College Commons

How does vulnerability and resilience aid in the work of inter-religious understanding? Dean Phillip Bell is President/CEO and Professor of Jewish History at Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. He earned a PhD and MA at the University of California, Berkeley and a BA at the University of Chicago. He has served on the Board of the Association for Jewish Studies and he is the author or editor of 10 books in Jewish Studies and Jewish History. Michael S. Hogue is Professor of Theology, Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at Meadville Lombard Theological School (Chicago). He received his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and is the author of several books, most recently, American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World (Columbia, 2018). He is also co-investigator with Dr. Dean Bell (Spertus Institute of Jewish Learning and Leadership) of the Religion, Vulnerability and Resilience Project.

Recasting the Jewish legal tradition as literature and spirituality. Dr. Alyssa Gray is Professor of Codes and Responsa Literature and Emily S. and Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman Chair of Rabbinics at HUC-JIR in New York. She specializes in Talmud and Jewish Law, about which she has written two books and co-edited a third, in addition to numerous essays for both scholarly and popular audiences. Her new book “Charity in Rabbinic Judaism: Atonement, Rewards, and Righteousness” was just published (Routledge, 2019). She is a frequent and sought-after presenter in academic, synagogue, and other venues. Check out her Eli Talk online: “Jewish Law as Great Literature.”

Israel as we visit it in our hearts, minds, and in person. Dr. Lesley Litman is the Director of the Executive M.A. Program in Jewish Education and works with the Experiment in Congregational Education as the coordinator of its Boston-based initiative. She also consults to The iCenter in the area of curriculum design and professional development in Israel education. Lesley holds a doctorate in Jewish education from The Jewish Theological Seminary. Her research interests focus on the connection between curriculum and innovation in congregational education. Jeremy Leigh teaches Israel Studies and Modern Jewish History at HUC-JIR's Taube Family Campus in Jerusalem. He is the coordinator of the Richard J. Scheuer Israel Seminar for the Year-In-Israel Program, as well as director of the HUC-JIR-JDC Fellowship for Global Jewish Responsibility. He leads the Year-In-Israel Program's program in Lithuania and coordinates the annual professional development program in Former Soviet Union. Prior to coming to HUC-JIR,

Bridging the gap between politically liberal and conservative Jews. Rabbi Peter S. Berg is the Senior Rabbi of The Temple: The Hebrew Benevolent Congregation. The Temple is Atlanta’s oldest synagogue, founded in 1867. Rabbi Berg was named by Newsweek and The Daily Beast as one of the most influential rabbis in United States, by Georgia Trend as one of the 100 most influential Georgians, and by Atlanta Magazine as one of Atlanta’s most powerful leaders.

How does music unlock and inspire learning and prayer, and even love? Singer-songwriter, composer, and educator Rory Michelle Sullivan has recorded four studio albums and performed internationally. She and her music have been featured at festivals such as ISH, Cincinnati’s Jewish and Israeli Arts and Cultural Festival, on Jewish Rock Radio’s Emerging Artist Showcase, and in Philadelphia RowHome magazine. Rory Michelle’s work explores relating to ourselves, others, and a spiritual Source in healthy, authentic, creative, and constructive ways. Her Jewish-themed musical endeavor, The God Album, includes fun folk, funk, rock, and swing music with songs infused, inspired, and informed by Jewish text. She is currently working on the musical Rising in Love.

A comedy show in Auschwitz? Exploring Holocaust and humor — and its limits. Ferne Pearlstein is a critically acclaimed filmmaker & renowned cinematographer. She won the Sundance Cinematography Prize for "Imelda” about the former first lady of the Philippines. She has produced and/or directed dozens of films including THE LAST LAUGH which was released theatrically in over 25 cities and screened at over 100 film festivals including London, Munich, Jerusalem, and Rome. Ferne is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and a 2018 inductee into Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame. View THE LAST LAUGH is available on Amazon Prime.For more information, visit www.lastlaughfilm.us. THE LAST LAUGH is on all social media, including Facebook @lastlaughfilm.

