Explore every episode of the podcast The College Commons Podcast

Israeli public intellectual Tomer Persico explains how “God created humanity in God’s image” changed civilization itself.

Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In addition to hundreds of articles on social and political issues in Israel, he has written three books: The Jewish Meditative Tradition in 2016; In God’s Image: Selfhood, Freedom and Equality, which came out in Hebrew in 2021; and Liberalism: its Roots, Values and Crises in 2024. His second book, In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea was published in English by NYU Press and came out in 2025.

Rabbi Charles Savenor leads Civic Spirit, promoting civics education in fulfillment of Thomas Paine’s declaration.

Rabbi Charles E. Savenor is the Executive Director of Civic Spirit. The mission of Civic Spirit is to educate, inspire, and empower schools across faith traditions to enhance civic knowledge, responsibility, and belonging, in their student and faculty communities. 

Rabbi Savenor was ordained at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and came to Civic Spirit in 2022 after serving as the Director of Congregational Education at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. His articles on education, parenting, leadership and Judaism in the 21st century have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Week, The New York Observer, Kveller, Hadassah Magazine, and The Boston Jewish Advocate. He won the 2026 Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.

Yael Yechieli walks us through the process of tangible, effective societal change.

Yael Yechieli is founder of 50/50, an initiative of the Tzedek Center, dedicated to a simple and very potent mission: To get women into half of all the decision-making positions in Israel. It even tracks the progress of women’s soccer, an important bellwether of social and economic power, not unlike women’s soccer and basketball here in the US. 

50/50 organizes public outreach, lectures, and all-important social and political campaigns to position women to take their place in Israel’s public sphere.

Description: Producer/Director John Rokosny tells the remarkable story of Fred Biermann in his film The Kid Officer.

Biography: John Rokosny is an award-winning producer and director of film, television, and music. His previous film, They Survived Together, aired nationally on PBS and earned a NY Emmy Award for Best Historical Documentary. Most recently, John has filmed nearly 100 Holocaust survivors for the USC Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg and a partner organization of the Hebrew Union College.

His new documentary film, The Kid Officer, tells the story of Holocaust survivor Fred Biermann’s escape from Vienna to Mandatory Palestine.

Description: Though contemporary individualism means all Jews are, in some measure, Jews by choice, Gary “Pips” Phillips made that choice during the Holocaust.

Biography: Dr. Georgette Bennett is at TED Speaker and an award-winning sociologist, author, popular lecturer, and former broadcast journalist. Bennett has founded no less than three interreligious nonprofit organizations, and she served in the U.S. State Department Religion and Foreign Policy initiative’s working group on conflict mitigation. Bennett is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2021, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 50 over 50 Women of Impact. Her book Crimewarps:  The Future of Crime in America, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and her most recent book titled, Half-Jew, Full Life – The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream.

Description: Jeffrey Marx wrestles with both the truth and the antisemitic fantasy of Jewish Arson in the early 20th century.

Biography: Ordained in 1983, Rabbi Marx served as the spiritual leader of The Santa Monica Synagogue from 1985- 2021.  As an independent scholar, he has examined the out-of-the-way chapters of American Jewish history, from his article titled “Eating Up: The Origins of Bagels and Lox” to his book Smoothing the Jew about Jewish self-representations at the turn of the 20th century,  designed to counteract the classic ethnic stereotypes; and most recently, Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to WWI, coming out in July of 2026 from New York University Press.

Description: The historian behind the history of HUC: Michael Meyer takes us on a sesquicentennial journey of American Judaism.

Biography: Michael A. Meyer received his B.A. from UCLA and his doctorate from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. From 1964 to 1967, he taught at the Los Angeles campus of HUC. Since 1967 he has been on the faculty of HUC’s Cincinnati campus, where he is currently the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History Emeritus. Professor Meyer also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem campus of HUC, and the University of Haifa and Ben Gurion University.

Professor Meyer’s books have won three Jewish Book Awards, including The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749-1824 (1967); Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (1988); Jewish Identity in the Modern World (1990); and a collection of essays entitled Judaism Within Modernity (2001). He has published more than two hundred articles and longer reviews.

Professor Meyer was president of the Association for Jewish Studies, chaired the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History in New York, and served as international president of the Leo Baeck Institute. His two most recent books are Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (2021) and Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler (2025).

Description: Professor Emeritus David Mendelsson looks back at a half-century of momentous change for HUC in Israel.

Biography: David Mendelsson recently stepped down as Director of the Year-in-Israel program at Hebrew Union College/Jerusalem where he fulfilled this role for eight years. Aside from lecturing at Hebrew Union College in the field of Israel Studies and Modern Jewish History, David also lectures at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University. He has been scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern California, Brandeis University, and Michigan State University. He has lectured widely in the United States to various Jewish agencies and in Israel to multiple groups of visitors to the country. David completed his doctorate and M.A. in the Department of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University and received his undergraduate degree at Manchester University, England. The subject of his doctorate was the History of Jewish Education in England between 1944-88 which was published by Peter Lang. David lives in Mevaseret Zion with his partner, Dalia. They have three children, Galit, Yael, and Itai.

Soundscape of the Soul

Jewish Music transplanted from Europe to American, via Hebrew Union College.

Judah M. Cohen, Ph.D. is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost at Hebrew Union College. Cohen previously served as the Lou & Sybil Professor of Jewish Culture in the Indiana University Borns Jewish Studies Program and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research and Creative Activity at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Over the course of four books and over 50 articles, Cohen has explored the idea of Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process. His research interests include music in Jewish life, American music, musical theater, popular culture, Caribbean Jewish history, diaspora, and medical ethnomusicology.

His training as a musicologist and an anthropologist, and his professional activity within Jewish studies, has allowed him to explore many aspects of Jewish culture and history. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard, and for his doctoral work he explored the meaning of becoming a Reform Jewish cantor at the turn of the twenty-first century, based on three years of ethnographic study with cantorial students. In his first book, Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., he offered both a historical narrative and a meditation on writing the history of a small community.

Subsequent projects have led him to investigate the history of Jewish music scholarship in the United States, musical theater works that address Holocaust memory, contemporary forms of Jewish musical expression and musical representations of such cultural figures as Anne Frank and Shylock. His other books include The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor (2009); Sounding Jewish Tradition: The Music of Central Synagogue (2011), which received the Greater Hudson Heritage Network Award for Excellence; and Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack (2019).

Throughout his research, he has focused on the idea of Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process, created and recreated over time by artists, religious leaders, philosophers and activists. He has aimed to understand this idea largely through the prism of sound and its relationship to ideas of Jewish identity.

Jessica Roda: Sacred Drugs - Jews, Psychedelics, and Healing (An HUC Connect Crossover Episode)

2026 Fritz A. Bamberger Lecture

As interest in psychedelics grows once again, people from many backgrounds—biomedical researchers, religious leaders, spiritual practitioners, and healing communities—are exploring their potential in new ways. Unlike the early psychedelic movements that emerged before the War on Drugs, today’s revival is strongly focused on legitimizing these practices through the lens of mental health and well‑being. Within this broader movement, ultra‑Orthodox Jewish communities have begun engaging with psychedelics in surprising and innovative ways. For many participants, these psychedelic practices reveal a desire to detach from the suffering produced by highly controlled societies and an attempt to find better alignment with one’s inner self.

Biography:

Jessica Roda is Associate Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. An anthropologist and ethnomusicologist trained in Europe and North America, her research explores the intersections of music, religion, cultural heritage, gender, health, and media. Her latest monograph, For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024), analyzes how ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, and women who have left religious life, mobilize artistic practices, performance, and digital media to negotiate, challenge, and transform religious authority and gendered norms. The work has received multiple distinctions, including the Cashmere Award from the AJS Women’s Caucus (2021), the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award (2021), the 2024 Society for Ethnomusicology Jewish Music Special Interest Group Prize, and it was shortlisted for the 2025 Religion and the Arts Book Award from the American Academy of Religion. Her current research examines altered states of consciousness, breathwork, and psychedelics, focusing on how global wellness cultures and plant-based healing practices are translated and reframed within Jewish theological and communal contexts. 

Charlie Scheidt follows the forgotten trail of his family from Europe to the United States.

Charlie Scheidt is the chairman emeritus of Roland Foods, the company founded by his parents in 1939. Among his leadership roles, he is active with the Leo Baeck Institute and sits on the board of the Auschwitz Institute for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities.

On her deathbed, Charlie’s mother, the last survivor of the generation of the Holocaust, directed him to files from the armoire. 20 years later, Together with Austrian filmmaker, Kat Rohrer, Charlie began to investigate those files. Together, the two began a journey of discovery, retracing his family’s steps through Germany, France, Holland, and ultimately to the US.

