Born to two Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia, Helen Epstein has spent her life building an impressive journalistic career. She has also explored her own lived experiences, as well as the repercussions of intergenerational trauma from the Holocaust, on both her own family and the families of other survivors, in several memoirs and non-fiction books.

Despite their small numbers, the introspective and penitential religious outlook of the German-Jewish Piestists had a significant and lasting impact on European Jewry. Written by men and intended for a male audience, the Pietists’ writings heighten the profound ambivalence toward women that is inherent in the rabbinic tradition

Anita Brenner, an anthropologist, journalist, and art historian, was born in Aguascalientes, Mexico, to Jewish immigrants from Latvia and grew up in Mexico and Texas. She was an important part of the Mexican Renaissance cultural scene, and the internal tension she experienced as Mexican, American, and Jewish provided her with insight into both Mexican and Jewish identity.

Niki Russ Federman is the fourth-generation co-owner of Russ & Daughters, the iconic appetizing shop founded in 1914 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan by her great-grandfather, Joel Russ. Known globally for its bagels, lox, babkas, and other Ashkenazi Jewish food delicacies, Russ & Daughters is believed to be the first business in America to include daughters in the name. As the fourth generation to own Russ & Daughters, Russ Federman has overseen its expansion while retaining an authentic legacy of Jewish food.