Presenter Bios
Tova Birnbaum is the Director of Jewish Content at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto. She was born in B'nai B'rak in an Ultra-Orthodox home and was one of the founders of the BINA Secular Yeshiva in Tel Aviv. Tova has previously served as the Central Shlicha (emissary), Director of the North America Region, of the World Zionist Organization. She is a teacher of Talmudic Rabbinic Literature, a Judaic studies lecturer, and a Theater Midrash workshop facilitator. She is also a Secular Jewish lifecycle ceremonies officiant. Tova is an actress and a Jewish performance artist. She holds a bachelor's degree in psychology and Jewish philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a master's degree in theater from Tel Aviv University.
Erica Brown is the director of the Mayberg Center for Jewish Education and Leadership and an associate professor of curriculum and pedagogy at The George Washington University. She was a Jerusalem Fellow, is a faculty member of the Wexner Foundation, an Avi Chai Fellow, and the recipient of the 2009 Covenant Award for her work in education. She is the author of twelve books on leadership, the Hebrew Bible, and spirituality, including Inspired Jewish Leadership: Practical Approaches to Building Strong Communities and Leadership in the Wilderness: Authority and Anarchy in the Book of Numbers. Her most recent book is The Book of Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile.
Gili Dvash serves as the Senior Shlicha of the Jewish Agency to Long Island as the director of the Randie Walbaum Malinsky Center For Israel in Sid Jacobson JCC. Gili was born and raised in Mitzpe Ramon of the Negev. After high-school she took a gap year and volunteered for a year of service in Holon with an international gap year program. Gili served in the Israel Defense Forces as the spokeswoman of the Edom Brigade representing many units in the army focusing on Karakal, women in combat positions and Intelligence units led by women. After the army Gili worked as a counseling coordinator in different youth movements in Israel and the Diaspora. Gili is part of several social initiatives regarding community building, social volunteering and Jewish identity and rituals. Gili holds a BSW degree in Ben Gurion University, and an MBA of the Mandel Social Leadership Program.
Ayalon Eliach is Senior Advisor at the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah. His passion is to make complex ideas digestible, relevant, and useful. Before joining the Lippman Kanfer team, he directed an initiative for the National Association of Consumer Advocates to help consumers minimize taxation on income they never received after winning lawsuits. He also served as a rabbinic intern for Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), the world’s largest LGBTQ synagogue, directed a study on the function of Jewish praxis for Clal and Rabbis Without Borders, and worked for two of New York’s premier law firms. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School and rabbinical ordination from Hebrew College. He was a fellow with the Dorot Fellowship in Israel as well as Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, and is currently a David Hartman Center Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
Zoe Fertik is Associate Director of Jewish Content at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto. Zoe’s work at the OFJCC is in partnership with BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. Previously, Zoe founded an immersive Jewish learning program at BINA, called Beit Midrash TLV.
Richard Elliott Friedman is the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and is the Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible at Harvard University. His book Who Wrote the Bible? has sold over 250,000 copies and was the subject of a three-hour television special. His other books include The Disappearance of God (published in paperback as The Hidden Face of God), The Hidden Book in the Bible, Commentary on the Torah, The Bible with Sources Revealed, The Bible Now (co-authored with Shawna Dolansky). His most recent book is The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters. He offers weekly lectures on the jewishLIVE program “Richard Elliott Friedman: Return to Torah.”
Elliot Vaisrub Glassenberg is an American-Canadian-Israeli queer Jewish educator and activist. Elliot is a senior educator at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change and co-chair of Right Now: Advocates for Asylum Seekers in Israel.
Elyse Goldstein is the spiritual leader of The City Shul in Toronto, Canada. She founded Kolel: The Adult Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning in 1991, where she spent two decades as its director and principal teacher. In 2005 she received The Covenant Award For Outstanding Educators. Her first book, ReVisions: Seeing Torah through a Feminist Lens, was published in 1998 and won the Canadian National Jewish Book Award in the field of Bible. Her second and third books, The Women’s Torah Commentary (2000), and The Women’s Haftarah Commentary (2003), are anthologies of 54 women rabbis from different movements on the weekly Torah and Haftarah. Her book New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future, published in 2008, was a finalist in The National Jewish Book Awards.
