Rabbanit Leah Sarna is the Associate Director of Education and Director of High School Programs at Drisha. She previously served as Director of Religious Engagement at Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation in Chicago, a leading urban Orthodox congregation.

She was ordained at Yeshivat Maharat in 2018, holds a BA from Yale University in Philosophy & Psychology, and also trained at the SKA Beit Midrash for Women at Migdal Oz, Drisha and the Center for Modern Torah Leadership. Rabbanit Sarna’s published works have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Lehrhaus and MyJewishLearning.

She has lectured in Orthodox synagogues and Jewish communal settings around the world and loves spreading her warm, energetic love for Torah and Mitzvot with Jews in all stages of life.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, is a historian of Jewish culture in the medieval Islamic world and a scholar of medieval Jewish thought, law, and literature. His first book on the movement of Jewish-Sufi pietism in medieval Egypt, entitled Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Circle (Oxford University Press, 2015), was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize by the American Academy for Jewish Research. His second book, Ageing in Medieval Jewish Culture, forthcoming with The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, is a study of aging in the Jewish communities of the medieval Mediterranean and Near East and of old age as a paradigm and ideal in medieval Jewish culture. He is currently working on a study of how Islam, both as religious rival and political power, was portrayed in medieval Jewish literature, as well as how Muslims were depicted in the daily documents of the Cairo Genizah.

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.

Click here to access podcasts recorded by Erin Leib Smokler.

Dr. David Zvi Kalman is Scholar in Residence and Director of New Media at Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where he was also a member of the inaugural cohort of North American David Hartman Center Fellows. David Zvi leads the Kogod Research Center’s research seminar on Judaism and the Natural World.

David Zvi holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from the University of Toronto. His research touches on Jewish law, the history of technology, technology and ethics, material culture, and Islamic jurisprudence. He is the owner of Print-O-Craft Press and the KLMNOPS art house. His work can be found at www.davidzvi.com.