Laura Shaw Frank is the Director of the Contemporary Jewish Life Department at the American Jewish Committee (AJC), where she works on Israel-Diaspora relations, Jewish literacy, and Israel education. Prior to her tenure at AJC, Laura served in administrative and educational roles at Yeshivat Maharat and SAR High School. A founding board member of JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, Laura holds a PhD in Modern Jewish history from the University of Maryland, College Park, and undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia University.

Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, once a curator at the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam and now an independent scholar, lives and works in Amsterdam. She received her PhD in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She specializes in European Jewish History of the Early Modern Period, concentrating in particular on social and cultural aspects of the Sephardi community of Early Modern Amsterdam. Her book Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews of Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford 2012) won the (American) National Jewish Book Award of 2012 in the category of Sephardi Culture.

Misha Klein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, where she is also affiliated with Judaic Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and International and Area Studies. She is author of Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in São Paulo (University Press of Florida 2012), an ethnography on the intersecting meanings of race, class, and belonging for the transnational and multicultural Jewish population in Brazil. Other publications include an essay in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures on anthropological contributions to Jewish Studies, both historical and through the “new Jewish ethnography.”

Ruth Behar is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Born in Havana, Cuba, she is known for her humanistic and literary approach to ethnographic writing, poetry, and fiction. Her work has been recognized by numerous honors, including MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the Pura Belpré Author Award for Latina/Latino literature.

Maxine Schwartz Seller grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and received  her BA  in History from Bryn Mawr College in 1956 and her PhD in American social history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. Her most recent position (1974-2006) was  as Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Adjunct Professor in History at the University at Buffalo. Her teaching and research have focused on the history and education of women, immigrants, and other distinctive communities within the United States. She is the author or editor of nine books and dozens of articles and reviews and has held several national offices. Married to Robert H. Seller, MD, for sixty years, she  has three children and five grandchildren.

Zohar Weiman-Kelman is a senior lecturer in the department of foreign literatures and linguistics and holds the Blechner Career Development Chair in East European Jewish Culture at Ben-Gurion University. They received a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California Berkeley and have held fellowships at the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania. Their first book, Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry, was published by SUNY Press in 2018.

Jacobo Sefamí is a professor, critic, and writer who specializes in Latin American poetry and Jewish writing in Latin America. He is the author of Los dolientes (translated into English as Mourning for Papá. A story of a Syrian-Jewish family in Mexico, 2010) and Por tierras extrañas (By Strange Lands; stories and travel chronicles in Turkey and Syria, 2019).

Ofek Kehila is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Mandel School PhD Honors Program and the Mandel-Scholion research group “In Someone Else’s Shoes - An Interdisciplinary Research Group for the Study of Empathy in History, Society, and Culture.” His dissertation, written under the direction of Prof. Ruth Fine, focuses on Rewriting and Empathy in the works of the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas.

Miriam Bell is a journalist, writer, and editor. She is the editor of the One Community Chronicle (a website for the New Zealand Jewish community), writes for J-Wire and the Australia Israel Review, and contributed chapters to Jewish Lives in New Zealand and Identity and Involvement Volume III: Auckland Jewry Into The 21st Century.

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France Emerita and Professor of Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard University. Her books include The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France (2016), Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996). Among collective volumes she has edited are Exile and Creativity (1998) and French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (with Christie McDonald, 2010).

Annie Atura Bushnell is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, where she received her PhD in English with a PhD Minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Lois Elinoff Rubin received a Doctor of Arts degree from Carnegie-Mellon University. Thereafter, she worked for thirty-one years at Penn State as professor of English, teaching women’s and multi-cultural literature. During that time, she published a dozen articles on composition and literature and edited the collection “Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women’s Writing.” She is now preparing for publication the manuscript “Writing the Life Cycle: The Poetry of Maxine Kumin, Linda Pastan, and Alicia Ostriker.”

Alice Nakhimovsky has written extensively on Jewish literature and everyday life in Eastern Europe. She was an editor of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Her 2015 Dear Mendl, Dear Rayzl, written with Roberta Newman, won a National Jewish Book Award.

