Graduation & Ordination
Speakers and Honorees

Honorees

Roger E. Joseph Prize Recipient

• World Central Kitchen

Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters

• Laurie L. Patton, President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Sherut L’Am Award – Service to the People Award

• Rabbi David Saperstein ’72, Director Emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Former United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom

Stay tuned for more announcements about this season’s graduation and ordination speakers.

Meet the Speakers & Honorees

Cantor Joshua Breitzer, ’11, M.M., M.S.M.

Clinical Instructor of Cantorial Arts at Hebrew Union College; Cantor, Congregation Beth Elohim, Brooklyn, NY

In 2025, after many years of board service, Cantor Joshua Breitzer was elected President of the American Conference of Cantors, which offers spiritual leadership and sacred music to Reform congregations throughout the world.

Cantor Breitzer’s professional activities extend far beyond Brooklyn. Named by The Forward in its “Soundtrack of Our Spirit” series as one of the best new Jewish music voices, Cantor Breitzer has sung at concert halls and synagogues across the country. He appears throughout the PBS documentary “The Four Sons And All Their Sons: A Passover Tale” and helped create the New York Festival of Song’s acclaimed cabaret “A Goyishe Christmas to You” in which he has performed every year since 2010. Among his most influential mentors were Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Yehudi Wyner, Cantor Lawrence Avery ’55, and Dr. Jack Gottlieb, whose artistic legacy Cantor Breitzer continues to preserve and promote.

As Clinical Instructor in Cantorial Arts at the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music, Cantor Breitzer advises and coaches students and teaches courses on integrative repertoire for Shabbat and Yom Kippur. An alumnus of the Clergy Leadership Program of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, he strives to model in all his work how one might weave traditional and contemporary liturgical settings into a holistic, compelling prayer experience. His former cantorial interns have gone on to serve prominent progressive Jewish communities all around the globe.

Cantor Breitzer proudly hails from mid-Michigan and spent formative summers at Interlochen Arts Camp, later earning voice degrees from the University of Michigan and the New England Conservatory. Committed to inspiring the next generation of Jewish music makers, he was the founding conductor of HaZamir Brooklyn, a chapter of HaZamir: The International Jewish Teen Choir, and is on the faculty of URJ Crane Lake Camp. He has also presented classes at the North American Jewish Choral Festival, the Academy for Jewish Religion, and at the Abraham Geiger Kolleg in Potsdam, Germany.

Together with his wife, Donna, and their children, Jonah and Gideon, Cantor Breitzer makes a home in Park Slope. He relishes the city’s multitude of mass transit systems, doing the New York Times Sunday Crossword, and crafting puns of varying quality for his extremely tolerant family and friends.

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Rabbi David Saperstein ’72, J.D.

Director Emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Former United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom

A rabbi, lawyer, and diplomat, for 40 years Rabbi David Saperstein served as Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, representing the Reform Jewish Movement to Congress and the Administration. He served, as well, a term as the President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

Over the decades, Rabbi Saperstein has held a range of public service posts, chairing two and serving on three other federal government commissions and advisory committees. Most notably, he served (2014-17) as the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom – the first rabbi ever to serve as a U.S. “ambassador.”

As an academic, Rabbi Saperstein taught church-state law and Jewish law for 38 years at Georgetown University. In the public interest world, he has served as chair, or on the boards and executive committees, of numerous national and international civil rights, environmental, social justice, and interfaith organizations, and currently serves as the chair of the World Faith Development Dialogue and co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Faith in Action.

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Laurie L. Patton, Ph.D.

President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Laurie L. Patton is the president of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. From 2015 to 2025, Patton served as the first woman president of Middlebury College. Patton also served as dean of Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Durden Professor of Religion, and as Candler Professor of Religion and Inaugural Director of the Center for Faculty Development at Emory University. She was president of the American Academy of Religion in 2019.

Patton is an authority on South Asian history, culture, and religion, and religion in the public square. She is the author or editor of eleven scholarly books and three books of poetry, and has translated the classical Sanskrit text, The Bhagavad Gita, for the Penguin Classics Series.

