OFER BEN-AMOTS - Composer
Award-winning composer Ofer Ben-Amots’ compositions are performed worldwide. Recognized for emotional and highly personal expression, Ben-Amots weaves folk elements with contemporary textures, creating dynamic tension that permeates and defines his musical language.

NATHANIEL DEUTSCH - Prof. of Jewish Studies

Deutsch is a professor of history and the Director of The Humanities Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and author of The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement which chronicles S.-An-sky's groundbreaking ethnographic expedition, as well as the forthcoming A Fortress in Brooklyn: Hasidic Williamsburg from White Flight to Gentrification (with Michael Casper).

LOIS RUDNICK - Prof. of American Studies

Lois Rudnick is Professor Emerita of American Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published and lectured extensively about the artist and writer communities of New Mexico, the complex and contested issues of Anglo patronage, and American Modernism.  She is currently writing a biography of Taos Pueblo artist Eva Mirabal and her family. 

GABRIELLA SAFRAN - Prof. in Jewish Studies, Slavic Languages & Lit.

Gabriella Safran teaches and writes on Russian and Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics at Stanford University. Her most recent monograph, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, 2010), is a biography of thIs early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary. She is currently working on two monographs, including one on the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.