Yonatan Brafman is assistant professor of Jewish Thought and Ethics and the director of the MA Program in Jewish Ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America as well as a visiting research scholar at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of Jewish thought, Jewish law, and contemporary moral and legal philosophy. He also studies the implications of religious practice for critical social theory and praxis. He has published or has forthcoming articles on these topics in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Diné Israel, Jewish Studies Quarterly, Journal of Jewish Ethics, and Journal of Religion and Violence. He is coeditor, with Leora Batnitzky, of an anthology titled Jewish Legal Theories: Writings on State, Religion, and Morality (Brandeis). He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Critique of Halakhic Reason: From Divine Norms to Social Normativity (Indiana). He holds a PhD in Philosophy of Religion and Jewish Thought from the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where he also received his BA, MA, and MPhil.

Shlomo C. Pill teaches in the Drisha Kollel. He is the founding Director of The Institute for Jewish Muslim Action. He is a Senior Fellow and Post-Doctoral Fellow in Law and Religion at The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, as well as an Instructor in Emory College’s Middle Eastern Studies Department and the TAM Institute for Jewish Studies where he teaches courses on Jewish and Islamic law. A licensed attorney with expertise in religious freedom, church-state, arbitration, and related issues, he received his JD from Fordham Law School, and LLM and SJD degrees in Law and Religion from Emory Law School.  His current work utilizes the comparative study of the Jewish, Islamic, and American jurisprudential traditions to develop new ways of thinking about a range of issues in contemporary American life, including religious freedom, faith-based arbitration, judicial and legal ethics, interactions between religious traditions and secular societies, and legal interpretation and decision making processes and methodologies.

Adina C. Levine teaches in the Drisha Kollel. She is currently an associate at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, a full service New York law firm, where she specializes in litigation. Prof. Levine received her JD from Harvard Law School, with a focus on comparative law.  She holds a Masters in Jewish Education from Azrieli Graduate School for Jewish Education, with a focus on secondary Jewish education.  Prior to attending law school, Prof. Levine participated in the Avi Chai Program for Advanced Talmudic Studies at Yeshiva University and received her Bachelors in Journalism from Stern College for Women as a Golding Distinguished Scholar. She is an adjunct professor at Touro Law School in Jewish Law, and also currently serves as an adjunct professor at Yeshiva University Stern College for Women, teaching a wide-range of law courses including Constitutional Law, Women and the Law, and Comparative American law and Talmudic law.

Chaim Saiman is a Professor of Law at Villanova University and is completing his book Halakha: the Rabbinic Idea of Law, which will be published by Princeton University Press. Professor Saiman has recently served as the Gruss Professor of Jewish Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Prior to teaching at Villanova, he learned at Yeshivat Har Etzion and Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, clerked for Judge Michael McConnell in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and studied at the law schools of Columbia, Harvard and NYU.

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Dov Linzer studied for many years at Yeshivat Har Etzion, was a member of Yeshiva University’s Gruss Kollel Elyon, and received his ordination from the Israeli Rabbinate. He is a recipient of the Javits Graduate fellowship, and a doctoral candidate in Religion at Columbia University. He headed the Boca Raton Kollel for the first two-and-a-half years of its existence, giving classes to the rabbis of the Kollel, and lecturing throughout the South Florida communities. He has published Halakha and machshava articles in Torah journals and lectures widely at synagogues and conferences on topics relating to Halakha, Orthodoxy, and modernity. Rabbi Linzer spearheaded the development of the YCT Rabbinical School curriculum into an innovative four year semikha program which provides its students with rigorous halakhic study and sophisticated professional training in the context of a religious atmosphere which cultivates openness and inclusiveness. In addition to overseeing the Yeshiva’s Torah curriculum, he teaches advanced Halakha in a broad range of areas across all four sections of the Shulchan Aruch – including Kashrut, Ishut and Niddah, and Shabbat and Eruvin. Rabbi Linzer teaches advanced classes in Talmud and a year-long class in Contemporary Challenges of Modern Orthodoxy

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Devora Steinmetz serves on the faculty of the Hebrew College Rabbinical School and the Mandel Leadership Institute. She is the founder of Beit Rabban, a Jewish day school profiled in Daniel Pekarsky’s Vision at Work: The Theory and Practice of Beit Rabban. She is the author of scholarly articles on Talmud, Midrash, and Bible as well as of two books, From Father to Son: Kinship, Conflict, and Continuity in Genesis and Punishment and Freedom: The Rabbinic Construction of Criminal Law. She has served on the faculty of Drisha, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yeshivat Hadar, and Havruta: a Beit Midrash at Hebrew University.

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Tsvi Blanchard is the Meyer Struckmann Professor of Jewish Law at Humboldt University Faculty of Law in Berlin as well as scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Law, Religion and Lawyer’s Work at Fordham Law School. In addition to being an ordained Orthodox rabbi, he holds PhDs in Philosophy and Clinical Psychology. He has taught philosophy and Jewish studies at Washington, Northwestern and Loyola Universities as well as at Drisha Institute and has had a private practice in psychotherapy. In addition to his articles on Jewish law, his publications include the 2002 Riesman award winning “How to Think About Being Jewish in the Twenty-First Century: a New Model of Jewish Identity Construction,” a book that he co-authored, entitled Embracing Life, Facing Death: a Jewish Guide to Palliative Care, and non-academic writings on a variety of Jewish topics.

Ariel Evan Mayse joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and serves as the rabbi-in-residence at Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute (atiqmakers.org).

Previously he was the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. Mayse holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in Israel.

His most recent publications include Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings for Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (University of Pennsylvania, 2020); Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community and Life in the Modern World (Brandeis University Press, 2020), edited with Sam Berrin Shonkoff, and The Language of Truth in the Mother Tongue (Magnes Press, 2020, in Hebrew).

Erin Leib Smokler is the Director of Spiritual Development and Internship Coordinator at Yeshivat Maharat, where she teaches Chassidut and Pastoral Torah. She earned her PhD and MA from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, her BA from Harvard University, and studied in Drisha’s Scholars Circle. She previously served as Assistant Literary Editor of The New Republic magazine, and her writing has appeared there as well as in The New York Times Book Review, The Jerusalem Report, and The Jewish Week.

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Rolando Matalon is the Rabbi at Congregation Bnai Jeshurun in Manhattan. He received ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary from which he has a Masters of Hebrew Letters. He has a BS in Chemistry from the Universite de Montreal.

Shai Held is Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar. He has taught for institutions such as Drisha, Me’ah, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and the Rabbinic Training Institute, and currently serves on the faculty of the Wexner Heritage program. He has a PhD in religion from Harvard. His book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence came out from Indiana University Press in the falll of 2013.

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Eitan Fishbane serves on the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he teaches students in the Rabbinical, Graduate, and Undergraduate schools. A scholar of Jewish mysticism and spirituality, he is the author of three books, including As Light Before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist, on the mystical thought of Isaac ben Samuel of Akko, and the forthcoming The Poetics of the Zohar; the editor of two others, and the recipient of numerous awards and honors. Professor Fishbane has lectured and taught at more than thirty synagogues across North America.

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David Shatz is a Professor of Philosophy, Division Coordinator of the Humanities, and Co-Chair of the Philosophy Department at Yeshiva University. He has a PhD from Columbia University and Rabbinic Ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.

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