Her second book of poems, Angel’s Task: Poems in Biblical Time, is a contemplative reading of the weekly parshiyot of the Jewish ritual year. Several of these were also published in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, edited by Rabbi Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, Ph.D., and Rabbi Andrea Weiss, Ph.D. She is a member of the Addison Country Havurah and Ohavi Zedek in Burlington, VT.

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Rabbi Meredith Kahan ’13

Senior Rabbi, K.K. Bene Israel – Rockdale Temple, Cincinnati, OH

Rabbi Meredith Faye Kahan serves as the tenth senior rabbi of the 200-year-old K.K. Bene Israel – Rockdale Temple in Cincinnati. Rabbi Kahan is a lifelong Buckeye; raised in Cincinnati, she earned her bachelor’s degree in social work at The Ohio State University. A product of the Reform Movement, especially NFTY, she is a proud 2013 ordinee of the historic Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College. Rabbi Kahan first served Rockdale Temple as Rabbinic Intern and then as Assistant/Associate Rabbi & Educator under the leadership of her mentor, Rabbi Sigma Faye Coran, z”l. As Senior Rabbi, Rabbi Kahan leads a growing, thriving, forward-thinking congregation. She currently serves as President of the Greater Cincinnati Board of Rabbis, sits on the Board of Advisors of URJ Goldman Union Camp Institute and the Steering Committee of Cincinnati’s Festival of Faiths, and is a grateful member of the Women’s Rabbinic Network. Rabbi Kahan is a lifelong lover of books, theater, and music, enjoys traveling, and can be found cheering on the Buckeyes year-round! Rabbi Kahan and her husband are the proud and tired parents of three children.

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Rabbi Neal Scheindlin

Visiting Instructor in Rabbinics and Biblical Commentaries at Hebrew Union College

Rabbi Neal Scheindlin is a visiting instructor in Rabbinics and biblical commentaries at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. For 18 years he taught and developed curriculum in Jewish law and ethics at Milken Community Schools. His Jewish Family Ethics Textbook, published by JPS, was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 2021.

A native of Philadelphia, Rabbi Scheindlin graduated summa cum laude from La Salle University. He received an M.A. and ordination as a Rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1986. He served in several pulpits and worked in Jewish education and healthcare chaplaincy in the East before moving to Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Rabbi Dvora Weisberg, Ph.D. They are the parents of two, and Saba and Savta of two.

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Joshua Holo, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College

Joshua Holo, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Jewish History and formerly served as Vice President of Academic Resources, Dean of the Hebrew Union College Jack H. Skirball Campus, and Director of the Louchheim School of Judaic Studies. He co-founded Hebrew Union College’s digital learning platform called the College Commons, and hosts a regular podcast called the College Commons Podcast. He was the editor of the Brill Series on Jewish Studies and a regular contributor of Torah commentary to the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. His publications range from the social and intellectual history of the Jews of the Middle Ages to contemporary liberal Zionism.

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World Central Kitchen

Joseph Prize Recipient

Whose founder and chief feeding officer, Chef José Andrés, inspires teams that work with urgency, leverage local resources, and cook side-by-side with the people most deeply affected by crisis, and whose commitment to prepare nourishing, comforting food to feed people amidst man-made crises, humanitarian emergencies, and catastrophic natural disasters provides much-needed sustenance along with hope and dignity in challenging times;

Whose resilient legacy programming addressed chronic food system challenges by empowering cooks to pursue hospitality sector careers; supporting the transition from dangerous wood- and coal-fueled fires to clean burning propane to improve human and environmental health; and supporting local farmers, fishers, and food producers to enhance food security and sustainability;

And whose endeavors embody the Talmudic imperative to provide food for the vulnerable, which our sages explain as among our most crucial responsibilities in this life: “When you are asked in the world to come, ‘What was your work?’ and you answer: ‘I fed the hungry,’ you will be told: ‘This is the gate of Adonai enter into it, you who have fed the hungry.'”

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