Parenting as spiritual practice, the complexity of cultural appropriation, and the challenging work of intersectionality and feminism today. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is an award-winning author and writer. She was named by Newsweek and The Daily Beast as one of ten “rabbis to watch,” by the Forward as one of the top 50 most influential women rabbis, and called a “wunderkund of Jewish feminism” by Publishers Weekly. She written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, Time, and many other publications, and contributes regularly to The Washington Post and The Forward. She has been featured on NPR a number of times, as well as in The Atlantic, USA Today, NBC News, MTV News, Upworthy, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Al Jazeera America, Reese Witherspoon’s podcast How It Is, and elsewhere. She is the author of seven books; Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting (Flatiron Books), which a the National Jewish Boo

Policy analyst Jordan Reimer unpacks the complexities of geopolitics in the middle east. Jordan Reimer is currently a policy analyst at RAND in the defense and political sciences department. He has an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and studied in Egypt and Yemen. He served as a policymaker at the Department of Defense under two administrations, focusing on Iraq, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula. Before RAND, Jordan was an intelligence analyst at the New York City Police Department, working on counter-terrorism investigations with a nexus to Syria. He is also a lecturer and course instructor on conflict and insurgency in the post-Arab Spring Middle East, radicalization, and political Islam, most recently at New York University.

Campus speech and our values. Michael S. Roth is the 16th president of Wesleyan University. A professor, author and curator, Roth's scholarly interests center on how people make sense of the past. His most recent book is Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist's Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech and Political Correctness on College Campuses (2019), published by Yale University Press. Among his many notable books, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, (2014) won the Frederic W. Ness Book Award given annually by the Association of American Colleges & Universities to the book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education. He regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and scholarly journals.

Cole Imperi: Death Becomes Us by HUC-JIR

Is belief of one type or another necessary to lead a good life? Scott Shay is a leading businessman, thought leader, and author of two widely read books: Getting Our Groove Back: How to Energize American Jewry, and In Good Faith: Questioning Religion and Atheism, the latter of which has been recognized as one of the best books of 2018 by Mosaic Authors and earned a finalist award from National Jewish Books. Scott co-founded Signature Bank in 2001, which has become known as one of the best banks in New York for private business owners. And he is a highly sought-after speaker, giving talks around the country throughout the year. For more information, visit: http://scottshay.com.

Palestinian author and vigorous advocate of Israeli-Palestinian peace, Yousef Bashir shares his compelling personal story of why we must focus on the human aspect of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Author of, The Words of My Father: Love and Pain in Palestine, Yousef Bashir is a Palestinian-American from the Gaza Strip, and the son of Khalil Bashir, a highly respected educator. Still suffering the effects of a near catastrophic injury at the hands of an anonymous IDF soldier, Yousef made his way to the United States where he earned a BA in International Affairs from Northeastern University and an MA in Co-existence and Conflict from Brandeis University. Now living in Washington DC, Bashir has worked on Capitol Hill, and served as a member of the Palestinian Diplomatic Delegation to the United States. Yousef is an accomplished author, a vigorous advocate of Israeli-Palestinian peace, and much sought-after public speaker.

Does Judaism have a spiritual blindspot that draws some away, even to cults? Josh Bloch was the host and co-producer of CBC Podcast's Uncover Escaping NXIVM. He has worked on CBC's daily current affairs show The Current since 2012 as a documentary editor. He co-created the CBC show The Life Game, which tells people's life stories with the help of improv actors, and How To Do It: the guide to things you hope you never need to know. He also produced CBC's first Virtual Reality documentary Highway of Tears. Photo credit: Evan Aagaard, CBC

Yogi, podcaster, and passionate Jew, Lauren Taus has a different take on being culturally Jewish. With decades of experience as a licensed clinical therapist and yoga teacher, Lauren Taus guides people in embodied healing to alchemize personal and intergeneration pain. She works with the body, the mind and the spirit to transform lives, and guide individuals into their highest, most authentic expression. Lauren works with cutting edge technology in her approaches, most recently certified by MAPS to use MDMA for treatment resistant complex trauma cases. Praised in magazines like USA Today, Self, Men's Health, Wanderlust, Yoga Journal and more, Lauren has worked with celebrity clients, hedge fund managers and entrepreneurial giants as well as at risk youth and the American prison system. Most recently, Lauren launched a deeper investigation into the divergent communities of the Holy Land, and she launched her podcast Inbodied Life to showcase the journey. Inbodied Life includes rich conversations around co

