Debra Messing, Azealia Banks, Justine Bateman, others, celebrate ‘brave’ at Sinai Awards

Tablet magazine gave out its Sinai Awards, celebrating people who make the world “not necessarily calmer, or prettier, or even safer, but freer.”

Debra Messing got an award, as did journalist Matt Taibbi, novelist Cynthia Ozick, Justine Bateman, and Azealia Banks. Amar’e Stoudemire presented an award to coach Bruce Pearl of Auburn.

Leah McSweeney, designer Elena Velez, Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the “Red Scare” podcast, Matthew Weiner and Man Repeller’s Leandra Medine Cohen were all on the scene at Casa Cipriani.

Tablet’s editor Alana Newhouse said, “The Sinai Awards are given to people who’ve made the world freer — not necessarily calmer, or prettier, or even safer, but freer. These people may be perfectly moral and have zero skeletons in their closet, bad tweets on their feeds, or wrong opinions in their heads. But I wouldn’t know — because it doesn’t matter. This award is not given for niceness or purity. It’s given for bravery and boldness.”

Newhouse added that the award is “given to people who believe in art, and ideas, and the human capacity for excellence.”

She added, “It’s given to people who made decisions, at critical moments, that those around them wouldn’t or couldn’t make, and in doing so they blew open an increasingly closed and concretizing world—generating freedom for everyone else at a time when it’s come to feel like the world’s rarest commodity.” One partygoer called it, “Very intellectual, sexy fun.”

“There is nothing sexier than a group of people challenging the status quo,” they said.

The long-running web magazine recently launched a print edition for the first time.

It’s published monthly and edited by Paris Review alum Lorin Stein.