The result is the book Inheritance: Love, Loss and the Legacy of the Holocaust which came out in March 2026 from Rutgers University Press.

David Oppenheimer traces the diversity principle back two centuries.

Biography: David B. Oppenheimer is a Clinical Professor of Law, Co-Director of the Pro Bono Program, and the Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-discrimination Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at a number of universities, including the Sorbonne and University of Bologna, and published widely, including, among others, his most recent book, The Diversity Principle.

Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein: The rabbinate is changing faster than it’s shrinking (but it’s also shrinking)

Description: Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein breaks down a landmark study of road to the rabbinate.

Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein is the Executive Director of Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation.

Previously, Rabbi Epstein served as Executive Director of the 14th Street Y in Manhattan, and as a member of the faculty of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Rabbi Epstein publishes and teaches widely in the Jewish community, and has served at various congregations, Jewish youth groups and summer camps as an educator.

In her current role at Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation, she oversaw the publication of a landmark study that came out in November of 2025, titled “From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership.”

Sit by the Fire and Tell a Story

Description: Rabbi Michael Zedek shares his stories and the values the drive them.

Biography: Michael Zedek is rabbi emeritus of two wonderful synagogues: Emanuel Congregation in Chicago and Temple B’nai Yehudah in Kansas City, Missouri. After his retirement from Emanuel, he served as senior advisor to the CCAR and now serves as rabbi-in-residence at the St. Paul School of Theology. A dedicated community activist, scholar, and teacher, Rabbi Zedek received a Fulbright-Hays Grant, and he was honored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

In 2025, Rabbi Zedek published the book titled “People Are Like…” with the subtitle “Stories for young readers and readers who wish to stay young.”

Jewish and Twelve-Step Traditions at the Crossroads of Addiction

Description: A Jewish ethical tradition called Mussar and a uniquely Jewish approach to twelve-step recovery.

Hannah L. is the author of Mussar in Recovery: A Jewish Spiritual Path to Serenity and Joy, which is the topic of today’s conversation. Mussar in Recovery offers an approach to recovery from addiction based in a complementary approach between the 12-step program and Mussar, a Jewish program of ethical development and self-improvement through the balancing of personal character traits.

Rabbi Harvey Winokur, collaborator on Mussar in Recovery, is the founding, and since 2018, emeritus rabbi, of Temple Kehillat Chaim located in Roswell, Georgia. Rabbi Winokur is a Jewish spiritual director and facilitator of Mussar.

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series

Adam Ferziger: A Patchwork of Jews

Opinions and approaches inhabit the entire spectrum of Jewish thought and practice, but how do they speak to each other?

Biography: Adam S. Ferziger is an historian of religion, and he holds the Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He researches Jewish intellectual, social, and spiritual responses to modern and contemporary life. His book Beyond Sectarianism, won a National Jewish Book Award and his newest work, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism, was published in July by NYU Press. 

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series

Arnold Eisen: Dimensional and Complex Judaism

More than a religion, resisting extremes, but also hard to pin down, Judaism and Judaism’s God inspire Arnold Eisen’s spiritual search.

Biography: Arnold M. Eisen, a foremost authority on American Judaism, is professor of Jewish Thought and chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He previously served on the faculties of Stanford, Tel Aviv, and Columbia universities. He has contributed regularly to print and online media, including the Wall Street Journal, The Jewish Week, Huffington Post, and Tablet, on topics of Jewish education, philosophy, and values. He is a prolific scholar and author, most recently, of Seeking the Hiding God: A Personal Theological Essay.

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series

Rabbi Dalia Marx: The Prayerbook As a Living Text

Rabbi Dalia Marx editor of the new Israeli Reform prayerbook muses on the siddur as both reflection and shaper of community.

Biography: Rabbi Professor Dalia Marx is the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Professor of Liturgy and Midrash at the Hebrew Union College, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently From Time to Time: Journeys in the Jewish Calendar. She is also the co-editor of the new Israeli Reform Siddur called “Tefillat ha-Adam” together with Alona Lisitsa. She is a public intellectual in Israel, appearing regularly on Israeli media, and she co-hosts with Rabbi Dan Prat a sister podcast of this one in Hebrew, also on HUC Connect, titled “Kanfei Ruach”.