Edward L. Greenstein is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Before that he taught full-time at Tel Aviv University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Widely published, Greenstein edited the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society for 46 years. His Essays on Biblical Method and Translation (1989) was reissued with a new preface in 2020. His well-received Job: A New Translation (2019) was awarded a prize by the Association for Jewish Studies. Among his fellowships and awards is the EMET Prize ("Israel's Nobel"). He is writing commentaries on Job, Lamentations, and Ruth, as well as other books.
Shira Hecht-Koller is Director of Education for 929 English. She has over fifteen years of experience teaching Jewish Studies and designing interdisciplinary curricula in the classroom and immersive learning environments. She has taught at North Shore Hebrew Academy, SARHS, and at Drisha Institute, where she directed the Dr. Beth Samuels Talmud Fellowship Program. Prior to her work in Jewish education she practiced corporate law at Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP. Her writing has appeared in Tablet, The Forward, The Lehrhaus, The Jewish Week, Times of Israel and ejewishphilanthropy and her photography illustrates The Jewish Journey Haggadah. She was a Paradigm Fellow at the Paideia Institute of Jewish Studies in Stockholm, and is currently a Fellow in the Jewish Pedagogies Circle at M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education. She holds a JD from Cardozo School of Law, and is a graduate of the Bruriah Scholars advanced Talmud program at Midreshet Lindenbaum.
Aaron Koller is an associate professor of Near Eastern and Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, where he studies the ancient world of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, especially material culture, language, and intellectual history. He is interested in life as it was lived in ancient times, and finds that studying the languages of ancient times provides windows into all sorts of issues. He is interested especially in Near Eastern cultures from the late Bronze Age through rabbinic literature. His most recent book is Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought.
Benay Lappe is the Founder and Rosh Yeshiva of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. Ordained by The Jewish Theological Seminary in 1997, she also currently serves as Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Next Jewish Future and as an Associate at CLAL—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. An award-winning educator specializing in the application of queer theory to Talmud study, Benay Lappe has served on the faculties of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Temple University, American Jewish University, The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, The Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies at UC-Berkeley, Milken Community High School, and The Wexner Institute, and her writings have appeared in Shma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility; eCLAL: An Online Journal of Religion, Public Life and Culture; The Book of Jewish Sacred Practices: CLAL’s Guide to Everyday and Holiday Rituals and Blessings; Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation; Torah Queeries, among others. Benay Lappe was named to The Forward 50 list of most influential Jews of 2020, Jewrotica’s Sexiest Rabbis List of 2013, The Forward’s 2014 List of Most Inspiring Rabbis, was awarded the 2015 Mintz Family Foundation Award for Creative Jewish Education, and is a 2016 recipient of the Covenant Award for innovative Jewish education.
Michal Lemberger is a writer whose debut collection, After Abel and Other Stories, was a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Honorable Mention for the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, finalist for the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction, and a National Jewish Book Club pick. Her nonfiction and journalism have appeared in many publications, including Real Simple, Slate, Salon, and Tablet. Her poetry has been published in a number of print and online journals, including The Bellevue Literary Review and The Rattling Wall. “Lot’s Wife,” from After Abel and Other Stories, was featured in Lilith Magazine. Excerpts of “City of Refuge” appeared in LitroNY and “After Abel” in The Nervous Breakdown. Lemberger holds an MA and PhD in English from UCLA and a BA in English and Religion from Barnard College. She has taught the Hebrew Bible as Literature at UCLA and the American Jewish University.
Jon D. Levenson is the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Previously, he taught at the University of Chicago and at Wellesley College. His work concentrates on the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, including its reinterpretations in the "rewritten Bible" of Second Temple Judaism and rabbinic midrash. In all his work, Levenson's emphasis falls on the close reading of texts for purposes of literary and theological understanding. His books The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son and Inheriting Abraham are especially relevant to this collection.
