Meet the Ellenson Conference Speakers
View speakers by topic:
- Jewish Law
- Repsonses to The Challenges of Sovereignty
- Modern Jewish Thought
- The Legacy of David Ellenson: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach
- A Panel on Israel-Diaspora
Jewish Law
Alyssa M. Gray
Alyssa M. Gray is Professor of Codes and Responsa Literature and Emily S. and Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman Chair in Rabbinics at HUC in New York. She received her PhD with distinction in Talmud and Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary. She also holds an LLM in Mishpat Ivri (Jewish law) from the Hebrew University Faculty of Law and a JD from the Columbia University School of Law.
Gray’s scholarly interests are the historical and literary development of talmudic literature and the history of Jewish law. She also researches literary aspects of Jewish lawbooks. Her books include Charity in Rabbinic Judaism: Atonement, Rewards, and Righteousness (New York and London: Routledge, 2019; paperback ed., 2020) and A Talmud in Exile: The Influence of Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah on the Formation of Bavli Avodah Zarah (Brown, 2005; 2nd digital edition; Brown, 2020). She has also co-edited two other volumes, most recently Making History: Studies in Rabbinic History, Literature, and Culture in Honor of Richard L. Kalmin (Brown, 2024; with Carol Bakhos). She has published numerous articles and book chapters and is a contributor to major collaborative projects such as the Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies, The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, and the Oxford Annotated Mishnah.
Professor Rabbi David Golinkin
Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin was born and raised in Arlington, Virginia. He made aliyah in 1972, earning a B.A. in Jewish History and two teaching certificates from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received an M.A. in Rabbinics and a Ph.D. in Talmud from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he was also ordained as Rabbi.
Prof. Golinkin is President Emeritus of Schechter Institutes, Inc. and of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where he also serves as a Professor of Talmud and Jewish Law. For twenty years, he served as Chair of the Va’ad Halakhah (Law Committee) of the Rabbinical Assembly which writes responsa and gives halakhic guidance to the Masorti (Conservative) Movement in Israel. He is the founder and Director of the Institute of Applied Halakhah at The Schechter Institute whose goal is to publish a library of halakhic literature for Jews thoughout the world. He is the Director of the Center for Women in Jewish Law at the Schechter Institute whose goal is to publish responsa and books by and about women in Jewish law. He is also the founder and Director of the Midrash Project at Schechter whose goal is to publish a series of critical editions of Midrashim.
In June 2014, Rabbi Golinkin was named by The Jerusalem Post, as one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world. In May 2019, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Jewish Theological Seminary. In November 2022, he received the Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Award for his contributions to Israeli society in the field of education. In 2025, The Schechter Institute published a Festschrift in his honor: Shir Hama’alot L’David.
Rabbi Golinkin is the author or editor of 67 books devoted to Talmud, Halakhah, Midrash, Liturgy and has published over 350 articles, responsa and sermons.
Professor Ronit Irshai
Ronit Irshai is Associate Professor and the former head of the gender studies department at Bar Ilan University in Israel; a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman institute in Jerusalem, a member in the board of the Reckman center at Bar Ilan University (For women’s rights) and a member of “Kolenu” – A religious feminist forum. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School during the academic year of 2007-2008, a visiting scholar at the Hadassah Brandeis Institute in fall 2016 and a visiting Professor at Gindal Global University in February 2019 in India.
She published a series of articles on Jewish religious feminism; halakhah (Jewish Law), theology and gender; Jewish sexual ethics; LGBTQ and Jewish law etc.
Her first book: Fertility and Jewish Law – Feminist Perspectives on Orthodox Responsa Literature was published by Brandeis University Press in 2012. The second book on abortion was published in Hebrew by Magness press, in 2022 and the third book “Holy Rebellion”, on Modern-Orthodox Feminism in Israel (together with Dr. Tanya Zion-Waldoks) was published by Brandeis University Press in spring 2024 and won the National Jewish Book Award.
