About the Participants

Katya Gibel Azoulay was born in NYC, made aliya in 1970 after graduating from The Brearley School. During that period, she married, had three children, earned a B.A. and M.A. from Hebrew University; she returned to the U.S. in 1991 to pursue a Ph.D. at Duke University and was invited Grinnell College in 1996 where she is currently Associate Professor in Anthropology & American Studies. Dr. Gibel Azoulay is author of Black, Jewish and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin and Other Myths of Identity, co-editor of the "Jewish Women of Color" issue of Bridges: Journal of Jewish Feminists, and has published articles in various journals including Cultural Studies, Developing World Bioethics, Identities. Research in African Literatures as well as review essays in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist and Biography.

Shifra Bronznick is the founder of Bronznick & Co., LLC, a change management firm that specializes in launching new initiatives, restructuring organizations and developing programs for the not-for-profit sector. An expert in the field of leadership and women's advancement, Ms. Bronznick is the founding President of "Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community." In collaboration with her client, Ma'yan, she launched the National Women's Leadership Initiative and Impact & Influence, a summit for Jewish women volunteer leaders. Ms. Bronznick also designed the program for the White House Project's National Women's Leadership Summit, which convened the most influential women in business, government, not-for-profit and academia in 2002 and 2003. Previously, Ms. Bronznick served as Executive Vice-President of Swig, Weiler & Arnow Mgt. Co., Inc., one of the premier commercial real estate firms in New York.

Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell has been teaching and writing about Jewish women's history and feminist spirituality for the past twenty years. The founding director of the American Jewish Congress Feminist Center in Los Angeles, Elwell served as the first rabbinic Director of Ma'yan, the Jewish Women's Project of the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side in New York City. She has served congregations in California, New Jersey and Virginia, and worked as rabbi and chaplain of Beit T'Shuvah, a residential program for Jewish felons and other recovering addicts. She has worked with congregations across the country to assist them in developing strategies to welcome and integrate GLBT congregants and their families into synagogue life. She currently serves as the Director of the Pennsylvania Council and the Federation of Reform Synagogues of Greater Philadelphia of the Union for Reform Judaism, as well as co-chair of the Bi-National Advisory Board of FaithTrust Institute. Elwell, who earned her doctorate at Indiana University and was ordained by Hebrew Union College, is the mother of two adult daughters. She and her partner Nurit Levi Shein live in Philadelphia.

Sally Gottesman has long been involved in Jewish feminist activities. Perhaps since she was the first girl to have a Saturday morning bat-mitzvah at Temple Shomrei Emunah, a Conservative synagogue in Montclair, New Jersey in 1975. Leaping forward 10 years, in 1985 Sally became the first paid employee of the Israel Women's Network in Jerusalem and in the later half of that decade she was the first New York/Tri-State Director of the New Israel Fund. Since that time, she graduated from the Yale School of Management and has spent the fifteen years as a management consultant to not-for-profit organizations, first for KPMG and now independently. Her clients have beem The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Hillel, Young Survival Coalition, and The Hebrew Free Loan Society. Sally serves as the Chair of Moving Traditions, a new organization that seeks to be the premier resource for those who are looking for inspiration and information to practice Judaism at key life moments. All Moving Traditions programs are informed by a consideration of gender, a respect for the diversity of meaningful Jewish practices, and the desire to make Judaism a force for good in people's lives and in the world. Moving Traditions' project Rosh Hodesh: It's a Girl Thing! will be featured at over 200 institutions nationwide this fall. Sally also currently serves on the Boards of StorahTelling and American Jewish World Service and is a member of Achayot Or, an annual gathering of Jewish feminists.

Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross is an international lecturer and motivational speaker with expertise in the Hebraic Oral Tradition, Hasidick teachings, and Practical Kabbalah. Hadassah is "radiant! An elegant creature in Italian shoes and tailored clothes" (The Forward) and has been identified as "part of a broadening, unconventional movement to teach Torah and prayer to an ever-growing audience across America" (Jerusalem Report). Born in Budapest, Hungary in the mid 1920's, Rebbetzin Gross is descended from an illustrious Hasidic dynasty, is the widow of six prominent rabbis and has established herself in the Jewish community and beyond as a personal soul-trainer to the ultra-orthodox elite (and elitists from all faiths and backgrounds). She has appeared before thousands worldwide in venues such as BAMcafé, The Ashkenaz Festival for New Yiddish Culture (Toronto), The Museum of Jewish Heritage, JCC Manhattan, JCC San Francisco, Burning Man Festival 2003, Lansky Lounge (NYC), the Belt Theater (NYC), Echo Club (LA) and the Limmud NY Conference. Press and media appearances include a cover story for Ha'Aretz Magazine, and a principal role in the Channel 10 Israeli TV series "The Search for the 10 Commandments".

Judith Hauptman is the E. Billi Ivry Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Known in particular for her reinterpretation of talmudic sources along feminist lines, Dr. Hauptman has spent her professional life engaged not only in the study of women's roles in Judaic thought, but also in an evaluation of the social and ethical norms of the rabbinic period that served to shape the outlines of a traditional faith passed down through the ages. Dr. Hauptman has also become acclaimed for her synoptic studies - a specialized area of talmudic research in which related texts are examined for their implications about the history of Jewish law. Her books include Development of the Talmudic Sugya: Relationship Between Tannaitic and Amoraic Sources and Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman's Voice. Her most recent articles, published in Judaism, are "Does the Tosefta Precede the Mishnah?" and "How Old is the Haggadah?" She is currently writing a book on the Mishnah and the Tosefta, two early rabbinic works. Dr. Hauptman is a board member of the Association for Jewish Studies and has served as rabbinics section co-ordinator for the last three annual conferences. Dr. Hauptman received a degree in Talmud from the Seminary College of Jewish Studies at JTS (now Albert A. List College) and a degree in economics from Barnard College and earned a MA and a PhD in Talmud from JTS. In addition, she has studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In May 2003, she was ordained as a rabbi by the Academy for Jewish Religion. She serves as volunteer chaplain to the Jewish residents at the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, a Catholic facility in Lower Manhattan.

Rachel Havrelock is a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago and a pioneering member of the UIC Jewish-Muslim initiative. She is the co-author of Women on the Biblical Road: Ruth, Naomi and the Female Journey, as well as articles on Judaism and gender and feminist commentary. Her current project is a book on the mythic history of the Jordan River. In addition to her academic endeavors, Rachel is a playwright and director. Her play, From Tel Aviv to Ramallah: A Beatbox Journey, was nominated as best new play by the Helen Hayes Awards and continues to tour the U.S.. Soundtrack City Chicago, a hip-hop comedy about urban life, is currently enjoying a run at Chicago's Viaduct Theater.

Elizabeth Holtzman concentrates her practice in government relations at the federal, state and local levels, and in litigation. She joined Herrick, Feinstein after twenty years in government. She served for eight years as a U.S. Congresswoman and won national attention for her role on the House Judiciary committee during Watergate. She was subsequently elected District Attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn), the only woman ever elected DA in NYC, serving for eight years. As DA, she argued successfully before the United States Supreme Court, and pioneered new strategies for the prosecution of rape and environmental crimes. She led the effort to overturn law allowing blacks to be removed from juries. Liz was also the only woman ever elected Comptroller of New York City. She invested the city's public funds in building hundreds of units of affordable housing. A bill she authored as comptroller was recently signed in to law 12 years later. It holds gun manufacturers liable for the injuries caused by illegal guns. Liz was appointed, by President Clinton, to the Nazi and Japanese Imperial War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, which is overseeing the declassification of the U.S. government's secret Nazi war crimes files.

