2024 CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
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Elliott Abrams
Elliott Abrams is the chairman of the Tikvah Fund, as well as chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition and Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.
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Shari Redstone
Shari Redstone is a media executive with wide-ranging experience in the entertainment industry and related ventures. This includes serving as Chair of the Board of Directors of Paramount Global as well as Chair, CEO, and President of National Amusements, a world leader in the motion picture exhibition industry. In addition, Ms. Redstone is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Advancit Capital, a venture firm investing in media, technology, and web3 startups.
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Eric Cohen
Eric Cohen is the co-chairman of the Jewish Leadership Conference and CEO of Tikvah.
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Rabbi Meir Soloveichik
Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik is director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Israel to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. His essays on these subjects have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, First Things, Azure, Tradition, and the Torah U-Madda Journal. In August 2012, he gave the invocation at the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. He is the son of Rabbi Eliyahu Soloveichik, grandson of the late Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, and the great-nephew of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
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Kassy Dillon
Kassy Dillon is an opinion journalist and political commentator for the Daily Wire who specializes in foreign policy. Prior to joining The Daily Wire, Kassy was the U.S. news editor for Jewish News Syndicate, a video journalist for Fox News Digital, and was formerly the director of digital engagement for Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Stand for America.
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Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann
Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann is the Executive Director of the Alexander Hamilton Society, an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit, membership organization dedicated to promoting constructive debate on basic principles and contemporary issues in foreign, economic, and national security policy.
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Zoé Tara Zeigherman
Zoé Tara Zeigherman is the director and producer of "Zionism & Anti-Zionism: The History of Two Opposing Ideas." This five-part series, featuring Dr. Einat Wilf, is based on Dr. Wilf’s Georgetown University seminar, in which Zoé Tara was a student. Zoé Tara developed the idea and concept for the series as a 2022 Tikvah Beren Fellow. Previously, she was an assistant to German-Jewish filmmaker Leo Khasin.
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Josh Kraushaar
Josh Kraushaar is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Insider and the author of Axios’ weekly Sunday Sneak Peek newsletter, which focuses on the big-picture forces driving American politics.
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Judge Robert J. Luck
Judge Robert J. Luck was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit by President Donald Trump in 2019. Prior to serving on the federal bench, he was appointed to the Florida Supreme Court by Governor Ron DeSantis on January 14, 2019. He previously served on the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami after his appointment there by Governor Rick Scott in March 2017.
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Will Inboden
Will Inboden is the William Powers, Jr. executive director of the Clements Center for National Security and a distinguished scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. He is also a National Intelligence Council associate and serves on the CIA’s Historical Advisory Panel and State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee.
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Aaron MacLean
Aaron MacLean is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Previously, he was senior foreign policy advisor and legislative director to Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
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Tamara Berens
Tamara Berens is one of two inaugural Krauthammer Fellows at Mosaic magazine. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the American Conservative, the Jerusalem Post, the National Interest, National Review Online, Standpoint, and the Weekly Standard.
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Sean Clifford
Sean Clifford is the chief strategy officer at Tikvah. He most recently served as an entrepreneur-in-residence with Learn Capital, an education-focused venture fund. Sean has spent much of the past eight years in startups and was the founder and CEO of Canopy, a tech company that leveraged AI to protect children from harmful online content.
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Daniel Shapiro
Daniel Shapiro recently completed a clerkship with Justice Clarence Thomas on the United States Supreme Court and now serves as the Director of Tikvah’s Legal Fellowship. Previously, Daniel worked as an associate at Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, where he litigated a wide range of appellate, constitutional, election, administrative, and commercial matters.
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Jake Greenspan
Jake Greenspan is CEO of Skolay, a startup which connects writers & readers for 1:1 conversations. He also leads an AI company called Cuneiform Labs and advises several education ventures, including UATX and the recently announced Emet Classical Academy.