Alona Lisitsa
Rabbi Dr. Alona Lisitsa teaches at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. She was c0-editor of Parashat Hamayim: Ritual Immersion as an Opportunity for Growth, Purification and Healing, and of Drishat Shalom – Sermons on the Weekly Portion by Rabbis of the Israeli Reform Movement. Her book Dabri Torah – A Women’s Commentary to the Torah was published by a joint project of Carmel and the Hebrew Union College. Rabbi Lisitsa serves as Rabbinic Advisor to the European Union of Progressive Judaism in Spain and Portugal.
Zvi Zohar
Zvi Zohar is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Sephardic Law and Ethics Emeritus at Bar Ilan University, where he taught in the Law Faculty and the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry. He is one of the founding scholars and Senior Research Fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Zvi’s work is concerned with the history of Halakhah from its origins and through to the present day, with a particular interest in the work of scholars who lived and worked in the Middle East and North Africa over the last two centuries.
Repsonses to The Challenges of Sovereignty
Rabbi Talia Avnon-Benveniste
Rabbi Talia Avnon-Benveniste is the Director of the Israel Rabbinical Program and Head of the Rabbinical Seminary at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Jerusalem. Ordained by HUC-JIR in 2008, she has developed a distinguished career at the intersection of Jewish thought, education, and contemporary religious leadership, grounded in sustained intellectual engagement with the evolving challenges of Jewish identity, ethics, and community in the modern world.
As Director of the Rabbinical Program, she leads the intellectual and pedagogical formation of future rabbis, shaping curricula and educational frameworks that respond to the complexity of global Jewish life. Her work brings together rigorous study and reflective practice, cultivating leadership attuned to questions of moral responsibility, pluralism, and the reinterpretation of Jewish tradition in contemporary contexts.
Dr. Iddo Haklai
Dr. Iddo Haklai is a David Hartman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, a rabbinical student in the Israeli Rabbinical Program at the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem, and a teacher of Bible and Humanistic Studies at a public high school in Kfar Saba. He received his PhD in Jewish Studies from Brandeis University, where Professor David Ellenson served as one of his mentors and a member of his doctoral committee. Dr. Haklai’s dissertation examined Orthodox-Jewish thought in Mandatory Palestine, focusing specifically on the theology of the Religious Zionist labor movement. Prior to his doctoral studies at Brandeis, he completed both his BA and MA in Jewish Thought and Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also worked at various institutions dedicated to Jewish history and Jewish education, including the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, the Gesher Foundation, which promotes mutual understanding between secular and religious Jewish youth in Israel, and Alma: Home for Hebrew Culture, among others.
Rabbi Naamah Kelman
Rabbi Naamah Kelman was the first woman ordained in Israel in 1992, by the Hebrew Union College, where she studied and worked for close to 40 years. She held a number of positions there, retiring as Dean in 2023.
She coordinates the Golden Family Hanasi Fellows, sending Israeli Rabbinic students to Reform Congregations in the US, and supports and mentors students in the area of Practical Rabbinics. She is also actively involved in the causes of Jewish Pluralism, Feminism, Israeli- Diaspora Relations.
She is currently putting together, along with her siblings, a book of recipes and stories, sharing their parents’ unique Shabbat table, which hosted Jewish VIP’s, celebs, just Jews and often Christian clergy, artists and activists, family and friends, capturing the Golden Age of the Upper West Side of New York.
Yehudah Mirsky
Yehudah Mirsky is Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis and on the faculty of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion and Yeshiva College and received rabbinic ordination in Jerusalem. He graduated from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the law review, and completed his PhD in Religion at Harvard. He worked in Washington as an aide to then-Senators Bob Kerrey and Al Gore, and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and served in the Clinton Administration as special advisor in the US State Department’s human rights bureau. From 2002-2012 he lived in Jerusalem and was a fellow at the Van Leer Institute and Jewish People Policy Institute and a grass-roots activist. He has written widely on politics, theology and culture for a number of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The New Republic and The Economist, The Daily Beast, and The Guardian After the attacks of September 11 he served as a volunteer chaplain for the Red Cross. He co-founded Ha-Tenuah Ya-Yerushalmit, the movement for a pluralist and livable Jerusalem. He is the author of the widely-acclaimed volume, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press), recently published in Hebrew as Rav Kook: Mabat Hadash (Devir).