Paula Hyman is the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University and President of the American Academy for Jewish Research. While a graduate student at Columbia University, Paula Hyman became a feminist activist, with a particular interest in bringing feminist change into the Jewish community. She is a founding member of Ezrat Nashim, which led the charge for the admission of women to the Conservative rabbinate. Much of her scholarship has focused on the roles and representation of Jewish women. A co-author of The Jewish Woman in America, she published Gender And Assimilation in Modern Jewish History and co-edited (with Deborah Dash Moore) the prize-winning encyclopedia, Jewish Women in America. Most recently, she edited an English-language version of the memoirs of an otherwise forgotten Jewish feminist from Poland, Puah Rakovsky's My Life as a Radical Jew. She is currently co-editing a multi-volume encyclopedia on Jewish women from the Hebrew Bible to the present and beginning a project on antisemitism, gender, and Jewish identity.

Lisa Jervis is the co-founder and publisher of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, a national nonprofit quarterly magazine offering feminist commentary on our intensely mediated world. She is also a founding board member of the media training and advocacy organization Women in Media and News, and editor at large of LiP: Informed Revolt. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and books, including Ms., the San Francisco Chronicle, Utne, Mother Jones, the Women's Review of Books, Bust, Hues, Salon, Girlfriends, Punk Planet, Body Outlaws (Seal Press), and The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order (Penguin). She is the co-editor Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership (Seal Press), and is currently at work on a book about the intellectual legacy of gender essentialism and its effect on contemporary feminism.

Faith Jones is a librarian and translator of Yiddish literature. Her translations have appeared in numerous poetry journals and in Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, an anthology from Warner Books. Her scholarly articles, on topics as diverse as McCarthyism, library history and Yiddish poets, have appeared in Canadian Jewish Studies and the forthcoming issue of Judaica Librarianship. She has contributed entries to several forthcoming encyclopedias: the Yiddish writers volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the revised edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica, and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. She co-produced, with Henry Sapoznik, "Live From KlezKamp," a double-CD anthology of live recordings from the famous annual music retreat. She is Yiddish editor of and a contributor to Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, published by Indiana University Press.

Norma Baumel Joseph is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Concordia University, Dr. Norma Baumel Joseph is Director of the Women and Religion specialization, and Graduate Program Director of the Doctoral Program Religion. Her teaching and research areas include women and Judaism, Jewish law and ethics, and women and religion. Norma appeared in and was consultant to the films Half The Kingdom and Untying the Bonds...Jewish Divorce. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the legal decisions of Rabbi Moses Feinstein as they describe and delineate separate spheres for women in the Jewish community. Since the early 1970's she has promoted women's greater participation Jewish religious and communal life. Founding member of the Canadian Coalition of Jewish Women for the Get (Jewish divorce), Dr. Joseph successfully worked with the community and the Federal Government to pass a law in 1990 (Divorce Act, ch.18, 21.1) that would protect Jewish women in difficult divorce situations and aid them in their pursuit of a Jewish divorce. Author of many publications, Norma Baumel Joseph has recieved numerous awards and grants in recognition of her scholarly and pedagogic talents.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz has been an activist since the early 1960s civil rights movement in Harlem. She graduated from City College-CUNY, and earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature at University of California-Berkeley. She was Co-Chair of the New Jewish Agenda Task Force on Anti-Semitism and Racism. She was the first director and a long-time board member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New. She has taught and lectured all over the U.S. and Canada, including as the Jane Watson Irwin Distinguished Professor of Women's Studies at Hamilton College, and the Belle Zeller Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Brooklyn College-CUNY. For several years she directed the Queens College Worker Education Extension Center, and currently teaches in Urban Studies and Comparative Literature at Queens College. Her essays, poetry and fiction are widely anthologized, and her books include My Jewish Face & other stories; The Issue Is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence, and Resistance; and (co-edited) The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology. Her newest book is The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. She is co-founder of Beyond the Pale: The Progressive Jewish Radio Hour in New York City, and continues to guest-produce segments.