For Rabbi Ed Feinstein meaning-making is story-telling, and the rabbi’s business.

Biography: Rabbi Ed Feinstein came to Valley Beth Shalom in 1993 at the invitation of the renowned Rabbi Harold Schulweis z"l, and succeeded Rabbi Schulweis as the congregation’s senior rabbi in 2005. He now serves on the faculty of the Ziegler Rabbinical School of the American Jewish University, the Wexner Heritage Program, the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and lectures widely across the United States. He is the author of several books, and he enjoys a well-earned reputation as wonderfully engaging lecturer and storyteller, and one of this generation’s great sermonizers.

A second generation of Holocaust survivors re-examine their lives through the lens of their parents.

Aron Hirt-Manheimer (he/him) is the Union for Reform Judaism's former editor-at-large, the former editor of Reform Judaism magazine (1976-2014) and founding editor of Davka magazine (1970-1976), a West Coast Jewish quarterly. His books include Jagendorf’s Foundry: A Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust (HarperCollins, 1991) and Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (HarperCollins, 1998) with Arthur Hertzberg. (Photo credit: Rose Eichenbaum)

Description: Spiritual and political dynamics that motivate and shape the pulpit of Rabbi Rachel Timoner.

Biography: Rabbi Rachel Timoner is grateful and proud to serve as Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She is honored to stand with families at the moments of greatest joy and deepest sorrow in their lives, and she is delighted to be part of a flowering of creativity, community, learning, spirituality, and action at CBE.

Her initiatives in recent years include a weekly class designed to get to the heart and meaning of the prayer experience, a rabbinic conversation on antisemitism, a study series on systemic racism in America, a weekly class about peoplehood and nationalism, a sukkah about the refugee experience, a dialogue and study series on Israel, a revival of CBE’s youth group, a partnership with Antioch Baptist Church to address racism and antisemitism in Brooklyn, and a Dismantling Racism Team which was part of the successful campaigns to Raise the Age of criminal responsibility and to win bail reform in the State of New York. She helped to launch RAC-NY and Reform California, two statewide efforts to bring Reform Jewish values to bear on core issues of our times, such as immigration, affordable housing, and racial profiling. In November 2016, Rabbi Timoner, in cooperation with City Councilmember Brad Lander, co-founded #GetOrganizedBK in CBE’s sanctuary, so that over the next two years, ten thousand Brooklyn neighbors came together to resist autocracy and protect human rights. In May 2022, she gathered 55 women rabbis of all denominations to meet with the mayor to change the face of Jewish leadership in New York. On any given Shabbat, you’ll find Rabbi Timoner speaking about our purpose as Jews and human beings, the moral challenges of our times, the ways we need each other, and awakening to the spiritual aspect of our lives.

From 2009 to 2015, Rabbi Timoner served as Associate Rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles, where she was a teacher of Torah and helped to develop the Shabbat Morning Minyan, Community of Elders, Spirituality Workshop, and Community Organizing Leadership Team that took on public transportation and economic justice.

Previously, Rabbi Timoner raised funds to rebuild the San Francisco Women’s Building; worked to mitigate the harm of welfare reform in California; and founded two leadership programs and a peer hotline for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

She is a graduate of Yale University, received s’micha from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and was a Rockefeller Next Generation Leadership Fellow and a Wexner Graduate Fellow. Rabbi Timoner serves on the board of the New York Jewish Agenda, the Brooklyn Community Foundation, the New York Board of Rabbis, the UJA-Federation of New York, Plaza Community Chapel, and the International Council of the New Israel Fund. She is a T’ruah chavera and is a graduate of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s Clergy Leadership Program and the Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training. She is the author of Breath of Life: God as Spirit in Judaism.

When it comes to pigs, however, maybe you are what you don’t eat… Maybe…

Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book, Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig (New York University Press, 2024), won a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. According to The Wall Street Journal, “’Forbidden’ is an engaging and surprisingly cheerful study of that odd couple of the religious imagination, the Jew and the pig.” In addition, he is the author of Rabbinic Drinking: What Beverages Teach Us About Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2020); The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge University Press, 2010), as well as the co-editor of four volumes: Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food (New York University Press, 2019); Animals and the Law in Antiquity (Brown Judaic Studies, 2021); With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (SBL Press, 2021); and Religious Competition in the Third Century C.E.: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014). He is currently working on a the history of kosher controversies.