His second book, Toward the Mystical Experience of Modernity, is forthcoming from Academic Studies Press.
Modern Jewish Thought
David N. Myers
David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA. He is the author or editor of many books in the field of Jewish history. From 2018-2023, he served as president of the New Israel Fund. In 2025, he was awarded a doctoral degree honoris causa from Hebrew Union College.
Julie E. Cooper
Julie E. Cooper is a Professor in the Political Science department at Tel Aviv University, where she also directs the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism. She is the author of Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought (2013) and the co-editor, with Samuel H. Brody, of The King is in the Field: Essays in Modern Jewish Political Thought.
Menachem Lorberbaum
Menachem Lorberbaum is professor of Jewish philosophy at Tel Aviv University. His work is animated by a series of key intersections—between theology and philosophy, between theology and politics, and between self-reflexive discourse and poetry.
Melila Hellner-Eshed
Melila Hellner-Eshed is a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. She has taught Jewish mysticism and Zohar at the Hebrew University in for the past 25 years, and teaches in the rabbinical program of the Israeli Reform movement. Her publications include A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (Stanford University Press, 2009); “Seekers of the Face – The Secrets of the Idra Rabba in the Zohar (Stanford 2022). Her new book co-written with Omri Shasha, On the Path of the Tree of Life – An Introduction to the Zohar (JPS forthcoming).
Maoz Kahana
Maoz Kahana is Professor and Head of the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, exploring Jewish life and thoughts in the early modern era. His second book, A Heartless Chicken: Science and Religion in the 18th Century, examined Jewish engagements with the Scientific Revolution. His forthcoming book, Pagan Gods in Jewish Space (Stanford University Press), explores the surprising vitality of elements of Greco-Roman mythology in early modern Jewish culture.
The Legacy of David Ellenson: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach
Michael Marmur
Michael Marmur is Professor of Jewish Theology at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He has served as Dean of the Jerusalem campus and Jack, Joseph & Morton Mandel Provost of the College. Among his publications are Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Living the Letters: An Alphabet of Emerging Jewish Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). With David Ellenson he edited American Jewish Thought Since 1934: Writings on Identity, Engagement and Belief (Brandeis University Press, 2020), and with David N. Myers he has edited a new collection of David Ellenson’s writings on Israel and Zionism. He was ordained in the Israeli Rabbinic Program of HUC in 1992.
Rabbi Rafael Ellenson
Rabbi Rafi Ellenson is a poet, translator, and serves at Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos, CA. Rafi’s writings have been published in Verklempt!, among others, and he has presented at the International Conference of Christians and Jews. He is the translator of the little book of e by E. Ethelbert Miller (City Point Press; 2024). Prior to rabbinical school, Rafi was the recipient of the Dorot Fellowship in Israel and he worked in the NGO sector at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants and 0202: Points of View from Jerusalem. He was ordained in 2025 by the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College where he also received a Master of Arts in Jewish Studies and a certificate in Interreligious Leadership from the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium. He is a graduate of the Individualized Bachelor of Arts program at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT and holds a certificate in facilitation from Resetting the Table.
Shmuel Feiner
Shmuel Feiner is Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University, Israel. He is the Chairman of The Historical Society of Israel, and member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
His work relates to the processes of modernization and secularization in European Jewry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and most particularly to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. His most recent book, The Emotional Experience of Jewish Secularization has been published this year in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment.