Honoring her mentor, attorney-turned-author Marlene Trestman wrote Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin (LSU Press, 2016). Following graduation from Goucher College, Trestman earned her law degree from George Washington University and her MBA from Maryland’s Loyola University and has received research funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Supreme Court Historical Society, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, American Jewish Archives, and Texas Jewish Historical Society. A native of New Orleans, Trestman lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is writing her second book, Most Fortunate Unfortunates: New Orleans’s Jewish Orphans’ Home, 1855-1946 (LSU Press, forthcoming). www.marlenetrestman.com

Susan Gilson Miller is an historian of contemporary North Africa, with a special interest in Jewish Studies. She is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Davis, and a Research Associate at the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Ph.D., is the president of Reconstructing Judaism, the central organization of the Reconstructionist movement, which includes the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She is a graduate of Columbia College, Columbia University; was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; and received her Ph.D. from Temple University. She has published several academic articles and writes regularly for The Forward, eJewish Philanthropy, The Times of Israel, and other publications.

Judith Shira Pinnolis is a librarian and musicologist. She teaches at the School of Jewish Music of Hebrew College and works as Associate Director of Libraries at Berklee College of Music/The Boston Conservatory at Berklee. She has served as Chair of the Jewish Music Roundtable of the Music Library Association and is creator and editor of The Jewish Music WebCenter (www.jmwc.org). Pinnolis received the M.M. at the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati and M.S. in Library Science at Simmons College.

Edna Barromi-Perlman is a senior lecturer at the Department of Visual Literacy in Kibbutzim College of Education in Israel. Barromi-Perlman is a research fellow of the Institute for Research of the Kibbutz and the cooperative idea in the University of Haifa and an Honorary Research Associate of The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on archival photographs in Palestine and Israel, personal albums, and the use of photography in education. Her work appears in academic journals such as Social Semiotics, Journal of Israeli History, Journal of Visual Literacy, Journal of Landscape Ecology, Journal of Photography and Culture, Landscape Research, and International Journal of Qualitative Methods. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Sussex and her MFA from Goldsmiths College in the United Kingdom.  Her book Photographs of Childhood and Parenting on Kibbutz: Collective Memories and Private Memorials came out in 2020. For more information, see https://haifa.academia.edu/EdnaBarromiPerlman.

Hana Green is a PhD Candidate at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She earned a BA in History from the University of Florida and an MA in Holocaust Studies from the University of Haifa before beginning her doctoral studies. Her research focuses on Jewish women who passed as Aryan during the Holocaust in Germany and Austria.

Bonnie S. Anderson is professor emerita from Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. One of the pioneers of women’s history, she wrote A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present (1988, 2^nd ed. 2000, with Judith P. Zinsser), Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (2000), and The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (2017). She is currently working on a family history and memoir.

Tal Dekel is Head of the Visual Literacy Program at Kibbutzim College, Israel. She also teaches at the Art History Department at Tel Aviv University and she formally served as Chair of the NCJW Gender Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University. Dekel specializes in visual culture, taking a particular interest in feminist theories, multiculturalism, migration, and age studies. She has published extensively in academic journals. Her books are Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory (Cambridge Scholars); Transnational Identities: Women, Art and Migration in Israel (Wayne State University Press); and Women and Old Age: Ageism and Gender in Israeli Art (Open University Press).

Loren Sass is an arts administrator and writer and is currently the Deputy Director of Development at Gibney in New York City. Loren has presented research at the “Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World” conference at Arizona State University and the Conney Conference at the 92nd Street Y. Loren serves on the Executive Committee of the Dance/NYC Junior Committee, a proactive working committee of emerging dance leaders who participate in a range of professional development activities and engage in critical dialogue about the NYC dance field with a focus on equity, inclusion, and advocacy.

Dr. Hannah Kosstrin is a dance historian and movement analyst working at the intersection of dance, Jewish, and gender studies. At The Ohio State University, she is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance and affiliate faculty with the Melton Center for Jewish Studies and Center for Slavic and East European Studies. Her monograph Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow (Oxford UP, 2017) was awarded Finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award.