Tamar Ish Shalom, formerly the chief anchor of Channel 10 (later Channel 13) News for 11 years and more recently the host of Channel 13’s weekend news edition, has won several prestigious awards, including the B’nai B’rith Journalism Award for her documentary series on the evolving face of American Jewry and the Givat Haviva Award for advancing shared society between Jews and Arabs in Israel. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Jewish philosophy and a master’s degree in religious studies. Tamar hosts a podcast on the topic of the impact of the October 7th events and the ongoing war on the world’s largest Jewish community outside Israel—the Jewish community of the United States.

Shira Tsachi is an educator, group facilitator, and social entrepreneur. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and geography from Hebrew University, and is a doctoral student in Jewish philosophy at Bar-Ilan University.

Over the past decade, Shira has been involved in young leadership development and in the administration of a unique beit midrash (study framework) at Ein Prat: The Academy for Leadership, where she also served as Deputy CEO for Research, Development, and Learning.

Shira was one of the last students of the late Israel Prize laureate Prof. Eliezer Schweid, and is deeply engaged with his thought and pedagogical legacy. She teaches and lectures on Jewish history and Zionist thought in a variety of educational settings.

She is a former chair of Mirkam – Mixed Communities Network – and is currently a member of the Open University Council.

Prof. 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 early Christian and rabbinic sources. She is a faculty member at the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and she was an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. She was the Horace Goldsmith Visiting Professor in Judaic Studies at Yale University and the Gruss Visiting Associate Professor in Talmudic Civil Law Harvard Law School. 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, National Jewish Book Award, 2019).

   

Noa Israeli is the coordinator of the academic course "Israeli Identity: Divided We Stand." She is a PhD student at the School of Jewish Studies at Tel Aviv University, and a graduate of the Israel Democracy Institute's Human Rights and Judaism Program. Israeli is the Director of the Scholarships Program for Outstanding Teaching Students at Tel Aviv University, and lecturer in the Regav program at the Kibbutzim Seminar. She lives in Tel Aviv and is the mother of two daughters.

Dr. Haim Zicherman, a senior lecturer at the Ono Academic College (OAC), is an expert in constitutional and property law and also researches the ultra-Orthodox society. His book Black Blue-White (Yedioth Books, 2014) takes a broad-minded approach to understanding the ultra-Orthodox society in Israel. Until last year, Zicherman managed the ultra-Orthodox campuses of the OAC, where thousands of Haredi students – male and female – study. In recent years, Zicherman has coordinated the development and management of the "Israeli Identity" course available to all undergraduate students in Israel.

Dr. Shuki Friedman is the Director General of the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is a member of the Faculty of Law at the Peres Academic Center and formerly served as secretary of the Locker Committee for Examining the Defense Budget. He was also chairman of the government committee on the sanctions against Iran, and headed the international and foreign law department for the legal division of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office. Areas of expertise The relationship of religion and state; processes of religionization; secular-religious-ultra-Orthodox relations; ultra-Orthodox employment; the defense budget; Islamic law; international law; the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

Professor Stern is President of the Jewish People Policy Institute and a full professor in the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University. He is an alumnus of the Kerem B'Yavneh hesder yeshiva (1973-1978); holds a law degree (summa cum laude) from Bar-Ilan University (1982), and a doctorate in corporate law from Harvard University (1986). Stern has served as dean of Bar-Ilan University's Faculty of Law (1994-1998), and was a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute (1989-2000). For a decade he served as the IDI's Vice President for Research. His areas of expertise are corporate law (merger and acquisitions, corporate finance and corporate governance), and public law (constitutional law, religion and state, human rights, law and halacha or Jewish law). He has lectured and been a visiting scholar at universities abroad (including Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis, and Princeton), and was Distinguished University Professor at Monash University in Australia (2009-2011). Stern has served as advisor to the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee; has participated in numerous committees and public entities, among them the Commission of Inquiry on the Treatment of Residents of Gush Katif (2009); the National Committee for Civic Studies (2009-2011, committee chair); the Takana Forum for the prevention of sexual harassment in the religious community (founding member); the Government Committee for Equality in the Burden of Service (2012); the Committee for Regulating Governance in Higher Education (2014). He has served on the boards of multiple companies, including (currently) that of Bank Leumi. Stern has been awarded the Zeltner Prize for Excellence in Legal Research (2009), and the Gorny Prize for Outstanding Activity in Public Law (2012). Professor Stern has written and edited over twenty books; has published over fifty research articles in five languages; is the coeditor (with Professor Sagi) of the journal Democratic Culture (19 volumes to date); regularly publishes essays and articles in the Israeli and international press, and is interviewed by the Israeli and international media on issues of law and society, religion and state, Judaism and democracy, Jewish identity and Israeli culture. Born in England (1955), married to Dr. Karen Friedman-Stern, father of eight.

Dr. Shlomo Fischer teaches sociology in the School of Education at Hebrew University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.He is also currently a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute. His research interests include the nexus of religion, politics and class in Israel, contemporary religion and the sociology of the Jewish people. He has published extensively on radical religious Zionism and the West Bank settlers as well as on the Shas movement. Fischer has worked in the field of education for the past 25 years. In the past 10 years he has worked in the field of religion, democracy and tolerance. He has edited (together with Adam Seligman) The Burden of Tolerance: Religious Traditions and the Challenge of Pluralism (Hebrew; HaKibbutz Hameuchad and the Van Leer Institute, 2007) which addresses these issues. From 1996-2007 he was the founder and Executive Director of Yesodot – Center for Torah and Democracy which works to advance education for democracy in the State-Religious school sector in Israel and was also one of the founders and is on the Board of the International Summer School for Religion and Public Life which is based in Boston, Mass. He is a graduate of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem.