2026 Season Speakers
Week 1
Izabella Tabarovsky
Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary antisemitism, the author of Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide , and a sought-after speaker and lecturer.
She is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC; senior fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities in Palo Alto; and a fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa.
A contributing writer at Tablet, she has also published in Newsweek, Sapir, Quillette, The National Interest, Fathom, The Forward, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Her essays have appeared in several edited volumes, including October 7: The Wars over Words and Deeds (Academic Studies Press); The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century: From the Academic Boycott Campaign into the Mainstream (Routledge); Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays Sionismo y antisionismo: Un debate necesario and Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People (Wicked Son). Her work has been translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Polish, Russian, Czech, and other languages.
June 29: From the USSR to American Campuses Today: The Ideological Roots of Contemporary Antizionism
June 30: The New Refuseniks: Jewish Courage and Defiance in an Age of Antizionist Pressure
Week 2
Rabbi Josh Stanton
Rabbi Joshua Stanton is Associate Vice President for Interfaith and Intergroup Initiatives at Jewish Federations of North America, where he empowers leaders from 141 Jewish Federations across the continent to become bridge-builders in their regions. He also serves as spiritual co-leader of East End Temple in Manhattan. Rabbi Stanton is coauthor with Rabbi Benjamin Spratt of Awakenings: American Jewish Transformations in Identity, Leadership and Belonging and the forthcoming book, “Revival: Portraits of America’s Spiritual Builders.” His articles, media appearances, and interviews have appeared in more than a dozen languages, and he has spoken at the United Nations, White House, and interfaith conferences around the world.
July 6: The Jewish Awakening
July 7: Visions of Peoplehood
Week 3
Amanda Berman
Amanda Berman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zioness, where she works to empower and activate Zionists on the progressive left to stand proudly in social justice spaces as Jews and Zionists. She is also a civil rights attorney who previously worked to fight antisemitism legally, spearheading such groundbreaking initiatives as the international action against Kuwait Airways for its discrimination against Israeli nationals, and the dual cases against San Francisco State University for its constitutional and civil rights violations against Jewish and Israeli students and community members.
Amanda writes on Jewish, social justice and civil rights issues, speaks and presents before diverse audiences, and is a media contributor across various mediums and outlets. She is a graduate of the Anti-Defamation League’s Glass Leadership Institute, the recipient of Hadassah’s prestigious Myrtle Wreath Award, and was listed by the Algemeiner as one of the top “100 people positively contributing to Jewish life” in 2018.
Amanda graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Diplomatic History and a Master of Governmental Administration and received her Juris Doctor from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she was a Public Service Scholar; served in the Bet Tzedek Legal Services Clinic, providing legal services to the underrepresented; served in the Advanced Human Rights Clinic, providing legal services to immigrants and refugees; sat on the Executive Board of the Cardozo Advocates for Battered Women; and was a Fellow in the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Clinic. She practiced securities litigation at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP before dedicating her career to the advancement and protection of the Jewish people and the Zionist community.
July 13: Zionism and Progressivism: The Twin Jewish Mandates of Particularism and Universalism
July 14: Jews as a Football: The Political Weaponization of Antisemitism on Left and Right
Week 4
Dr. Yoni Applebaum
Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor at The Atlantic and the author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum is a social and cultural historian of the United States. Before joining The Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He previously taught at Babson College and at Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in American history.
July 20: The Anti-Semitic Origins of American Zoning
July 21: The Jews Who Brought You the Weekend
Week 5
Dr. Rebecca Kobrin
Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, in Columbia University’s Department of History, where she teaches in the field of American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She is also the Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia.
Her research, teaching, and publications engage in the fields of international migration, urban history, Jewish history, American religion, and diaspora studies. She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as the Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University. Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize (2012). She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism and is co-editor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History. (In 2015, she was awarded Columbia University’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for her outstanding teaching and her inspirational mentoring of her students.
Her book, A Credit to the Nation: Jewish Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870-1930 brings together scholarship in Jewish history, American immigration studies, and American economic history. She is one of the principal investigators leading the award-winning digital humanities Historical NYC Project, an award-winning map that visualizes the demographic and spatial changes wrought in New York City between 1850 and 1940.
July 2: A Credit to the Nation: A New History of Eastern European Jews and American Banking: Sender Jarmulowsky and his Bank on Orchard Street
July 28: A Credit to the Nation: A New History of Eastern European Jews and American Banking: Bank of United States: The Failure that Changed American Banking
Week 6
Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat
Week 6
Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat
Stuart Eizenstat is an American diplomat and attorney. He has held many positions. He was the former Chief White House Domestic Policy Adviser (1977-1981) under President Jimmy Carter. He was U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs, and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury (1993-2001). Beginning in 1993, he was Senior U.S. Government official in charge of Holocaust Justice in Clinton, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.
In the Biden administration, he served as Special Adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Holocaust Issues. In this capacity, he played a major role in the negotiation of the Best Practices for the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art (2024), now supported by 34 countries. He was appointed by President Biden as Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council (2022-present).
In 2008, the Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat Distinguished Professorship in Jewish history and culture was endowed in Eizenstat's honor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For his work he has received the Courage and Conscience Award from the Government of Israel, the Knight Commander's Cross (Badge and Star) of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the French Legion of Honor from the Government of France, and the International Advocate for Peace Award from the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution.[
Since 2009, he has served as pro bono Special Negotiator for the Jewish Claims Conference in negotiations with the German government, obtaining billions of dollars of benefits for poor Holocaust survivors, for home care, social and medical services, enhanced pensions, hardship payments, child survivor and Kindertransport survivors, special supplemental payments for the poorest of the poor, and worldwide educational benefits.
He has authored four books, scores of newspaper and magazine articles, is a frequent lecturer, and has made numerous television and radio appearances
He is a decorated diplomat by France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Israel, U.S. governments.
August 3: The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World from Kennedy to Trump
August 4: The Holocaust: Past, Present and Future.
Marion Ein Lewin was born in the Netherlands to parents who were driven from their home in Germany in 1935 by Nazi antisemitism and violence. Marion, her parents and twin brother Stephen remained together throughout the Holocaust—one of only a very few families to do so. They survived the transit camp Westerbork, the horrific concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, and a perilous journey on the “lost train” in the last days of the war. The family was liberated by Soviet soldiers on April 23, 1945. Arriving in the U.S. in 1947, Marion went on to graduate from Barnard College and Columbia University. Her professional life focused on health policy and health economics. For 15 years, she was Senior Staff Officer at the Institute of Medicine at the National Academies of Science and headed its Office of Health Policy Programs and Fellowships. Read more about Mrs. Lewin’s Holocaust experiences in Faris Cassell, Inseparable: The Hess Twins’ Holocaust Journey through Bergen-Belsen to America
August 3: TBD
Week 7
Sarah Hurwitz
As A Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try To Erase Us, and Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life – in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There), which was a finalist for two National Jewish Book Awards and for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She was a White House speechwriter from 2009 to 2017, starting out as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama and then serving as head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama. Prior to working in the White House, Hurwitz was the chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton on her 2008 presidential campaign. Hurwitz is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and was a 2017 Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. She has also completed training to be a chaplain, which she does on a volunteer basis at a hospital near her home.
August 10: Reclaiming the Jewish Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us
August 11: The Radical, Counter-Cultural Wisdom of Jewish Tradition and Why the World Desperately Needs It Right Now
Week 8
Linda Greenhouse
Linda Greenhouse is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School, a position she has held since 2009. For 30 years before that, she was the New York Times Supreme Court correspondent, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for her coverage of the Court. She is the author or co-author of five books about the Supreme Court, including The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, now in a 3rd edition), as well as a memoir, Just a Journalist (Harvard University Press, 2017). Her essays appear frequently in the New York Times opinion pages as well as the New York Review of Books and other publications. She has lectured widely at colleges and law schools.
She is a graduate of Radcliffe College (Harvard) and earned a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School. In her extracurricular life, she is a former member of the Harvard University Board of Overseers and of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2017 to 2023, she served as the first female president of the American Philosophical Society, the nation’s oldest learned society, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743. She has received 17 honorary degrees.
The Supreme Court in the Age of Trump
August 17: The Separation of Powers. Where has the Supreme Court left the American democratic experiment with respect to the powers of the President, of Congress, and perhaps most significantly, of its own power?
August 18: What lies ahead for the Supreme Court?
Week 9
Dr. Morris Vogel
Morris J. Vogel served as president of New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum, widely recognized as an innovative historic site in its interpretation and use of storytelling and social relevance, from 2008 to 2017 and again from 2019 to 2021. Vogel graduated from Brandeis University and received his PhD in American social and cultural history from the University of Chicago before joining the faculty of Temple University. He later served Temple’s College of Liberal Arts as dean before assuming the directorship of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Creativity and Culture Program. Vogel is the author or editor of six books, including The Invention of the Modern Hospital and Cultural Connections: Museums and Libraries of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. He founded and directed the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities. While a Pennsylvanian, Vogel served on the Commonwealth’s Historic Preservation Board.
August 24: A Tenement Success Story: Inscribing the Jewish Experience unto the American Promised Land
August 25: Beyond the Jewish Lower East Side: The Tenement Museum’s Expanding Story