After garnering prestigious awards in music and theatre, she ventured in moviemaking, setting up her own production company, Barwood Films in 1972. The company’s first movie, Up The Sandbox, highlighted the growing women’s movement and jumpstarted Barbara Streisand’s career not only as a serious moviemaker but an advocate of political activism. She later produced more movies that dealt with various political issues of personal significance to her.

The Rodney King riots impressed upon Streisand deeply, strengthening her conviction to do her part in addressing the problem of violence among youth in under-served communities across America. Acting on her personal belief that this violence is an unfortunate but understandable reaction to economic hardships and social injustice, she established the Streisand Foundation in 1993 initially to help disadvantage youth.

Since then, the scope of the Streisand Foundation’s advocacy has broadened. It has contributed over $16 million dollars to national nonprofit organizations advocating women’s issues, civil rights, race relations, civil liberties, gay rights, voter education, nuclear disarmament, gun control, poverty, and AIDS.

A long-time advocate of women’s health, Streisand donated $5 million dollars to the Cedars-Sinai Women Center in support of women’s cardiovascular research.

Barbara Streisand is also sympathetic to environmental causes. In support of the global climatic change initiatives of former US President Bill Clinton, she donated $1 million dollars to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation.

In recognition of her contributions to philanthropic work, ABC News proclaimed her as the third most generous celebrity among the biggest philanthropists convened by the Giving Back Fund. She was also inducted as an Honoree of the Kennedy Center.

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Until Steven Spielberg released Schindler’s List in 1993, nobody truly reckoned him to be anyone other than a director who made movies with amazing special effects. The success of Schindler’s List put rest to the notion that Steven Spielberg was not a “serious director,” winning him his first Oscar for Best Director. The film itself was honored as the year’s Best Picture. Schindler’s List created a stirring and unforgettable portrait of the Holocaust.

Exploring the Holocaust was not just a one-shot project for Steven Spielberg, however. A year after making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg funded the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

Patterned after Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive, the Shoah Foundation gathers the testimonies, experiences, and eyewitness accounts of those who survived the Holocaust. Among those interviewed were Jews, political prisoners, rescuers, liberators, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and participants in war crime trials.

These testimonies are compiled in the foundation’s massive Visual History Archive, a 200-terabyte software medium from which one can retrieve the footages. Housed at the University of Southern California, the Visual History Archive contains over 50,000 testimonies culled from over fifty countries and spoken in thirty-two languages, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The foundation has also produced movie documentaries to educate school children about the heartrending event.

The Shoah Foundation Institute has broadened its scope to encompass the horrors of other crimes against humanity, such as the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. In its own way, the archive has chronicled the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit in the face of evil.

Spielberg used his profits from Schindler’s List to establish the Righteous Persons Foundation in 1994. The foundation has awarded hundreds of grants in the fields of education, arts, culture, spirituality, Holocaust awareness, tolerance, interfaith relations, and synagogue life.

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