Judaism Is About Love with Rabbi Shai Held

Rabbi Shai Held is the president and dean of the Hadar Institute in New York City. Held received the Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and he has been named to Newsweek’s list of the most influential rabbis in America and to the Forward’s list of the most prominent Jews in the world. His new book, Judaism Is About Love, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March 2024. 

Rabbi Sharon Brous is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR. Her TED talk, “Reclaiming Religion,” reached over 1.5 million viewers. She blessed President Obama and Vice President Biden at the Inaugural National Prayer Service in 2013, and in 2021 she returned to bless President Biden and Vice President Harris. Ranked #1 on Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s influential Rabbis in America list, Brous is recognized as one of the fifty most influential Jews by The Forward and Jerusalem Post. Brous’s upcoming book, “The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Heal Our Hearts and Mend Our Broken World,” is available for pre-order in spring 2023. Ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary and a graduate of Columbia University, she resides in Los Angeles with her spouse and three children.

Rabbi Dr Bradley Shavit Artson (www.bradartson.com) holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University in Los Angeles. Rabbi Artson has long been a passionate advocate for social justice, human dignity, diversity and inclusion. He wrote a book on Jewish teachings on war, peace and nuclear annihilation in the late 80s, became a leading voice advocating for GLBT marriage and ordination in the 90s, and has published and spoken widely on environmental ethics, special needs inclusion, racial and economic justice, cultural and religious dialogue and cooperation, and working for a just and secure peace for Israel and the Middle East. A member of the Philosophy Department, he is particularly interested in theology, ethics, and the integration of science and religion. He mentors Camp Ramah in California in Ojai and Ramah of Northern California in the Bay Area. He is also dean of the Zacharias Frankel College in Potsdam, Germany, ordaining Conservative rabbis for Europe. A frequent contributor for the Huffington Post, the Times of Israel,  and a Contributing Writer for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, he has a public figure Facebook page with over 70,000 likes. Rabbi Artson is the author of 12 books and over 250 articles, most recently Renewing the Process of Creation: A Jewish Integration of Science and Spirit. Married to Elana Artson, they are the proud parents of twins, Jacob and Shira.

Mark Oppenheimer received his B.A. in history from Yale in 1996 and his Ph.D. in American religious history from Yale in 2003, the year that he published his first book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion and the Age of Counterculture.
Since then, Oppenheimer has taught at Stanford, Wellesley, NYU, Boston College (where he was the Corcoran Visiting Professor in Christian-Jewish Relations), and Yale, where for sixteen years he directed the Yale Journalism Initiative. From 2010-2016, he wrote The Beliefs column, About Religion, for The New York Times. He is the author of numerous magazine articles and five books, the most recent of which is Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and The Soul of a Neighborhood.
A popular speaker and lecturer, Oppenheimer is the creator of two podcasts: Unorthodox, about Jewish life and culture, which he hosted from 2015-2023 and while had over seven million downloads, and Gatecrashers: The Hidden History of Jews in the Ivy League (2022). He is currently writing biographies of author Judy Blume and newspaper columnist Ann Landers.