Speaker Bios

Dr. Lauren Bairnsfather is the CEO of the Anne Frank Center USA. She began her career at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and most recently served as Executive Director of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. She holds a Doctorate in History from the University of Texas at Austin and serves on the boards of the Association of Holocaust Organizations and the Council of American Jewish Museums. 

Rachelle Bergstein is a lifestyle writer, author, and editor, focused on style, pop culture, and families. Her work has appeared in the New York Post, The New York Times, NPR, and more. She is the author of three books: Women from the Ankle Down, Brilliance and Fire, and The Genius of Judy. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. Find out more at RachelleBergstein.com. 

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is also the creator and executive producer of its Emmy-nominated limited series adaptation for FX. Long Island Compromise is her second novel. 

Jonah E. Bromwich is a staff reporter for The New York Times, covering Manhattan’s criminal justice system. He was a lead reporter on Trump’s criminal trial, reporting live from the courtroom for more than a month. 

Stephanie Butnick is a prominent voice in the Jewish world. As a longtime co-host of Tablet Magazine’s hit podcast Unorthodox, she’s known for her smart and entertaining conversations. Stephanie is the co-author of The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia: From Abraham to Zabar’s and Everything in Between, and travels to communities around the country to speak about contemporary Jewish life.   

Ellen Cassedy is a Yiddish translator with a special interest in women writers.  Her translations include On the Landing: Stories by Yenta Mash and Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (with co-translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub).  She and Anita Norich are the translators of Rashel Veprinski’s novel Dos kraytsn fun di hent (Hand in Hand), forthcoming from White Goat Press.

Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty-five years. Her magazine journalism has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship and ten grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Her debut novel KICKDOWN (2018/Arcade) was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. Her latest work of creative non-fiction The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance (Viking/Penguin) was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews, The Forward, Tribal College Journal and The Christian Science Monitor.

F. K. Clementi is a writer, public intellectual, and a professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma. 

Debórah Dwork is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center – City University of New York. Pathbreaking in her early oral recording of Holocaust child survivors, Dwork weaves their narratives into the history she writes. Her award-winning books include Children With A Star; Flight from the Reich; Auschwitz; and Holocaust. Her most recent work, Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis, will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2025.  Prof. Dwork is also a leading authority on university education in this field: she envisioned and actualized the first doctoral program anywhere in the world specifically in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies.

Delia Ephron is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. She adapted her recent best-selling memoir, Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, as a play, which opened this year on Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theater. Her novels include best-selling Siracusa and The Lion Is In. Among her many books of essays and humor are SisterMotherHusbandDog (etc) and How To Eat Like A Child. Her movie credits – often co-written with her sister Nora Ephron — include You’ve Got Mail, Michael, and This is My Life. She and her sister co-authored the play, Love, Loss and What I Wore. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. She lives in Greenwich Village. 

Samantha Ettus is a national bestselling author of five books, a renowned speaker, and a former co-host of iHeart’s leading women in business podcast. Sam was a longtime contributor to Forbes and was a syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. For many years, Sam hosted a national call-in radio show and was host of leading internet talk show “Obsessed TV,” which she created and produced with internet personality Gary Vaynerchuk. 

Jack Fairweather is the author of the Costa Book Award winner The Volunteer, a #1 bestseller in the UK that’s been hailed as a modern classic and compared to Schindler’s List. He served as a correspondent for The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph, where he was the paper’s Baghdad and Persian Gulf bureau chief. 

Reuven Fenton has been covering breaking news for the New York Post since 2007, and has earned national recognition for his exclusive reporting on myriad national stories. He is a graduate of Yeshiva University and Columbia University School of Journalism. Goyhood is his debut novel. 

Sandra Fox is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hebrew Judaic Studies at New York University, and director of the Archive of the American Jewish Left in the Digital Age. Her research interests include American Jewish history, the history of youth and childhood, Yiddish culture, and the history of sexuality. Her book, The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America (Stanford University Press) addresses the experiences of youth in postwar Jewish summer camps and the place of intergenerational negotiation in the making of American Jewish culture. 

Laura Shaw Frank is Director of the Center for Education Advocacy at American Jewish Committee (AJC) where she oversees AJC’s work on combating antisemitism and fostering inclusion of Jewish students and faculty in K-12 and higher education spaces. A passionate and seasoned educator, Laura advises educators and administrators in college and university spaces as well as in K-12 institutions on building educational institutions that are fully inclusive of Jews, resilient against antisemitism, and focused on civic education and democratic values.

Evelyn Frick (she/they) is a culture writer-editor based in Brooklyn. She is an associate editor for Hey Alma, a feminist Jewish publication from 70 Faces Media, and has additional writing in the New Yorker, Vulture, Reductress and The Onion. Evelyn received her Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in Art History from Vassar College in 2019. She is a scholar of the early 2000s novel You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. 

Elyssa Friedland is the USA Today bestselling author of six novels and a children’s picture book. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School. Elyssa worked as an associate at a major firm before turning to writing full-time. She has taught an undergraduate course at Yale called “Contemporary Novel Writing” for several years. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, LitHub, POPSUGAR, RealSimple.com, Writer’s Digest and Bustle. Elyssa is a founding member of Artists Against Antisemitism, a not-for-profit organization initiated by a group of contemporary female authors devoted to spreading light to offset hate. She resides in New York City with her husband and three children.   

Julia Gergely is a journalist living in Brooklyn. Most recently, she was a staff reporter at the New York Jewish Week covering Jewish life, religion, local news, culture and community in New York City. Her work has also appeared in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The Forward and Betches and has been syndicated internationally. 

Allison Gilbert is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and one of the most influential writers and speakers on how to find the inner resources to overcome life’s biggest challenges. Through research and lived experience, Allison helps audiences transform grief and loss, manage caregiving and chronic illness, and find connection amid the growing public health crisis of social isolation and loneliness. She is co-author of Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s final book, The Joy of Connections: 100 Ways to Beat Loneliness and Live a Happier and More Meaningful Life. 

Sara Glass, PhD, LCSW, is a therapist, writer, and speaker who helps members of the queer community and individuals who have survived trauma to live bold, honest, and proud lives. She lives in Manhattan, New York with her three children. Find out more at DrSaraGlass.com.       

Sean Glatch is a queer poet, storyteller, and screenwriter in New York City. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Milk Press, 8Poems, The Poetry Annals, on local TV, and elsewhere. Sean currently runs Writers.com, the oldest writing school on the internet. 

Danny Goodman’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Catapult, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere, and he was the recipient of a writer-in-residence fellowship from Rivendell. He earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of New Orleans and lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, a book editor, and their editorial cats. His debut novel, Amerikaland, called a “strong debut” by the Jewish Book Council and winner of the 2024 NYC Big Book Award for Best New Fiction, is out now. 

Lauren Aliza Green holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She is the author of A Great Dark House, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and the inaugural recipient of the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award, sponsored by Poetry Ireland and Stanford University. Her writing has received support from the Kenyon Review Workshop, Bread Loaf, and the Carson McCullers Center. 

Ronnie Grinberg is Associate Professor of History and core faculty member of the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York intellectuals published by Princeton University Press in spring 2024.  The book has been favorably reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, among other venues.

Jeffrey S. Gurock is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University. He has written or edited 25 books, including Jews in Gotham, which in 2012 was honored as Winner, Everett Family Foundation Award, Jewish Book of the Year, Jewish Book Council. 

Beth Harpaz is the Forward’s Bintel Brief advice columnist and the author of three nonfiction books, including Finding Annie Farrell, a family memoir, and The Girls in the Van, about media coverage of Hillary Clinton. Harpaz was a reporter and editor at The Associated Press before joining the Forward. Her latest pursuit is writing plays.     

An award-winning journalist and author, Chris Heath has written about a wide array of subjects for GQ, The Atlantic, Esquire, New York and Vanity Fair, including the aftermaths of the 2011 Japanese tsunami and of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; Iraqi refugees in Syria; a Colorado man traveling on repeated solo missions to kill Osama Bin Laden; the Pennsylvania treasure hunters convinced that the FBI stole their cache of Civil War gold; a homicidal Uber driver in Kalamazoo; the man who convinced Sweden that he was a serial killer then changed his mind; and the mystery of why so many American households appeared to receive unsolicited seeds from China during the 2020 pandemic.

Sarah Imhoff is Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She writes about religion and the body with a particular interest in gender, sexuality, race, and disability.

Adam Langer is the Executive Editor of The Forward, the nation’s most widely read Jewish media outlet. Born and raised in Chicago, he is the author of the novels Crossing California, The Washington Story, Ellington Boulevard, The Thieves of Manhattan, The Salinger Contract and Cyclorama, as well as the memoir My Father’s Bonus March. He is also the creator of the Forward’s “Playing Anne Frank” podcast. 

