Joshua Cohen is the recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and the National Jewish Book Award for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. He is the author of five other novels and four story collections.

James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. Widely considered one of the world's top literary critics, he is the author of How Fiction Works, as well as two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and a novel, The Book Against God.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was a towering theologian and activist who left an indelible mark on the civil rights movement and the American Jewish community. January 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Heschel's death (yahrzeit).

Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig is rabbi of the Netzah Menashe community in Beit Shemesh, Israel. Previously, he served as Rosh Yeshiva (academic head) of Yeshivat Shevut Yisrael in Efrat. Rabbi Rosensweig is the author of several books including the recent Nafshi Beshe’elati on Jewish law and mental health.

THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST, a new three-part, six-hour series directed and produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, explores America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the 20th century. The film examines the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany in the context of global antisemitism and racism, the eugenics movement in the United States and race laws in the American south. The series sheds light on what the U.S. government and American people knew and did as the catastrophe unfolded in Europe.

Nicholas Lemann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and was previously the national correspondent for The Atlantic. He is a past dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he is now a faculty member, and since 2015 he has directed the publishing imprint Columbia Global Reports. He is the author of “The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America,” “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,” and “Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.” His most recent book is “Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream."

Mark Oppenheimer is the host of the new podcast Gatecrashers which tells the story of how Jews fought for acceptance at elite schools, and how the Jewish experience in the Ivy League shaped American higher education, and shaped America at large.

Co-sponsored by Brown RISD Hillel, Cornell Hillel | The Yudowitz Center for Jewish Campus Life, Center for Jewish Life/Princeton Hillel, Hillel at Dartmouth, The Kraft Center/Columbia Barnard Hillel, PENN Hillel, and Slifka Center at Yale.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He co-directs the Institute's Muslim Leadership Initiative, which teaches emerging young Muslim American leaders about Judaism, Jewish identity and Israel. He is co-host, together with Donniel Hartman and Elana Stein Hain, of the Hartman Institute's podcast, “For Heaven’s Sake.” Halevi’s 2013 book Like Dreamers, won the Jewish Book Council Everett Book of the Year Award. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller and has appeared in a dozen languages.

Ysoscher Katz, Chair of Talmud Department, YCT Rabbinical School
Matty Lichtenstein, Research Fellow, Brown University
David N. Myers, Distinguished Professor of History and chair of Jewish History, UCLA
Nomi M. Stolzenberg, Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair in Law, USC Gould School of Law

Tzipi Livni was first elected to Israel's Parliament, the Knesset, in 1999 and has since held numerous ministerial positions including: Minister of Foreign Affairs and Vice Prime minister (the first woman to hold this position since Golda Meir), Minister of Justice, Minister of Regional Cooperation, Minister of Immigrant Absorption, Minister of Housing and Construction, Minister of Agriculture, Leader of the opposition, Leader of Center Party Kadima (the biggest party in the parliament) and leader of Hatnua Party.

Jonathan Greenblatt is CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, the world's leading anti-hate organization with a distinguished record of fighting antisemitism and advocating for just and fair treatment for all. Jonathan joined ADL in 2015 after serving as special assistant to President Obama and director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. He had a distinguished career in business as a successful social entrepreneur and corporate executive: he cofounded Ethos Brands, founded All for Good, and served as a senior executive at realtor.com. He is the author of It Could Happen Here: Why America is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable - And How We Can Stop It.

Lila Corwin Berman is Chair of American Jewish History at Temple University, where she directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She is the author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution, which has been awarded prizes from the Organization of American Historians and the American Jewish Historical Society.

Danielle Durchslag is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. The great-granddaughter of Nathan Cummings, she was born into what she describes as a "Jewish Dynasty." In her art, she explores the psychological and political complexitites of the world of American Jewish wealth in which she grew up.

Professor Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, and formerly Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He has written or edited 17 books including The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism - a fundamental reassessment of the foundations of current-day economics, showing how religious thinking has shaped economic thinking ever since the beginnings of modern Western economics and how this influence continues to be relevant today, especially in the United States.

Steven Levitsky is the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions. He is the author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, a New York Times Best-Seller that has been published in 25 languages, and has written frequently for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, and The New Republic.

Robert Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard and the former dean of the Kennedy School of Government. A recipient of the Skytte Prize, the world’s highest accolade for a political scientist, he has written fifteen books, including Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, among the most cited and bestselling social science works in the last half century. Last year he published The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and a commentator on "PBS NewsHour," NPR's "All Things Considered," and NBC's "Meet the Press." He is the author of five books including The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, which was a No. 1 New York Times best seller. He teaches at Yale University, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Thomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist. He is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes -- two for international reporting from the Middle East and a third for his columns written about 9/11. He is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers including From Beirut to Jerusalem. Friedman earned his B.A. from Brandeis in 1975 and was awarded a Marshall Scholarship by the British government and earned an M.Phil in Modern Middle East Studies from St. Antony's College, Oxford.

 

Greg Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University and the president of the Harvard Chaplains. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.

Yo-Yo Ma is widely considered one of the greatest living musicians. A graduate of Harvard College, he has been awarded the Glenn Gould Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Polar Music Prize. He has won over a dozen Emmy awards.

 

Sarah Hurwitz was a Senior Speechwriter for President Barack Obama and then served as Head Speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama. Before working at the White House, Sarah was Chief Speechwriter for Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential primary campaign. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, she is the author of Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to  Life - In Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There).

Idan Dershowitz is Chair of Hebrew Bible Exegesis at the University of Potsdam. In 2017 he was selected for Harvard's Society of Fellows. Dershowitz's dramatic claim that a long-thought forgery is both authentic and the oldest existing biblical manuscript was recently profiled in the New York Times. He is the author of The Dismembered Bible: Cutting and Pasting Scripture in Antiquity and The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book.