Irena Klepfisz, born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, was one of the estimated half percent of Polish Jewish children to survive World War II. After liberation, Klepfisz and her mother moved briefly to Lodz before going to Sweden in the spring of 1946, and then, in 1949, to the United States. Irena was eight and already spoke Polish, some Yiddish, and Swedish when she began to learn English in New York's P.S. 95. Although she struggled with English, she began to take interest in great world literature at the end of high school, and began also to write poetry. At the same time, she continued to learn Yiddish through emersion in her neighborhood and attendance five afternoons a week and later on weekends at the Arbeter ring shule, the Workmen's Circle secular school. At City College of New York, Klepfisz graduated with honors in English and Yiddish. Her bilingual poetry attests to her deep desire to keep Yiddish alive as a language connected to a deep culture. Klepfisz began publishing her poems in 1971. Her first two published poems, the paired "Searching for My Father's Body" and "The Widow and the Daughter," speak of the devastating impact of the Holocaust on Klepfisz's life. In addition to these experiences, Klepfisz's work explores many other facets of her identity, notably what it means to be a woman, a feminist, a lesbian, a cultural Jew, and an activist against the actions of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians. Klepfisz was the co-founder of Conditions magazine, a feminist magazine emphasizing the writing of lesbians, the co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology, the editorial consultant for Yiddish and Yiddish literature on the Jewish feminist magazine Bridges, and the co-founder of The Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (JWCEO). She currently teaches at Barnard College while continuing to write, speak out for equality of the alienated, and to work for peace.

Lori Lefkovitz is the Sadie Gottesman and Arlene Gottesman Reff Professor of Gender and Judaism and director of Kolot: The Center for Jewish Women's and Gender Studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. As a Fulbright scholar, she held a visiting professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004, where she taught the literature of American Jewish Feminism. Her other awards include an academic fellowship at the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, a Woodrow Wilson dissertation fellowship in the Women's Studies Division, and a Golda Meir post-doctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University. She holds a B.A. from Brandeis University, and M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University and is the author of books and articles in the fields of literature, critical theory, and Jewish feminism, including Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust (co-edited with Julia Epstein). Kolot's programs include Ritualwell.org, an online resource for Jewish feminist liturgy and ceremonies.

Laura Levitt is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University where she does extensive teaching in the University's Women's Studies Program. During the spring of 2005, she was a Visiting Professor of Religion at Williams College. She is the author of Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home; co-editor with Miriam Peskowitz of Judaism Since Gende; and with Shelley Hornstein and Laurence Silberstein an editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust. She recently edited and contributed to "Changing Focus: Family Photography and American Jewish Identity" a special issue of The Scholar & The Feminist Online. Her current book project Ordinary Jews looks at 20th century American Jewish life and everyday losses from under the shadow of the Holocaust using family photographs.

Khadijah Miller is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Norfolk State University in Norfolk, Virginia. Her doctorate is in African American Studies, with a concentration in Black Women's 20th Century American History from Temple University. She has taught African American Studies, African American History and Women's Studies courses at Temple University, Drexel University and West Chester University. Prior to teaching in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Norfolk State University, she was the director of the Women's Studies program at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania. In early 2006, she will have published entries in the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, edited by Carole Boyce Davies, Ph.D. and is currently engaged in a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities on "Extending the Reach: Year Long Programming on the African Diaspora."

Gina Nahai is the author of the Pulitzer nominated Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, and Sunday's Silence. Her stories and reviews have appeared in numerous journals including The Southern California Anthology and the Los Angeles Times. Ms. Nahai has a Masters in International Relations from UCLA and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from USC. She is an adjunct professor of Creative Writing at USC, has studied the politics of Iran for the United States Department of Defense, and serves on the advisory board of the International Women's Media Foundation.