Reform liturgy in Israel, where Hebrew content has a whole new meaning. Rabbi Dalia Marx, Ph.D., is the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Professor of Liturgy and Midrash at the Taube Family Campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem, and she teaches in various academic institutions in Israel and Europe. Marx, tenth generation in Jerusalem, earned her doctorate at the Hebrew University and her rabbinic ordination at HUC-JIR in Jerusalem and Cincinnati. She is involved in various research projects and is active in promoting liberal Judaism in Israel. Marx writes for academic and popular journals and publications. She is the author of When I Sleep and When I Wake: On Prayers between Dusk and Dawn (Yediot Sfarim, 2010, in Hebrew), A Feminist Commentary of the Babylonian Talmud (Mohr Siebeck, 2013, in English), About Time: Journeys in the Jewish-Israeli Calendar (Yediot Sfarim, 2018, in Hebrew) and the co-editor of a few books. Marx lives in Jerusalem with her husband Rabbi Roly Zylbersztein

Take a gripping glimpse behind the bars of the American criminal prison system from a Jewish social activist who's done time on the inside. Evie Litwok is the Founder and Executive Director of Witness to Mass Incarceration (WMI). WMI’s mission is to end mass incarceration by placing formerly incarcerated women and LGBTQIA+ experiences at the center of the fight for alternatives to mass incarceration. Evie works to change the narrative from invisibility and victimization to empowerment through documentation, leadership training, organizing and advocacy. Litwok walked out of prison homeless, jobless, and penniless. Despite the lack of resources, she began speaking about her experiences in prison and formed WMI. She has added the goals of eliminating sexual violence, pushing for emergency evacuation of incarcerated people during times of national disaster and her newest initiative, the Suitcase Project, gives newly released people a suitcase filled with much needed items and a potential community. Her hard wor

“Unorthodox” Podcast host takes questions on American Judaism and Jewish culture. Author and freelance writer, Mark Oppenheimer, wrote the “Beliefs” column for The New York Times from 2010 until the summer of 2016. He now hosts a weekly podcast "Unorthodox," produced by Tablet magazine. On iTunes’s #1 Jewish-themed podcast, he delivers the News of the Jews to the world, and interviews guests (Jewish and non-) from Roxane Gay to Simon Doonan, from Transparent’s Kathryn Hahn to Dan Savage. His magazine journalism and reviews appear in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Believer, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Yale and has taught at Yale, Stanford, Wesleyan, Boston College, and NYU. He has written two studies of religion and popular culture. The first, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, describes how the tumult of the 1960s affected Protestants, Catholics and Jews in America. The second, Thirteen and a Day, tells the story of my cross-country trip in search of unique

Poetry and prose from the pen of Yermiyahu Ahron Taub transport us from the world of Orthodox Judaism to the libraries of modern America. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of the collection of short stories Prodigal Children in the House of G-d (2018) and six books of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems (2017). Preparing to Dance: New Yiddish songs, a CD of nine of his Yiddish poems set to music by Michał Gorczyński, was released in 2014. Taub was honored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage as one of New York’s best emerging Jewish artists and has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. With co-translator Ellen Cassedy, he is the recipient of the 2012 Yiddish Book Center Translation Prize and the 2014-2017 Modern Language Association’s Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies for Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (2016). His short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Hamilton Stone Review, Jewrotica,

Exploring the therapy of angels and past lives to understand the soul and the self. Doris E. Cohen, Ph.D., is an internationally renowned clinical psychologist and psychotherapist and has been in the private practice for more than 30 years. Her unique approach uses psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, Past-Life Regressions and Dream analysis.

Exploring the value, ritual, and tradition of storytelling while straddling different Jewish worlds. Pearl Gluck’s work has been part of the Sundance Lab, played at the Cannes Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and PBS. The Turn Out is her first fiction feature film. Her first documentary feature film, Divan (2004) opened theatrically at Film Forum in NYC, was broadcast on the Sundance Channel and played across the country and internationally at festivals. Pearl’s first narrative short, Where is Joel Baum (2012), won prizes such as Best Actor at the Starz Denver Film Festival and Best Film at the Toronto Female Eye Film Festival. She continues to make both documentary and narrative films that explore themes of class, gender, and faith. Pearl teaches Screenwriting and Directing at Penn State University and is currently developing a documentary project exploring specialty courts that offer an alternative, treatment-oriented approach for victims of sex trafficking. Ten years after leaving her native Borough