Dan Libenson is the founder and president of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future, co-host of the Judaism Unbound podcast, co-founder of jewishLIVE, and co-creator of the Megillah Project. He is the translator of The Orchard by renowned Israeli novelist Yochi Brandes and translation editor of The Secret Book of Kings by the same author. His extensive background in Jewish communal innovation includes six years as Executive Director of the University of Chicago Hillel and three years as Director of New Initiatives at Harvard Hillel. Dan is a 2009 AVI CHAI Fellow and has also received the Richard M. Joel Exemplar of Excellence award. In 2010, he was named a Jewish Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago Jewish News. He has published articles in Ha'aretz, The New York Jewish Week, Zeek, eJewishPhilanthropy, and elsewhere. Before devoting his life to working in the Jewish community, Dan spent five years as a law professor.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones holds the Chair in Ancient History at Cardiff University and is the Director of the Ancient Iran Program for the British Institute of Persian Studies. He has written widely for both academic and public audiences. His books include King and Court in Ancient Persia, Ctesias’ History of Persia: Tales of the Orient, The Culture of Animals in Antiquity, and Designs on the Past: How Hollywood Created the Ancient World. His work has featured in BBC History Magazine, History Today and World History and he has often appeared on the BBC, Channel 4, and in The Times and other media outlets. He has spent extensive time in Iran, where his books have received Farsi translation. He is the Series Editor for Edinburgh Studies in Ancient Persia at Edinburgh University Press. Future publications include The Persians, for Wildfire Books and The Book of Esther and Ancient Persia for I.B. Tauris.
Deborah Sacks Mintz is a musician, educator, and prayer leader, who serves as a resource to communities across North America and beyond who seek to deepen their practice of empowered song and connective prayer. She has served innovative institutions across the country as a teacher of Torah and Jewish communal music, including Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn and the Brandeis Collegiate Institute in Los Angeles, and she currently serves as rabbinic fellow at B'nai Jeshurun in New York City, as well as on faculty at Hadar's Rising Song Institute. In addition to composing new Jewish melodies and facilitating leadership workshops nationwide, Deborah collaborates with musicians, including Joey Weisenberg, Chava Mirel, Josh Warshawsky, and Elana Arian. A leading voice in the Jewish music soundscape, her distinctive harmonies can be heard on over a dozen records by artists from coast to coast. Deborah recently released her debut album of original spiritual music, The Narrow and the Expanse, on Rising Song Records. A Wexner Graduate Fellow, Deborah is pursuing rabbinical ordination at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and holds degrees in vocal performance and religious anthropology from the University of Michigan. Deborah's new album can be purchased or streamed here, and select videos of the live recording sessions can be enjoyed on Youtube. For more on Deborah's work, see her website, as well as the website of the Rising Song Institute.
Na’amit Sturm Nagel is an English Teacher at Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles, California, and Associate Director of The Shalhevet Institute, a center for Jewish ideas and learning in LA. She is a recipient of the Covenant Foundation’s Pomegranate Prize in recognition of her leadership and contribution to the field of Jewish education. In addition to her work at Shalhevet, Na’amit organizes essay writing workshops for high school students, runs adult book groups, and publishes op-eds and book reviews in The Forward, Lehrhaus, The Jewish Journal, and Kveller.
Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, composer, performer, and Torah teacher. She creates multi-genre works of experimental beauty which explore the intersection of ancient wisdom texts with everyday life. As a musician and performer, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women with accompanying curriculum, and A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, a chamber-rock opera about the intersection of finance and spirituality which is currently being made into an independent feature film.
Nomi Schneck’s work explores art as a commentary on biblical stories and themes. As a PhD candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, Nomi’s dissertation questions how the appearance of biblical art in Late Antiquity fits within broader patterns of visual storytelling and myth-making. During her ten years teaching English literature and Tanakh at Jewish day schools, Nomi developed a creative arts workshop and journal as well as a summer seminar, Visualizing Jewish Texts, combining museum visits with beit midrash study. Nomi also spent time conducting research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and contributed to the Agents of Faith exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Her work has been funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. Nomi currently lives in Teaneck, NJ with her husband, Noam, and children Maayan, Brielle, Amalia, and Shachar.
Ethan Schwartz is a Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Villanova University. He received his Ph.D. in spring 2020 from Harvard University, and also taught at Loyola University Chicago. He studies the Hebrew Bible in both the ancient Near Eastern setting in which it emerged and the Second Temple setting in which it became Jewish and Christian scripture. His research focuses on the prophetic literature, with interests in the representation of prophetic interaction with institutional authority, the comparative study of biblical and ancient Near Eastern prophecy, the redaction of the prophetic corpus, and the reception of the prophetic literature in Judaism and Christianity. Other areas of research include the Pentateuch, the literature of Qumran, the ancient Jewish context of the New Testament, and the intellectual history of academic biblical studies. In much of his work, he tries to bring biblical texts into historical-critical conversation with the philosophical literature of Classical Greece.
Michal Bar-Asher Siegal is a scholar of rabbinic Judaism. Her work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world, and compares between Early Christian and rabbinic sources. She is an associate professor at The Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and was an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. Her first book is Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013, winner of the 2014 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award). Her second book is Jewish–Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2019, finalist for the 2019 National Jewish Book Award).
Malka Z. Simkovich is the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and the director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She is the author of The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria (2016), and Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories That Shaped Early Judaism (2018), which received the 2019 AJL Judaica Reference Honor Award. Simkovich’s articles have been published in journals such as the Harvard Theological Review and the Journal for the Study of Judaism, as well as on online forums such as The Lehrhaus and the Times of Israel. She is involved in numerous local and international interreligious dialogue projects which help to increase understanding and friendship between Christians and Jews.
Anna Solomon is the author of The Book of V., Leaving Lucy Pear, and The Little Bride and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, One Story, Ploughshares, Slate, Tablet, and elsewhere. Coeditor with Eleanor Henderson of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, Solomon teaches fiction writing at the Warren Wilson MFA Program in Creative Writing and the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center.
Abby Chava Stein is a Jewish educator, author, speaker, and activist. She was born and raised in a Hasidic family of rabbinic descent, and is a direct descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Abby attended Yeshiva, completing a rabbinical degree in 2011. In 2012, she left the Hasidic world to explore a self-determined life. In 2015 Abby came out as a woman of trans experience. Since coming out, she has been working to raise support and awareness for trans rights and those leaving Ultra-Orthodoxy. In 2016, she was named by The Jewish Week as one of the “36 Under 36” young Jews who are inspiring change in the world. In 2018 she was awarded the Pride Award by the Brooklyn Borough President. She studied gender studies and political science at Columbia University in New York City. Her memoir Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman was published by Seal Press in November 2019.
Mishael Zion is the director of the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture and co-founder of the Klausner Minyan in Jersuaelm. Previously, he was the co-director and rabbi of the Bronfman Fellowships, a leadership program for outstanding young Jewish people in Israel and North America. He is the author of Esther: A New Israeli Commentary and, together with his father, Noam Zion, the author of Halaila Hazeh: An Israeli Haggadah and A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices.
More Information about the Partners Behind the Akedah Project
About 929 English
929 is the number of chapters in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the formative text of the Jewish heritage. 929 English is a cutting-edge project dedicated to creating a global Jewish conversation around issues that unite and divide us, but always anchored in or inspired by Tanakh. 929 invites Jews everywhere to read Tanakh, one chapter a day, together with a website with creative readings and pluralistic interpretations, including audio and video, by a wide range of writers, artists, rabbis, educators, scholars, students and more. As an outgrowth of the web-based platform, 929 English also offers a diverse selection of classes, lectures and live events across North America. For more information, please visit 929.org.il/.
About BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change
BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change designs and implements cultural, social and educational programs for Israelis and Jews from all over the world, with the goal of enhancing Jewish and Israeli identity, particularly among non-orthodox Israelis, empowering individuals and groups to make a difference in their own lives, in their community and throughout Israeli society and beyond. For more information, visit bina.org.il/en/.
About JewishLIVE and Judaism Unbound
JewishLIVE and Judaism Unbound are projects of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future, a US-based non-profit organization whose work happens primarily online and is not limited by geography. Judaism Unbound is best known for producing one of the most-listened-to Jewish podcasts, now with well over one million downloads, which explores ideas at the cutting edge of Jewish life today. The Institute launched jewishLIVE in March of 2020 as an entry portal to the “digital Jewish wilderness” in which most Jews suddenly found themselves as the COVID-19 crisis began. jewishLIVE offers a stage to world-class innovators, thinkers, artists, musicians and ritualists to showcase their creativity and expertise. For more information, visit www.jewishlive.org and www.judaismunbound.com.
About the Oshman Family JCC
The Oshman Family Jewish Community Center (OFJCC) is a community-supported nonprofit on the Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life which serves the South Peninsula through educational, social, cultural, fitness, sports and other programs. The OFJCC provides a common ground for Jewish institutions, other local groups, organizations and individuals to work, learn and play together for the betterment of the whole community. The OFJCC's registered trademarks are Live Fully® and Architects of the Jewish Future®. For more information, visit paloaltojcc.org or call (650) 223-8700.