Description: Hannah Pollin-Galay reveals the Yiddish of destruction, and its capacity to bring life and meaning.

Biography: Hannah Pollin-Galay is a scholar of East European Jewish culture, with a focus on the Holocaust. Drawing on both historical and literary methods, her work explores themes such as cultural production under catastrophic conditions, space, gender, interethnic relations and language identity. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018), challenges the assumption of a universal vocabulary for describing and healing human pain. Her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) explores the metamorphosis of speech in ghettos and camps and won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, in memory of Ernest W. Michel. She is currently working on a new project investigating Jewish perceptions of nonhuman nature during the Holocaust. Pollin-Galay teaches and mentors broadly on Holocaust history and memory, Yiddish culture in all periods, the environmental humanities, oral history and methods of integrating literature and history. Before coming to UMass, Pollin-Galay taught at Tel Aviv University, where she served as head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture.

Description: Complicated contours and tortuous fissures emerge as a picture of the American Jewish experience in Tablets Shattered.

Biography: Joshua Leifer is a journalist and historian. He is a columnist for Haaretz.

His essays and reporting have also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere. His first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (2024), won a National Jewish Book Award.

He is currently a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University, where his research sits at the nexus of modern intellectual history, modern Jewish politics, U.S. foreign policy, and Holocaust memory. His dissertation project examines the politics of antisemitism and the crisis of the liberal order.

Love of family, culture, and home, set to the music of Yemenite Jews in Songs for the Brokenhearted: A Novel.

Ayelet Tsabari is the author of Songs for the Brokenhearted, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award and A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024. Her memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Vine Awards, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019.

Her first book, the story collection The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

She’s the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language. Ayelet teaches creative writing at The University of King’s College MFA and at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing.

Novelist Howard Langer transplants a fictional Hasidic Dynasty to the heart of segregated America, to discover a truly New World.

Biography:

Howard Langer was born in New York and brought up on the west side of Manhattan. His father served on the U.S.S. Missouri and was present at the Japanese surrender in 1945. His mother taught reading in Spanish Harlem for over thirty years. Howard attended the City College of New York when its English faculty included, among others, William Gaddis and Joseph Heller. He obtained a teacher’s degree from the Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem where he had the opportunity to study under Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Appelfeld. He holds an M.A.in English from the University of Toronto, where he studied Shakespeare with the great scholar-poet Sheldon Zitner, who first published his remarkable books of poetry at age 75, decades after Howard graduated.

Howard won awards for his fiction as an undergraduate. He ultimately attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught for the last twenty years. His law practice has specialized in protecting the vulnerable and his most notable case involved a class action that recovered $200 million from a bank that had abetted fraudulent telemarketers who preyed on the poor and elderly. The case restored to the victims all that had been taken by the telemarketers. His pro bono work has been recognized by the Philadelphia Bar Association and Community Legal Services among others. His text on Antitrust law, The Competition Law of the United States, is currently in its fourth edition. He has published a number of short non-fiction pieces in recent years. Publications.

He began writing The Last Dekreptizer in 2021 after attending a zoom workshop by George Saunders sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia at the height of the Covid pandemic. Inspired by Saunder’s presentation, Howard began writing the next morning what eventually morphed into the novel.

Howard and his wife live in Philadelphia. He has two adult sons.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg takes us on a majestic odyssey of religious purpose and Covenant.

Biography:

Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg serves as the President of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life (JJGI) and as Senior Scholar in Residence at Hadar. Rabbi Greenberg was ordained by Beth Joseph Rabbinical Seminary of Brooklyn, New York and has a PhD in history from Harvard University. He has had a long and notable career in the service of the Jewish people. He served in the rabbinate, notably at the Riverdale Jewish Center in the 1960s. He served as professor and chairman of the Department of Jewish Studies of City College of the City University of New York in the 1970s. Together with Elie Wiesel, he founded CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and served as its president until 1997.CLAL offered pluralistic Jewish learning for Jewish communal leadership and programs of intra-faith dialogue for rabbis of every denominational background. From 1997 to 2008, he served as founding president of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation which created such programs as birthright Israel and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education. Rabbi Greenberg was one of the activist/founders of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in the movement to liberate Russian Jewry. He was a pioneer in the development of Holocaust education and commemoration. When Elie Wiesel served as chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, Rabbi Greenberg served as its (Executive) Director. The Commission recommended and drew the blueprint for the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall in Washington. He served as the Museum’s chairman from 2000-2002. He is a leading Jewish thinker and has written extensively on post-Holocaust Jewish religious thought, Jewish-Christian relations, pluralism, and the ethics of Jewish power. In his book, Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, Professor Steven T. Katz wrote: “No Jewish thinker has had a greater impact on the American Jewish Community in the last two decades than Irving (Yitz) Greenberg.” In his new book, The Triumph of Life (forthcoming), he argues that the Holocaust and the Jewish assumption of power in creating the state of Israel are the beginning of a new era in Jewish history. Together, these two events usher in a third stage of Jewish religion.

