Deborah Starr is a professor of Near Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on issues of identity and inter-communal exchange in Middle Eastern literature and film, with a focus on the Jews of Egypt. She is the author of Togo Mizrahi and The Making of Egyptian Cinema (University of California Press, 2020) and Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire (Routledge 2009). She is also the co-editor, with Sasson Somekh, of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff.

Anthony David is an historian, teacher, and author of nine books, most recently Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and Its Hope for the Future, which he wrote with Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Israeli Shin Bet. 

Jacqueline Laznow is a Research Associate at the Folklore Research Center and holds the position of academic senior librarian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also a member of the Israeli Association of Jewish Latin American Researchers.  Her research focuses on Jewish women’s ethnohistory, folklore, gender, and migration studies. She has published widely in academic journals on various facets of Jewish-Argentine women’s daily lives and on the life stories of Israeli women ordained as rabbis. Her most recent publications examine the influence of Jewish-American librarians on Israeli librarianship and Jewish women’s quest for equality during the Yishuv period in Eretz Israel.

Na’amit Sturm Nagel is a Doctoral Candidate in the English department at the University of California-Irvine. Her research focuses on Jewish American literature, specifically fiction and life-writing by women during second-wave feminism and the identity politics of the late twentieth century. Her most recent publication is “The Lord of History in Cynthia Ozick’s ‘Ruth,” published in Studies in American Jewish Literature. Sturm Nagel has also published op-eds and book reviews in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Moment Magazine, Lilith, The Forward, Lehrhaus, The Jewish Journal, and Kveller. 

Claire Auperin is a French PhD student working on English-language American Jewish women’s magazines published in the first half of the twentieth century. She wrote her master’s thesis on Rosa Sonneschein’s magazine, the American Jewess (1895-1899). She was invited to be a Fulbright Visiting Doctoral Student by Professor Beth S. Wenger at the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2024. 

Osnat Akirav is a professor of Political Science at the Western Galilee College, Israel, and president of Israel Political Science Association. Her specialization is in legislative studies, candidate selection methods, government formation, democratic backsliding, local government, and gender and politics. 

Vanessa R. Sasson is a professor of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts Department of Marianopolis College where she has been teaching since 1999. She is also a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State and Research Member at CERIAS at UQAM.