Michael Fertik is a published fiction author, poet, produced film writer, and playwright. His recently released "Hip Set" is set in Tel Aviv. Fertik's writing has won numerous prizes and includes a New York Times best seller. The executive chairman and founder of Reputation.com and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, he is also the founder and managing partner of Heroic Ventures, a top venture firm that invests in early-stage companies chiefly in Silicon Valley and Israel.

Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former Faculty Associate at Harvard Law School. She is the author of three books, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, which reveals a world in which technology users are neither customers, employees, nor products. Instead they are the raw material for new procedures of manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order: a surveillance economy.

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the Founding Director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A licensed clinical psychologist, she is the author of six books including her recently released memoir, The Empathy Diaries. A Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year, a TED speaker, and featured media commentator, Turkle is a recipient of Guggeheim and Rockefeller Humanities fellowships and is a member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.

A conversation with Liz Burdock (CEO & President of the Business Network for Offshore Wind); Ziven Drake (Senior Technical Coordinator for the North Atlantic States Carpenters Training Fund); and Rachel Pachter (Vineyard Wind's Chief Development Officer), moderated by David Borrus (Business Manager for UBC Pile Drivers & Divers Local 56, North Atlantic States Council of Carpenters).

Lydia Dugdale, MD, MAR is Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her scholarship focuses on end-of-life issues, medical ethics, and the doctor-patient relationship. She edited "Dying in the Twenty-First Century" and is the author of "The Lost Art of Dying," a popular press book on the preparation for death.
 

Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan joins Rabbi Dani Passow for a discussion of the new science of psychedelics, where Rabbi Dani shares his own experience as a subject of an NYU medical center study on the effects of psilocybin on clergy.

As part of Harvard Hillel’s Online Speaker Series, The New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos uses his expertise as a politics and foreign affairs reporter to comment about the 2020 election.

Harvard Law School professor and author Martha Minow joined Harvard Hillel's Online Speaker Series. She was featured on a panel that included HLS professor Noah Feldman, Dartmouth College professor Susannah Heschel, and Chief Justice of The Boston Rabbinical Court Joseph Polak to discuss her latest book "When Should Law Forgive."

Lloyd Blankfein ’75, JD ’78 is senior chairman of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. He joined Harvard Hillel’s Online Speaker Series to talk about his work on many Harvard advisory boards and the pressures of working in the finance industry during uncertain times.

Dr. Elisa New participated in Harvard Hillel’s Online Speaker Series to discuss her television series Poetry in America. Her show focuses on making poetry education widely accessible and has featured such diverse guests as Shaquille O’Neal and Joe Biden.

As part of a special evening of learning between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Harvard Hillel welcomed former dean of Harvard Law School Martha Minow and Prof. Jerome Groopman for a discussion about hope, justice, and forgiveness.

Theoretical physicist Dr. Jeremy England’s research has used statistical physics to explain the spontaneous emergence of life. His new book, Every Life is On Fire, is both a book about physics and a d’var Torah. Dr. England joined us to talk about the origins of life as part of Harvard Hillel’s ongoing Online Speaker Series.

Harvard Graduate School of Education professor, Howard Gardner, and director of HGSE's Project Zero, Wendy Fishman, in conversation about what higher ed looks like now, and what it will look like into the future.

Joshua Foer is the writer and entrepreneur who created the Sukkah City design competition. He and architect Paul Goldberger have a discussion as part of Harvard Hillel’s ongoing Online Speaker Series.

 

Part of Harvard Hillel's online speaker series, Dr. Michael Osterholm joined us for a conversation on what the future holds.

 

Ambassador Nicholas Burns digs into what the historic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates might mean for the Middle East as a whole.

 

Harvard Hillel welcomed Ezekiel Emanuel for a conversation about how coronavirus affects health care, higher education, and how we move forward from here. Dr. Emanuel was interviewed by his daughter, Natalia Emanuel, a Harvard PhD student.

 

 

Computational geneticist Dr. Pardis Sabeti envisions what the world will look like when students return to campus.

 

 

Part of our online speaker series, Imam Khalil Abdur-Rashid, Harvard's Muslim Chaplain, shares his thoughts on how communities can end systemic racism.

 

Part of Harvard Hillel's online speaker series, Rabbi Dani Passow speaks with Harvard University Provost Dr. Alan Garber. Provost Garber is also the Mallinckrodt Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Economics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Public Policy in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. An economist and physician, he studies methods for improving health care productivity and health care financing.

A conversation about Jews and power, from the Bible to the modern state of Israel to the 2020 U.S. election. Ruth Wisse, is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund and Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Emerita at Harvard. Ari Hoffman is a columnist at The Forward, where he writes about politics, culture, and the arts. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

 

Part of Harvard Hillel's online speaker series, Harvard University President Larry Bacow talks with students, alumni, and community members.

 

 

Part of Harvard Hillel's Online Speaker Series, Prof. Jill Lepore approaches the current pandemic with historical perspective.

 

 

Part of Harvard Hillel's online speaker series, Prof. Steven Pinker looks at coronavirus through the lens of psychology.

 

Part of Harvard Hillel's online speaker series, Lauren Cohen Fisher speaks with three journalists at prominent Israeli news outlets about COVID-19 in Israel. With: Nathan Jeffay (Times of Israel), Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman (Jerusalem Post), and Amos Haarel (Haaretz).

 

Part of Harvard Hillel's Online Speaker Series, Prof. Noah Feldman remarks on Passover during a pandemic.

 

 

Rabbi Shai Held and Prof. Michael Sandel talk about the ethics of coronavirus, part of Harvard Hillel's Online Speaker Series.