Rachel Kadish
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Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels The Weight of Ink, From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, and Tin House, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and elsewhere.
She has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has received the National Jewish Book Award, the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award, and the John Gardner Fiction Award, and was the Koret Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University.
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She lives outside Boston and teaches in Lesley University's MFA Program in Creative Writing
Ilana Kurshan
Ilana Kurshan is the author of If All the Seas Were Ink (St. Martin's, 2017), winner of the Sophie Brody Medal and a finalist for the Natan Award and a National Jewish Book Award. She has translated books of Jewish interest by Ruth Calderon, Benjamin Lau, and Micah Goodman, as well as novels, short stories, and children’s picture books. She is a regular contributor to Lilith Magazine, where she is the Book Reviews Editor, and her writing has appeared in The Forward, The World Jewish Digest, Hadassah, Nashim, Zeek, Kveller, and Tablet. Kurshan is a graduate of Harvard University (BA, summa cum laude, History of Science) and Cambridge University (M.Phil, English literature). She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and four children.
Deborah Lipstadt
Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot professor of Holocaust Studies at Emory University, has published and taught about the Holocaust for close to 40 years. She is probably most widely known because of the libel lawsuit brought against her (1996) by David Irving for having called him a Holocaust denier. A ten-week trial in London (2000), ended in an overwhelming victory for Professor Lipstadt and the Daily Telegraph (London) described the trial as having "done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations.” Professor Lipstadt’s TED talk about the trial has received well over one million views. The movie Denial, starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Wilkinson, with a screenplay by David Hare, tells the story of this legal battle. It is based on her book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (Harper Collins 2006) and recently reissued as Denial (Harper Collins 2016).
Professor Lipstadt is currently writing a book, Antisemitism: Here and Now, to be published 2018. She has written most recently Holocaust: An American Understanding (Rutgers, 2016) and her previous books include The Eichmann Trial (Schocken, 2011) and Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (Free Press, 1986). At Emory, Lipstadt has won the Emery Williams Teaching Award. She was selected for the award by alumni as the teacher who had most influenced them.
Professor Lipstadt was an historical consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has held Presidential appointment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council (from Presidents Clinton and Obama) and was asked by President George W. Bush to represent the White House at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. She was part of a committee that advised Secretary of State Madeline Albright on matters of religious freedom abroad.
Photo: Jillian Edelstein
Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker is a major American Jewish poet and critic. Her 16th collection of poems, Waiting for the Light, received the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry; her collection The Book of Seventy won that award in 2010. She is also twice a National Book Award finalist, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award and the William Carlos Williams Award, and is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Ostriker’s 2012 collection The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011, was awarded the Paterson Prize. As a critic, Ostriker is the author of the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible, including the controversial midrashic work The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions and For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. Her work has been translated into many languages including Hebrew and Arabic.
Photo: J.P. Ostriker
Erika Meitner
Erika Meitner is the author of Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003); Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011); Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; and Copia (BOA Editions, 2014). Her fifth book of poems, Holy Moly Carry Me, is due out from BOA Editions in September of 2018. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Tin House. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center, and she was the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing.