Author Danielle Sharkan finds cultural identity in multicultural community, in her picture book Sharing Shalom.

Biography:

Danielle grew up in the sub­urbs of Chica­go and has since

had the priv­i­lege of liv­ing in Cana­da, Israel, and Argenti­na. As an edu­ca­tor and a proud moth­er of two won­der­ful chil­dren, she is deeply com­mit­ted to both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al growth. Danielle is pas­sion­ate about nature, yoga, and all things Israel — espe­cial­ly

its vibrant culi­nary cul­ture. She cur­rent­ly resides in Boul­der, Col­orado, where she enjoys spend­ing time with her fam­i­ly, explor­ing the out­doors, and embrac­ing the beau­ty of life in the Rockies.

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl disentangles the power of the pulpit from the stature of its holder, by sharing the vulnerability, musicality and ethical of sermons.

Biography:

Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl serves as the Senior Rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City and is the first woman to lead Central’s Reform congregation in its 180-year history. Rabbi Buchdahl first joined Central Synagogue as Senior Cantor in 2006. In 2014, she was chosen by the congregation to be Senior Rabbi.

Rabbi Buchdahl was invested as a cantor in 1999 and also ordained as a rabbi in 2001 by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York where she was a Wexner Graduate Fellow. She earned a bachelor of arts in religious studies from Yale University in 1994. Born in Korea to a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother, Rabbi Buchdahl is the first Asian American to be ordained as a cantor or rabbi in North America. Prior to her service at Central Synagogue, Rabbi Buchdahl served as Associate Rabbi/Cantor at Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, New York.

Rabbi Buchdahl has been nationally recognized for her innovations in leading worship, which draw large crowds both in the congregation’s historic Main Sanctuary and via livestream and cable broadcast to viewers in more than 100 countries.

Rabbi Buchdahl has been featured in dozens of news outlets including the Today Show, NPR, and PBS and was listed as one of Newsweek’s “America’s 50 Most Influential Rabbis.” She serves on the boards of the AJC, the Asia Society, the New York Board of Rabbis, and the Yale University President's Council.

Rabbi Buchdahl and her husband Jacob Buchdahl have three children.

Author and activist Lihi Lapid follows characters who yearn for each other across space, time and even cognition.

Biography:

Lihi Lapid is a writer, journalist, lecturer and performer, symbolizing the voice of the contemporary Israeli woman. Her activity in various media has earned her a following that sweeps through social media with thousands of shares and comments.

Her books have been on the bestseller lists for weeks, led by the book "A Soldier's Wife," which is a milestone in personal female writing in Hebrew.

Lapid has published two novels, in addition to a book intended for mothers who enlist their children, two children's books, and a recipe book.

She used to be a photojournalist and is now a writer, lecturer, and performer.

Lapid is active in social issues, with an emphasis on two areas: women's rights and parenting children with special needs. She is the president of the "Shekel - Community Services for People with Disabilities" association.

Author Lee Yaron resists the simplification of politics, people, and, most of all, of October 7th — in favor of nuance and humanity.

Biography:

Lee Yaron is an award-winning Israeli journalist.

Her new book, "10/7: 100 Human Stories," won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award  Book of the Year — and the 2025 Natan Notable Books award.

At 30, Yaron is the youngest Book of the Year recipient in the award's history. She joins distinguished past winners including Philip Roth, Elie Wiesel, David Grossman and Amos Oz.

She was selected for the prestigious 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Her investigative journalism on corruption, social issues, and environmental concerns has prompted the establishment of state-level commissions and driven changes in Israeli policy and law. This work earned her the 2022 Yitzhak Livni "Knight" Award for Free Speech in Media. She currently serves as an elected member-representative on the Executive Committee of the Union of Israeli Journalists.

Website: https://www.leeyaron.com/