Caroline Leavitt is the award-winning author of twelve novels, including the New York Times bestseller Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow. A book critic for People magazine, her essays, articles and stories have been included in New York magazine, “Modern Love” in the New York Times, Salon, and The Daily Beast, among others. The recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Award for Fiction and a Sundance Screenwriters Lab finalist, she is also the co-founder of A Mighty Blaze. 

Dr. Miriam Eve Mora is a historian of American immigration and ethnic history, with a focus on Jewish American gender identity. Her areas of research interest and specialization include modern Jewish history, gender and antisemitism, genocide studies, Holocaust memory and representation in pop culture, masculinity, history of Irish conflict, and American Jewish acculturation. Her first book, Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century was released from Wayne State University Press in 2024 and received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. She is also currently the lead historian for the Jewish American curricular project as a part of the National History Day “Inclusive History Initiative.”

Lisa Newman, director of publishing and public programs and director of White Goat Press, the Yiddish Book Center’s imprint, and host of The Shmooze, the Center’s podcast. Prior to joining the Yiddish Book Center, Lisa managed public relations and publishing projects for a variety of nonprofit and corporate clients. After moving to western Massachusetts to work for New England Monthly, she went on to work with numerous national magazine and book publishers. She has been an instructor at the Radcliffe Publishing Course and the Columbia Publishing Course and a panelist at industry events. She is a graduate of New York University. 

Sarah Maslin Nir is a staff reporter for The New York Times, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the Once Upon a Horse series of children’s books, featuring true stories from across the equestrian world. Nir is also the author of the adult nonfiction book Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal.  

Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.  She is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), numerous short stories, among them the previously-untranslated stories by Israel Joshua Singer, and, with Ellen Cassedy, Hand to Hand by Rashel Veprinski.

Hannah Orenstein is the author of Maine Characters, Meant to Be Mine, Head Over Heels, Love at First Like, and Playing with Matches, as well as the Deputy Editor of Lifestyle and Wellness at Bustle. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Maine. 

Grace Kessler Overbeke is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at Columbia College, Chicago. 

Zibby Owens is the bestselling author of Blank: A Novel, Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature, Princess Charming, and the forthcoming novel Overheard. She is the editor of three anthologies: On Being Jewish Now, Moms Don’t Have Time To Have Kids, and Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology. Zibby has regularly contributed to “Good Morning America,” Vogue, Oprah Daily, and many other outlets. 

Sarah Podemski is an award winning multidisciplinary artist from Toronto. She is passionate about recreating the Indigenous narrative that has been misrepresented since the beginning of cinema. She stars in three seasons of the critically acclaimed, Spirit award-winning and Emmy nominated series Reservation Dogs (FX) and can also be seen in three seasons of the sci-fi comedy Resident Alien (Syfy). 

Throughout her career, Sarah has been passionate about raising awareness and elevating Indigenous and Jewish narratives in the entertainment industry. In addition to her on-camera presence, she writes and produces alongside her husband, James Gadon.

Bonny Reichert is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist. She has been an editor at Today’s Parent and Chatelaine magazines, and a columnist and regular contributor to The Globe and Mail newspaper. When she turned forty, a now-or-never feeling made her quit her job to enroll in culinary school, and she’s been exploring her relationship with food on the page ever since. Bonny was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and lives in Toronto with her husband and little dog, Bruno. How to Share an Egg won the 2022 Dave Greber Book Award for social justice writing. 

Hannah Reynolds is the two-time Sydney Taylor Honor author of young adult romantic comedies. She grew up outside of Boston, where she spent most of her childhood and teenage years recommending books to friends, working at a bookstore, and making chocolate desserts. She received her BA in Creative Writing and Archaeology from Ithaca College, which meant she never needed to stop telling romantic stories or playing in the dirt. 

Noah Rinsky is a writer and the creator of the Instagram account @oldjewishmen. When he’s not chasing down Old Jewish Men in South Florida, New York, and Tel Avivor hocking overpriced OJM merchandise, he’s probably hanging out with his wife at Mister Wontons, filming old men in the sauna for a mockumentary about the World Sauna Championships or brewing afresh pot of decaf. Noah lives in Brooklyn. Shock-ing, eh? 

