Melissa Weininger is the Anna Smith Fine Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Associate Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Rice University. She researches and writes about modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, especially contemporary Israeli literature written in and about diaspora.

Michelle Shain is a social scientist with who combines expertise in policy research and with deep knowledge of American Jewish life. She has an MA from the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in Social Policy from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Dr. Shain spent ten years as a researcher at Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies before joining the Orthodox Union as Assistant Director of the Center for Communal Research.

Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies and is Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first books, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (2007) and Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (2011), examine the Shoah’s intersections with art and space; her newest work is entitled Jewish Anxiety in the Novels of Philip Roth (2015). She is now working on a project about convergences between Jewish and black artists and writers as well as the novel Rare Stuff and an edited anthology about memory studies.

Matthew D. Warshawsky is professor of Spanish at the University of Portland, where he teaches courses on Spanish Medieval and Golden Age literature and culture and Latin American Jewish literature and culture, among other topics. He is the author of The Perils of Living the Good and True Law: Iberian Crypto-Jews in the Shadow of the Colonial Inquisition of Hispanic America (Juan de la Cuesta, 2016) and the co-editor, with James A. Parr, of Don Quixote: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Juan de la Cuesta, 2013).

Naomi Lindstrom is the Gale Family Foundation Professor in Jewish Arts and Culture, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and Co-Director of the Gale Collaborative for the Study of Jewish Life in the Americas at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Her recent books are Early Spanish American Narrative (2004) and The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing (1998). She manages the listserv of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.

Nerina Visacovsky received her PhD from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She is a Senior Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and Senior University Professor at the University of San Martin (UNSAM). Her principal fields of research are left-wing Jewish identity and education in South America. She is also Director of the Centro de Documentation y Biblioteca (CeDoB) Pinie Katz at the ICUF (YKUF), Buenos Aires.

Raquel Torenberg was born and raised in Mexico City. A sociologist and an expert in education, she attended the University of Hartford and the Jerusalem Fellows program in leadership in Jewish education. From 2004-2011, she served as academic director at the Universidad Hebraica and from 2012-2018 she was principal of the Colegio Hebrew Sefaradi, both in Mexico City.

Pete Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Mississippi State University. He is the author of “Something On My Own”: Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929-1956 (Syracuse University Press, 2007). His research interests include the intersection between 20^th century media history, politics, and gender.

Vincent Brook has a PhD in film and television from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been a lecturer at UCLA since 2005 and taught for extended periods at California State University, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California. He has written dozens of scholarly articles and authored or edited nine books, several on Jewish images in media, including Something Ain't Kosher Here: The Rise of the "Jewish" Sitcom (2003), You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture (2006), Driven to Darkness: Jewish Emigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (2009), and From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood (2017).