Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a writer, activist, and national lecturer, is a founding editor of Ms. magazine, and the author of twelve books. Her works include the Jewish feminist classic Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America, the novel Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate, and her latest title, the nonfiction work Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy. Pogrebin was also the editorial consultant on Marlo Thomas’s acclaimed children’s book, Free to Be, You and Me. 

Pogrebin’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Tablet, The Forward and many other periodicals of Jewish interest. She is a co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, the UJA Task Force on Women, and the Ms. Foundation for Women, and she is a past president of the Authors Guild and of Americans for Peace Now.  

She currently serves on the board of the Brandeis University Women's and Gender Studies Program and performed past board service for the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School. Ms. Pogrebin’s honors include a Yale University Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, a Matrix Award for excellence in communication and the arts, and an Emmy Award for her work on Free to Be You and Me. Her writing and activism have also been honored by dozens of Jewish organizations and synagogues. 

Letty Cottin Pogrebin lives with her husband in New York City and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The couple has three children and six grandchildren. 

William Deresiewicz is an acclaimed essayist, critic, and speaker, renowned for his best-seller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. The author of more than 300 essays and reviews, he has earned awards like the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. His work appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more, and it has been translated into 19 languages and featured in 39 anthologies. 

Formerly a Yale and Columbia English professor, Deresiewicz transitioned to full-time writing. He's spoken at over 160 venues and has been a guest on The Colbert Report and The New Yorker Radio Hour. He has taught or lectured at schools including Bard, Scripps, Claremont McKenna, and the University of San Diego. He's authored books like The Death of the Artist, A Jane Austen Education, and Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. 

Deresiewicz is also active with Tivnu: Building Justice and Project Wayfinder, promoting social justice and purpose-based learning. 

Anthony Russell is a vocalist, composer, and arranger specializing in music in the Yiddish language. His work in Ashkenazi Jewish musical forms led to an exploration of his own ethnic roots through the research, arrangement, and performance of a hundred years of African American music, resulting in the EP Convergence (2018), a collaboration with klezmer consort Veretski Pass, exploring the sounds and themes of one hundred years of African American and Ashkenazi Jewish music. Inspired by an ethnographic trip to Belarus and Poland as a Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow (2016-17), Anthony formed a duo, Tsvey Brider (“Two Brothers”), with accordionist and pianist Dmitri Gaskin, for the composition and performance of original music set to Yiddish poetry. Their recent release, Kosmopolitn, features their settings of 20th-century Yiddish modernist poetry for voice and string ensemble. A past Hadar Rising Song Fellow (2021-22) and a present Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Fellow (2023-25) Anthony has expanded his work into cultural activism through collaboration with the Workers Circle and as an essayist in many publications, including The Forward, Tablet, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and Jewish Currents. Anthony lives in Atlanta with his husband of eight years, Rabbi Michael Rothbaum. 

Jay Michaelson is the author of nine books, including Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism and God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His recent book The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Antinomianism to Esoteric Myth, was published by Oxford University Press and won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for scholarship. His latest book is The Secret that Is Not a Secret: Ten Heretical Tales; it is his first work of fiction. He holds a Ph.D. in Jewish thought from Hebrew University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination.   

Michaelson’s scholarly work on Jewish mysticism and messianism has been published in journals including Theology and Sexuality, Modern Judaism, and Shofar, and anthologized in volumes including Queer Religion, Imagining the Jewish God, and Jews and the Law.  He has held teaching positions at Chicago Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, and Boston University Law School. 

Outside the academy, Michaelson works as a journalist, teacher, and rabbi.  He is a frequent commentator on CNN and a contributor to Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The Forward, and other publications.  In the meditation field, he is the program director of the New York Insight Meditation Center and the director of the Adamah Jewish Meditation Retreat.  He worked as an LGBTQ activist for ten years and has been included in the “Forward 50” list of influential American Jews.  He lives outside of New York City.  

Sarah Hurwitz is the author of Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life–In Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There), a book about her experience rediscovering Judaism as an adult, which was a finalist for two National Jewish Book Awards and for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. From 2009 to 2017, Hurwitz served as a White House speechwriter, first as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama and then as head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Hurwitz was the chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton. Hurwitz has been profiled in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian; interviewed on The Today Show, Morning Joe, Amanpour & Co., and NPR; published in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post; and named by The Forward as one of 50 Jews who impacted American life in 2016 and 2019. Hurwitz is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and was a Spring 2017 Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.

Roya Hakakian is a writer whose work has appeared both in print and on television. She has developed over a dozen hours of programming for leading journalism units on network television, including 60 Minutes. Hakakian is the author of two collections of poems in Persian and is listed among the leading voices of contemporary Persian poetry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies around the world, including Strange Times My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. She contributes to the Persian Literary Review and served as the poetry editor of Par Magazine for six years. 

Hakakian has contributed countless columns, essays, and book reviews to leading English language publications, most recently to The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. She has been a guest on CNN, MSNBC and NPR. Her work mostly centers around the issues of human rights, social justice, and the conditions of minorities, especially Jews and women in the Middle East. She is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and has served on several non-profit boards, including Refugees International. She is a fellow at Yale University’s Davenport College and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Hakakian’s memoir of growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran, Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran has been translated into many languages, and Hakakian is also a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship in nonfiction. Her second nonfiction book, the Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, about Iran’s terror campaign against exiled Iranian dissidents in Western Europe, was named a Notable Book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review. Her most recent work is A Beginner’s Guide to America for the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf 2021).