Judith Plaskow is professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian. She has been teaching, writing and speaking about feminist studies in religion and Jewish feminism for over thirty years. With Carol P. Christ, she co-edited Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion and Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, anthologies of feminist theology used in many women's studies and religious studies courses. With Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, she co-founded the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and she co-edited it for its first decade (1985-94). Her book Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective has become a Jewish feminist classic. A collection of her essays, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics 1972-2003, was recently published by Beacon Press.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is an author, journalist, lecturer and social justice activist. A founding editor of Ms. magazine, she is also the author of nine books, most recently her first novel - Three Daughters - which was published last fall. Among her non-fiction titles are two acclaimed memoirs - Getting Over Getting Older and Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America. In addition, she was the editor of the anthology, Stories for Free Children, and was the editorial consultant on Free to Be, You and Me, Marlo Thomas' groundbreaking children's book, record and television special. Ms. Pogrebin's articles have been published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, TV Guide, Harpers Bazaar, Family Circle, and Good Housekeeping, among other publications. She is a regular columnist for Moment magazine, and for ten years, she wrote "The Working Woman" column in The Ladies Home Journal. Ms. Pogrebin has also been a leader in many social justice causes and organizations. She recently completed four years as President of the Authors Guild. Besides serving as an editor at Ms. magazine for nearly twenty years, Ms. Pogrebin also was a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus; the Ms. Foundation for Women; and the International Center for Peace in the Middle East . She serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Divinity School Women in Religion Program and the Brandeis University Women's Studies Program. Her civic activities have included two terms as Chair of the Board of Americans for Peace Now, an advocacy organization that works toward a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She participated for more than ten years in a dialogue group made up of Blacks and Jews, and for five years in a Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue Project. Letty Cottin Pogrebin's honors and awards range from Who's Who in America; to a Yale University Poynter Fellowship in Journalism; to an Emmy Award for Free to Be You and Me. She lives in New York City with her husband Bert, an attorney. The couple has three grown children and six grandchildren.

Danya Ruttenberg is the editor of Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. She serves as a contributing editor to Lilith and Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, as well as contributing writer to Jewschool.com. Her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Tikkun, Bitch, Heeb, Salon, The Best Jewish Writing 2002, The Women's Seder Sourcebook and the forthcoming Encyclopedia Judaica and The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism. She is also featured in the forthcoming documentary, Young, Jewish and Left. She is currently studying for rabbinic ordination at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and has lectured widely about religion and culture. Danya received her B.A. in Religious Studies from Brown University and her M.A. in Rabbinics from the University of Judaism. She has also studied at Sarah Lawrence College, the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, The Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew University and the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary.

Naomi Schemnan was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island, and graduated from Barnard in 1968. Since 1975 she has been part of the NY-Jewish diaspora, living first in Ottawa and then in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where she is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies. A collection of her essays, Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege, was published in 1993. She thinks, teaches, and writes on a wide range of topics, all of which end up puzzling over the same set of fundamental questions: how can we understand the concepts we use to construct and explain ourselves and each other, taking into account differences of social location, especially concerning inequalities of power and privilege, which destabilize both the "we" that does the constructing and explaining and the critical, reflective "we" that tries to understand it all. Her particular interest in social locations that are, in normative terms, impossible or unintelligible has led her to reflect on her own identity as a secular, non-Zionist, strongly Jewish-identified, morally committed atheist. She has explored her Jewish identity most directly in two essays (which will appear in her second collection, tentatively titled, Shifting Ground: Margins, Diasporas, and the Reading of Wittgenstein, "Terminal Moraine," and "Queering the Center by Centering the Queer: Reflections on Transsexuals and Secular Jews."

Nancy Schwartzman is the director of "Between Us" a documentary-in-progress set in Jerusalem and New York. She is a founding editor and Creative Director of Heeb Magazine, responsible for the photo stories "Word to Your Bubbe," "Jewess" and "The Passion." She is the founder of NYC-safestreets.org a non-profit dedicated to linking businesses and creating maps in Brooklyn and Manhattan to help women travel safely.� For five years she has been the grants officer for Media, Visual Arts and Performing Arts at the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. She is a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Art History and a minor in Film. �Currently she lives in New York City.

Alisa Solomon has just joined Columbia University's faculty as director of the Arts and Culture major in the new MA program at School of Journalism. She was a professor for nearly 20 years at Baruch College-City University of New York in English/Journalism and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Ph.D. programs in Theater and in English. A theater critic, scholar and journalist, she was a staff writer at the Village Voice for 14 years and still freelances for the Voice, where she has won awards for her reporting on U.S. immigration policy, reproductive rights, and electoral politics. She has also written for The Nation, The Forward, the New York Times and other publications. She is the author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender, winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and co-editor (with Tony Kushner) of Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and (with Framji Minwalla) of The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater.