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Speaker Bios 2017-05-19T16:58:53+00:00

Speaker Bios

Michael Chabon - Photo Credit - Benjamin Tice Smith

MICHAEL CHABON is the author of numerous novels, among them Moonglow, Telegraph Avenue, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, along with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, with whom he edited the present volume. (Photo credit Benjamin Tice Smith.)

Ayelet Waldman - Photo Credit - Claire Lewis

AYELET WALDMAN is the author of the book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My Life, and of the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter’s Keeper, as well as the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. She is the editor of Inside this Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, with whom she edited this volume. (Photo credit Claire Lewis.)

Avner Gvaryahu

YEHUDA SHAUL was born and raised in Jerusalem in an ultra-Orthodox family and graduated from a Yeshiva high school in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. He served in the IDF as a commander and platoon sergeant in the 50th battalion of the Nahal Brigade from 2001 to 2004, in the West Bank towns of Bethlehem and Hebron. Yehuda founded Breaking the Silence in 2004 with a group of fellow veterans and he currently serves as the organization’s Co-Director. He is now studying political science at the Open University of Israel.

Geraldine Brooks - Photo credit - Randi Baird

GERALDINE BROOKS is the author of five novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning March and the international bestseller People of the Book. She was the Wall Street Journal Mideast correspondent and is the author of a nonfiction work on Muslim women, Nine Parts of Desire, which was translated into more than twenty languages. In 2016 she was named an officer of the Order of Australia. (Photo credit Randi Baird.)

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Rabbi Sharon Brous

RABBI SHARON BROUS is the founding/senior rabbi at IKAR in Los Angeles, and a leading voice in reanimating American Jewry.

Rabbi Eric Gurvis

RABBI ERIC GURVIS has served as Senior Rabbi of Temple Shalom of Newton since July 1999, having previously served congregations in New York City; Jackson, Mississippi; and Teaneck, New Jersey. He is a Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a graduate of The Mussar Institute’s Manchim leadership program. He and his wife Laura have four adult children and happily a new grandson.

Rabbi Eric Gurvis

TED KOPPEL, over the course of 26 years as anchor and managing editor of Nightline, became the longest serving news anchor in U.S. broadcast history. In 2012, New York University named Koppel one of the “100 outstanding journalists in the United States in the last 100 years. When he left ABC News after 42 years, he was the most honored reporter in that network’s history. He has also been awarded 42 Emmy’s, including one for lifetime achievement.

DANIEL J. SOKATCH is the Chief Executive Officer of the New Israel Fund (NIF), the leading organization committed to equality and democracy for all Israelis. Before joining NIF, Sokatch served as the Executive Director of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties. Prior to his tenure at Federation, he served as the founding Executive Director of the Los Angeles based Progressive Jewish Alliance. In recognition of his leadership, Sokatch has been named to the Forward newspaper’s “Forward 50,” an annual list of the fifty leading Jewish decision-makers and opinion-shapers, in 2002, 2005 and 2008 and 2010.