Rabbi Rebecca M. Joseph, Ph.D.
is Director of Institutional Grants at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Dr. Joseph teaches and lectures nationally on contemporary Jewish culture and identity. She also serves on the Advisory Board of Dayenu! Enough Silence, the New York Board of Rabbis' domestic violence initiative. Dr. Joseph was ordained by the Rabbinical School at JTS in 2005 where she was awarded the Herman H. and Mignon l. Rubenovitz Prize in Jewish Theology. She received a PhD (1987) and an MA (1983) in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego and a BA from Swarthmore College (1981).

Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses
is a Scholar in Residence at UJA-Federation of New York. She received her ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1995 and is the first woman from the Syrian Jewish community to become a rabbi as well as the first – and currently the only – person from her community to become a non-Orthodox rabbi.
 
Before coming to UJA-Federation, Rabbi Cohler-Esses taught and consulted widely in the Jewish world for organizations such as Maayan, the Jewish Life Network and The Curriculum Initiative. She has served on the faculties  of Skirball, the HUC Kollel and the Bronfman Youth Fellowship (BYFI). In 1998 Rabbi Cohler-Esses became co-director of BFYI , and served in a variety of capacities for BFYI until 2005.  Rabbi Cohler-Esses received a fellowship from CLAL —The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership to study with Yitz Greenberg and to teach for CLAL. She subsequently joined their faculty, teaching in pluralist settings while pursuing advanced study of Midrash at JTS.  

Rabbi Cohler-Esses writes about Torah and Jewish ethnicity for several anthologies and scholarly journals and for the New York Jewish Week.  She lives in Manhattan with her journalist husband and their three children. At UJA-Federation of New York , Rabbi Cohler-Esses teaches diverse groups of students on subjects ranging from courses on Biblical narrative and law, Talmud and Jewish ethics.

Lori Hope 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.  She 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).  Lefkovitz holds a B.A. from Brandeis University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.  Her awards include an academic fellowship at the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, a Woodrow Wilson dissertation fellowship in the Women's Studies Division, a Golda Meir post-doctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University, and a 2004 Fulbright Professorship at Hebrew University, where she taught The Literature of American Jewish Feminism.  She is completing a manuscript, Self in Scriptures, on Bible and identity.  She is married to Rabbi Leonard Gordon of the Germantown Jewish Centre, and they have two daughters.