PRESENTERS

Dr. Susannah Heschel

Plenary: Judaism and Islam

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on the history of Jewish and Protestant religious thought in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she has brought post-colonial theory and feminist theory to her analyses. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago); The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton); and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung, as well as several edited volumes, including Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism and Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Forthcoming this year are a monograph written with Sarah Imhoff, Jewish Studies and the Woman Question (Princeton), and a co-edited volume, New Paths: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot Wolfson, with Glenn Dynner and Shaul Magid. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. She has held fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Maimonides Institute in Hamburg, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and several awards from Dartmouth College. She is an elected member of the American Society for the Study of Religion and the American Academy for Jewish Research, and she has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Cape Town, Frankfurt, and Edinburgh, and at Princeton, and next year at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland.

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl

Plenary: Navigating This Difficult Moment and the Power of Jewish Joy

Angela Warnick Buchdahl serves as the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City, a flagship Reform synagogue, dubbed the first ‘mega-shul’ by the Wall Street Journal. Buchdahl is the first woman to lead Central in its 180-year history. Born in Seoul, Korea, Buchdahl graduated from Yale University and went on to become the first Asian American ordained as a cantor and first ordained as rabbi in North America. Rabbi Buchdahl has been nationally recognized for her innovations in leading worship, which draw large crowds in the congregation’s historic Sanctuary and a million live streamers in more than 100 countries. Rabbi Buchdahl was invited by President Barack Obama in 2014 and President Joe Biden in 2023 to share blessings and light the menorah for the White House Hanukkah Party, the first rabbi invited by two administrations. Rabbi Buchdahl serves on the boards of American Jewish Committee, The Asia Society, Yale University Presidents Council, and New York Board of Rabbis. She has been featured on the Today Show, NPR, PBS and Newsweek’s “America’s 50 Most Influential Rabbis.” Rabbi Buchdahl’s memoir, Heart of a Stranger is set to be published by Penguin/Random House in October 2025. Rabbi Buchdahl and her husband Jacob have three children.

Abigail Pogrebin

Plenary: Navigating This Difficult Moment and the Power of Jewish Joy

Abigail Pogrebin is the author of My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew, which was featured on the Today Show and was a finalist for a 2017 National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent book, It Takes Two to Torah, An Orthodox Rabbi and Reform Journalist Discuss and Debate Their Way Through the Five Books of Moses, won the 2025 Independent Press Award for Religion Non-Fiction and was co-authored with Rabbi Dov Linzer of YCT with a foreword by Mayim Bialik. Her first book, Stars of David, featured interviews with Jewish luminaries from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Steven Spielberg and was adapted for the Off-Broadway stage in NY. Her 2021 series for The Forward — “Still Small Voice” — featured 18 conversations with clergy about their own faith and received recognition from The Religion News Association and the American Jewish Press Association. Abby moderates her own interview series on the Jewish Broadcasting Service (JBS) and has written for the New York Times, Atlantic, Tablet, Newsweek, Vogue, New York Magazine and the Forward. She is a past president of Central Synagogue in NYC.

Dr. Stephen Spector

Are You a Good Parent? Is God? What the Book of Genesis Teaches Us

Stephen Spector is professor emeritus of English at Stony Brook. He has been a senior research fellow at Wesleyan University and the National Humanities Center, and a visiting professor at Hebrew University Jerusalem. he has published nine books and held numerous grants, fellowships, and prizes.

His books include Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism and Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews.

Dr. Daniel Fisher-Livne

Where is the Lost Ark: And Why Do People Keep Looking?

Daniel Fisher-Livne, Ph.D (UC Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible and the Languages of the Near East at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Dr. Fisher-Livne’s teaching and research investigate the Hebrew Bible’s formation and early reception as memory work, illuminating ways in which the text has functioned as a powerful “cultural archive” and “platform” for cultural and religious life. He is currently working on three research projects in biblical studies. First, he is writing a cultural biography of the Ark of the Covenant—Lost Arks: Objects, Memory, and the Contestation of the Biblical Past. Second, he is the associate general editor for CCAR’s A New Torah Translation and Commentary for the Twenty-First Century. Third, he is preparing the Judges volume for the Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, a new international text-critical project from SBL Press.