Michal Muskat-Barkan
Professor Michal Muszkat-Barkan is the Director of the Department of Education and Professional Development at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. She initiated and founded Rikma, an M.A. leadership program developed in partnership with the Melton Centre for Jewish Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Teachers’ Lounge in Memory of Shira Banki, recipient of the 2026 Speaker of the Knesset Prize for Quality of Life; and Teacher. Classroom. State., a teachers’ laboratories for Jewish and democratic education. She serves on the Israeli Ministry of Education’s Committee for the Jewish-Israeli Culture curriculum. Her research focuses on Jewish education and the professional development of educators.
A Panel on Israel-Diaspora
Nachman Shai
Nachman Shai is an Israeli journalist and politician who served as Minister of Diaspora Affairs. He previously served as a member of the Knesset and its Deputy Speaker, as well as the IDF spokesman and director of the IDF Radio Station. In April 2024 he was appointed Dean of the Hebrew Union College’s Taube Family Campus in Jerusalem. He studied communications at the World Press Institute in Minnesota, and worked as a research fellow in the Shorenstein Center in the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. In 2009 Nachman obtained a Ph.D. in political science and communications from Bar Ilan University and his thesis, on “Public Diplomacy and Low Intensity Conflict”, was awarded the 2012 Tshetshik Prize for Security Studies by Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.
In 1979 he became press secretary for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations in New York, and in 1981 he was named press consultant to Israel’s Washington embassy. In 1991 he founded The Second Authority for Television and Radio and served as its Director General. He was also chairman of the board of directors of the Israel Television News Company, chairman of the Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and Director General of the Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport. He later served as Senior Vice-President of United Jewish Communities (UJC) and Director-General of UJC Israel.
Ruth Calderon
Dr. Ruth Calderon is an educator and Talmud scholar working to promote Hebrew, Israeli, and Jewish culture, to cultivate the study of Torah in the secular world, and to create a liberal, humanistic public space that is rich in culture. She served in the 19th Knesset as a Member of Knesset for the Yesh Atid party and as Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. Ruth founded Beit Midrash Elul in Jerusalem and Alma – Home for Hebrew Culture in Tel Aviv. She also served as the head of the culture and education department of the National Library of Israel. In recognition of her work, Ruth was awarded the AVI CHAI Prize for Jewish Education, the Samuel Rothberg Prize for Jewish Education, and honorary doctorates from Brandeis University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Hebrew College in Boston. Ruth is the author of A Bride for One Night: Talmud Tales and A Talmudic Alpha Beta, which present personal readings of Talmudic stories. Her children’s books, The Princess and the Rock and A Rainy Day Story, present adaptations of Talmudic and Chassidic stories for children. Ruth holds a master’s degree and doctorate in Talmud from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a graduate of Cohort 1 of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership.
Donniel Hartman
President, Shalom Hartman Institute
Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and holds the Kaufman Family Chair in Jewish Philosophy. He is author of the Boundaries of Judaism and Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself. His latest book, who are the Jews and Who Can We Become, was a 2023 Jewish Book Council Award Finalist. Donniel is also the host of the award-winning podcast For Heaven’s Sake, together with his colleague Yossi Klein Halevi, which ranks consistently as one of the top Judaism podcasts in the world.
Gilad Kariv
Gilad Kariv is an Israeli attorney, Reform rabbi, and a politician. He was the former CEO of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism and is currently a member of the Knesset for the Democrats and previously for the Labor Party. He has also served as chairman of the Law, Constitution and Justice Committee of the Knesset during the term of the 36th Government of Israel. He serves as the Chair of the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs. In addition to this leadership role, he is a member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, the National Security Committee, and the Law, Constitution and Justice Committee.
Joshua Leifer, Journalist and Researcher
Joshua Leifer is a journalist and historian. He is a columnist for Haaretz. His essays and reporting have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and elsewhere. His first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (Dutton 20204), won a National Jewish Book Award. He is also a doctoral candidate in Yale University’s Department of History, where his research examines the intersection of modern intellectual history, modern Jewish politics, Holocaust memory, and U.S. foreign policy. His academic work has been supported by the Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken OSA Archivum in Budapest, Hungary, the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, and Yale’s Program in Jewish Studies.