Ali Rosen is a bestselling author of both cookbooks and novels, and is the Emmy and James Beard Award-nominated host of Potluck with Ali Rosen on NYC Life. Her novels—described by The Skimm as “a vacation between two covers”—are Recipe for Second Chances and Alternate Endings. Her next swoonworthy novel, Unlikely Story, about a therapist who falls for the wrong man, will be released in March 2025. She is also the author of three cookbooks including the recently released 15 Minute Meals. She has frequently been featured on shows like NBC’S Today Show and ABC’s Good Morning America, and in publications including The New York Times,  Bon Appetit, The Washington Post and New York Magazine. She is originally from Charleston, SC but now lives in New York City with her husband, three kids, and rescue dog. 

Laura R. Samotin has a PhD in international relations and enjoys using her academic background on military tactics, power politics, and leadership to enliven and inform her creative writing. Her YA and adult fiction is grounded in Jewish myth, mysticism, and her Eastern European Jewish heritage. 

Veronica Schanoes is an American author of fantasy stories and an associate professor in the department of English at Queens College, CUNY, where she studies fairy tales. Her novella Burning Girls was nominated for the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award and won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella in 2013. She lives in New York City. Burning Girls and Other Stories, her debut collection, appeared from Tordotcom in 2021. 

Amy E. Schwartz is the opinion and book editor of Moment Magazine. Before joining Moment in 2011, she spent 17 years as an editorial writer and weekly op ed columnist at The Washington Post, specializing in education, science and the culture wars. Schwartz received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Harvard University in 1984 and studied in Germany from 1990-91 as a Chancellor’s Scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has lived in and reported from France, Germany and Turkey and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 1988. Schwartz has also worked at Harper’s, The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly. She is president of the non-denominational Jewish Study Center in Washington, DC. Amy is the editor of the 2020 book Can Robots Be Jewish? And Other Pressing Questions of Modern Life. 

Sarah Seltzer is a feminist writer and editor in New York City and an editor at Lilith magazine. The Singer Sisters (Flatiron, 2024), a USA Today bestseller, is her debut novel. 

Stephen B. Shepard is the Founding Dean Emeritus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He served as a senior editor at Newsweek, the editor of Saturday Review, and editor-in-chief of Business Week. From 1992 to 1994, he was president of the American Society of Magazine Editors. In addition to teaching at CUNY, Shepard was a faculty member at the Columbia Journalism School, where he was co-founder and first director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowships, a mid-career program for working journalists.  

Seth Stern is a legal journalist and editor at Bloomberg Industry Group. He previously reported for Bloomberg News, Congressional Quarterly, and the Christian Science Monitor. He co-authored Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School, and Cornell University 

Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, a political strategist, a philanthropist, and a writer. He is the cofounder and managing partner of Tusk Venture Partners, the world’s first venture capital fund that invests solely in early-stage startups in highly regulated industries, and is the founder of political consulting firm Tusk Strategies. Bradley’s family foundation is funding and leading the national campaign to bring mobile voting to all U.S. elections. Tusk Philanthropies also runs and funds antihunger campaigns that have led to the creation of antihunger policies and programs (including universal school breakfast programs) in nineteen states, helping to feed nearly 13 million people. 

Sasha Vasilyuk was born in the Soviet Crimea and spent her childhood between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to San Francisco at the age of 13. She has a MA in Journalism from New York University, and her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, BBC, The Telegraph, Narrative, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She has won several awards, including the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing, NATJA award, and BAM/PFA Fellowship from UC Berkeley. She lives in San Francisco, California with her husband and children. 

A. R. Vishny was born and raised in Massachusetts but now calls New York City home. Her essays on Jewish representation in pop culture have appeared in Teen Vogue, the Washington Post, and Hey Alma. She earned a BA in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a JD at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she was a Law and Literature fellow. When she’s not writing, she’s at the theater or else hunting for the perfect slice of cheesecake. 

Dr. Elizabeth “Barry” White recently retired from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she served as historian and as Research Director for the USHMM’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide. Prior to working for the USHMM, Barry spent a career at the US Department of Justice working on investigations and prosecutions of Nazi criminals and other human rights violators. She served as deputy director and chief historian of the Office of Special Investigations and as deputy chief and chief historian of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section.  

Lior Zaltzman is an writer, cartoonist and the deputy managing editor of Kveller, where she writes about Jewish pop culture, lifestyle and current events, including stories the best Jewish romances to read if you miss “Bridgerton” or loved/hated “Nobody Wants This.” She recently helped launch Kveller’s Jewish TV Club, a bi-weekly newsletter full of exciting news about Israeli shows you might have missed and reflections about the bar mitzvah and “Fiddler on the Roof” episodes of your nostalgic favorites. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two magical children.