Dr. Fisher-Livne is committed to public engagement in Jewish studies, work he undertakes through the new CCAR commentary and as co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship (Routledge, 2024). He is Research Affiliate at the National Humanities Alliance, where he previously directed Humanities for All—an initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation to build capacity for public engagement in humanities scholarship across U.S. higher education (https://humanitiesforall.org). He is also a member of the AAR Applied Religious Studies Committee and the Editorial Board of Bible Odyssey, SBL’s public-facing portal sharing the latest research on the people, places, and history of the Bible.

Eric Miller

From Enoch to Metatron: The Origins of Jewish Mysticism and The Jews of Alexandria and the Emergence of the God-fearers

Eric Miller is an Adjunct Professor of History at Stony Brook University specializing in the evolution of religious ideas in Antiquity and Late Antiquity, with a special focus on the shifts within Judaism from the post-exilic Persian Period, through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the proliferation of Jewish sects during this period, including the Jesus Movement (which eventually becomes Christianity). At Stony Brook, he teaches courses on Jewish History (from Antiquity through the Early Modern World), Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, “The Origins of Jewish Mysticism,” “Apocalypse Then and Now: Concepts of the End of the World from Antiquity to Today,” and “Rabbis, Bishops and Emperors: Jews and Christians Under Roman Rule.”

Margalit Fox

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: Crime Boss

Considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism, Margalit Fox retired in June 2018 from a 24-year-career at the New York Times, where she was most recently a senior writer. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written the Page One sendoffs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, the writer Maya Angelou, the poets Seamus Heaney and Adrienne Rich, the children’s author Maurice Sendak and the advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers. She has also written the obituaries of many of the unsung heroes who have managed, quietly, to touch history, among them the inventors of the Frisbee, the crash-test dummy, the plastic lawn flamingo and the bar code. Before joining the obituary department in 2004, she spent ten years as a staff editor at the New York Times Book Review.

Ms. Fox received the Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 2011 for feature writing, and in 2015 for beat reporting. In 2016, the Poynter Institute named her one of the six best writers in the Times’s history.

Originally trained as a cellist, Ms. Fox is a native Long Islander. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University (1982) and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. 

She is the author of several books including The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss (2024); The Confidence Men (2021), Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind (2007), The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (2013), which was selected as one of the hundred best books of the year by The New York Times, and Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer (2018). 

Rabbi Jeremy Perlow

Where Do We Go from Here: Judaism and The Afterlife

Rabbi Perlow is a passionate teacher who believes in building community through Torah learning, community engagement, and personal relationships. After studying in Israel for two years at Yeshivat Shaalvim, Rabbi Perlow earned a BS in Accounting from Sy Syms School of Business and a MA in Bible from Bernard Revel Graduate School. He received his Rabbinic Ordination from Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchonon Theological Seminary. Rabbi Perlow currently serves as the Rabbi of Stony Brook Hebrew Congregation (SBHC) and works in partnership with Emet Outreach to bring additional Torah learning and rich Jewish experiences to campus.

The Sisters of Salaam Shalom

The Sisters of Salaam Shalom

Panelists to be confirmed. You can learn more about the sisterhood here!

Holocaust Education Panelists

Is Holocaust Education Working?

Panelists to be confirmed.

Dr. Michael Mandelbaum

U.S. Policy and The Future of the Mideast

Dr. Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Harvard and Columbia Universities and at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and served as Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

A contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and The London Observer, Professor Mandelbaum served for 23 years as the associate director of the Aspen Institute Congressional Project on American Relations with the Former Communist World. He serves on the Board of Advisors of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington-based organization sponsoring research and public discussion on American policy toward the Middle East.

Professor Mandelbaum is a graduate of Yale College. He earned his Masters’ degree at King’s College, Cambridge University and his doctorate at Harvard University. Professor Mandelbaum is the author or co-author of numerous articles and essays and of eighteen books including Mission Failure: American and the World in the Post-Cold War Era (2016); The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (2019); The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower (2022); and The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made (2024) and The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football and Basketball and What They See When They Do (2004).