jails, has been taught as part of a course on modern religious thought by Katharina von Kellenbach …