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J.J. Kimche
J.J. Kimche is a student, teacher, researcher, editor, ghostwriter, and translator, currently residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. J.J. is a PhD candidate in the field of modern religious philosophy at Harvard University, where he specialises in the intersection between Modern European philosophy and Post-Enlightenment Jewish thought. His academic essays and translations have been published in both academic and popular venues. J.J. received his undergraduate education at Shalem College, Jerusalem, where he double-majored in Western philosophy and Jewish thought. Prior to that, he spent two years learning in Yeshivat Har Etzion and completed his military service in the 101st Division of the IDF’s Paratroopers Brigade. Born into a family of renowned British rabbis and educators, J.J. has been intensely involved in Jewish education for the past twelve years, teaching Jewish ideas to a wide array of audiences across three continents, and in multiple languages. In recent years he has taught Jewish thought at a prominent Yeshivah, Greek philosophy at a pre-army academy, and worked as a Junior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. J.J. currently serves as the Orthodox educator at MIT Hillel, where he teaches a wide range of Jewish texts.
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Norman J.W. Goda
Norman J.W. Goda is the Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies modern European history and specializes in the history of the Holocaust, war crimes trials, and twentieth century diplomacy. He is the author of Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path toward America (1998); Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (2007); The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews (2013). He has also co-authored, with Richard Breitman, US Intelligence and the Nazis (2005) and Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (2010). He has edited two volumes of international essays titled Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Perspectives (2014) and Rethinking Holocaust Justice: Essays Across Disciplines (2018). He served a lead editor on To the Gates of Jerusalem: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945-1947 (2014) and Envoy to the Promised Land: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1948-1951 (2017). Both McDonald volumes were published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Goda has published articles in various journals including the Journal of Modern History, The International History Review, The Journal of Contemporary History, and Antisemitism Studies, and his work has been the subject of stories by the The New York Times, the Associated Press, US News and World Report, and other major news outlets. Goda has served as a consultant to the US and German governments, as well as for various radio, television, and film documentaries in the US, Europe, and Israel.
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Tal Fortgang
Tal Fortgang is a law clerk on a federal court in Washington, DC. Since participating in a Tikvah high school fellowship over a decade ago he has remained active in Tikvah programming as a College Summer Honors (Beren) Fellow, a Krauthammer Fellow, a Legal Fellow, and an instructor for various Tikvah educational programs. Additionally, he has held fellowships at the Manhattan Institute, SAPIR, and the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty. He writes frequently on a variety of topics for Commentary, Law & Liberty, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Tal earned an AB in Politics and certificate in Judaic Studies cum laude from Princeton University. He earned his JD from NYU Law, where he was Senior Notes Editor of the Journal of Law & Liberty, a Bradley Fellow, and research assistant for Professor Richard A. Epstein. After his clerkships he is slated to practice appellate and administrative law at a leading Philadelphia law firm.
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Zach Kessel
Zach Kessel is a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review, a current Tikvah Krauthammer Fellow, and a former Beren Summer Fellow. Since October 7, his work has consisted mainly of reporting on antisemitism on college campuses, first in the form of statements by student organizations excusing, identifying with, and even praising Hamas’s attack on Israel, and then on the rallies and associated activities where genocidal rhetoric can be seen on posters and heard in chants. He has appeared on national television and on podcasts to discuss his reporting and the state of higher education in the United States and has participated in panel discussions at universities and at the 2023 Jewish Leadership Conference. He has also maintained an account on National Review’s website of the myriad attacks against Jewish people in the West since October 7. Zach can be seen in the forthcoming January issue of National Review’s print edition on the origins of contemporary anti-Zionism within Soviet propaganda. In addition to National Review, his writings have appeared in publications including the Dispatch, the Washington Free Beacon, and the Washington Post.
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Angélique Talmor
Angélique Talmor is a student at the Harvard Kennedy School and the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is French-American-Israeli, and has prior experience as an analyst for the French Government, as well as in policy research and consulting. Angélique is interested in writing on the rise of left-wing antisemitism in the West, French Jewish affairs, as well as on Israeli Foreign Affairs. Angélique holds a BA summa cum laude from the University of Florida and an MA in International Public Management from Sciences Po Paris. She is also an alumna of the Hudson Institute Political Studies Program.