Ambassador Dr. Yechiel Leiter has served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States since January 2025. A seasoned policy expert and public servant, he previously held senior roles including adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Chief of Staff to then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Education, and Acting Chairman of the Israel Ports Company. He holds degrees in law and political science, a Master’s in International Relations, and a PhD in political philosophy. His post-doctoral research on the philosophy of John Locke and the Hebrew Bible was published by Cambridge University Press. Ambassador Leiter is a father of eight and grandfather of many. His eldest son, Maj. Moshe Yedidya Leiter — a medical doctor and IDF special forces officer — fell in combat in Gaza on November 10, 2023.

Josh Hammer is Newsweek's senior-editor-at-large, a syndicated columnist, and the author of Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West (Radius Book Group, 2025). He also hosts The Josh Hammer Show, a podcast and syndicated radio show. A frequent commentator on political, legal, and cultural issues, Josh is a constitutional attorney by training and additionally serves as senior counsel for the Article III Project. He is also a fellow with the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. Josh has been published by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, U.S. News & World Report, National Review, First Things, National Affairs, American Affairs, the Claremont Review of Books, The New Criterion, The Free Press, City Journal, Public Discourse, Tablet Magazine, Deseret Magazine, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, The European Conservative Fortune, Fox Business, the Jewish Journal, and many other places. His legal scholarship has also been published by the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and the University of St. Thomas Law Journal. Josh is a frequent TV guest on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax, and he regularly appears on popular national radio shows as well. Josh graduated from Duke University, where he majored in economics, and from the University of Chicago Law School. He lives in Florida with his wife and daughter, and he also remains an active member of the State Bar of Texas.

Rev. Johnnie Moore, PhD, is a global evangelical leader best known for his consequential work at the intersection of faith and foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Rev. Moore is routinely listed among the world’s most influential religious figures. He is a popular author, teacher, businessperson, and acclaimed human rights and religious freedom activist whose effective advocacy has materially impacted policy in many nations. More recently, Rev. Moore has been a global thought leader actively navigating the divisions between faith and science, particularly as it relates to the emerging Age of Artificial Intelligence. His awards and honors include the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s prestigious Medal of Valor. He was twice appointed to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom by the president of the United States, and in 2023 he was named one of the world’s top 25 “young visionaries” by the Jerusalem Post. He is the vice chancellor and managing director of Middle East studies at Pepperdine University. In the summer of 2025, Moore led the U.S. government’s historic efforts to provide nearly 200 million meals for free to the people of Gaza, food Hamas could not steal.

Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik is a senior fellow and contributor at Tikvah, director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, and senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He is also the host of the popular Bible 365, Jerusalem 365, and Ten-Minute Mitzvah daily podcasts. He has lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to Jewish theology, Zionism and the miracle of modern Israel, the Hebraic roots of America, Jewish and American history, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. Rabbi Soloveichik’s essays on these subjects have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Commentary, Mosaic, First Things, Azure, Tradition, and the Torah U-Madda Journal. His book Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship was published by Encounter in 2023, and Sacred Time was published in 2024 by Koren’s Maggid Press. 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.

Ami Kozak is a comedian, musician, impressionist and podcaster. Ami's online videos have taken social media by storm, amassing millions of views on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. He has been featured on Fox News, Sky News, The Daily Wire, Adam Carolla, as well as numerous other high-profile news segments and podcasts. He has become a staunch advocate for Israel and the Jewish Community and hosts his own podcast, “Ami’s House”. His live show combines stand-up, hilarious impressions, songs and live looping. In addition to comedy, Ami is a versatile musician, serving as the Bass Player and Vocalist for the Indie/Folk/Pop band, Distant Cousins. Their impressive discography includes multiple albums, and they've contributed their musical talents to various films, commercials, and TV shows.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He was previously a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (2009) and the New York Times bestseller The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020).

David Azerrad is an assistant professor and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C. His research and writing focuses on classical liberalism, conservative political thought and identity politics. Prior to joining Hillsdale, Azerrad was the Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation. He has taught previously at American University and the University of Dallas. A native of Montreal, Azerrad received his B.A. from Concordia University, his M.A. from Carleton University and his Ph.D. in politics from the University of Dallas.

Kassy Akiva is a foreign affairs reporter for The Daily Wire. She joined the team in October 2023 and specializes in multimedia reporting and video journalism, covering a wide variety of topics including culture, politics, policy and foreign affairs. Before joining Digital Originals, Kassy was a reporter for Fox News Digital where she created hundreds of video reports. Kassy was also the U.S. news editor for Jewish News Syndicate. Kassy was the director of digital engagement for Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Stand for America. While a college student, Kassy founded Lone Conservative, a group blog that assists students in launching careers in media. Kassy is a Tikvah Krauthammer Fellowship alumna and holds an MPP from the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy specializing in American politics and international relations.

Dovid Bashevkin is the director of education for NCSY, the youth movement of the Orthodox Union, and an instructor at Yeshiva University, where he teaches courses on public policy, religious crisis, and rabbinic thought, and the Founder of 18Forty.org. He completed rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, as well as a Master’s degree at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies focusing on the thought of Rabbi Zadok of Lublin under the guidance of Dr. Yaakov Elman. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in Public Policy and Management at The New School’s Milano School of International Affairs, focusing on crisis management.

Eric Cohen is the President and CEO of Tikvah, where he has served in a leadership role since 2007. He is one of the founders and chairman of the board of Emet Classical Academy, and he has been involved in founding many publications, including the New Atlantis (where he continues to serve as editor-at-large), the Jewish Review of Books, and Mosaic magazine (where he serves as publisher). He was also instrumental in building Tikvah’s operations in Israel, and he serves on the board of directors of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Hertog Foundation. Mr. Cohen writes regularly in numerous academic and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers, and is the author of In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology (2008) and co-editor of The Future Is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics (2002). He was previously managing editor of the Public Interest and served as a senior advisor to the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Alexander S. Duff is associate professor in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes widely in the history of political philosophy, and his publications on classical, modern, and contemporary political philosophy have appeared in both scholarly and popular publications. He has held fellowships from the Civitas Institute, the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and American Public Life at the University of Notre Dame, and the Program for the Study of the Western Heritage at Boston College. He is the author of Heidegger and Politics: The Ontology of Radical Discontent. He is a co-founder of the Association for the History of Political Thought, an academic organization devoted to the study of the History of Political Thought. Dr. Duff received an M.A. from Carleton University and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame.

Carrie Filipetti currently serves as the Executive Director of the Vandenberg Coalition. Prior to this role, Carrie served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Cuba and Venezuela in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs and the Deputy Special Representative for Venezuela at the U.S. Department of State, for which she received a Superior Honor Award. From 2019-2020, Carrie also served as the Senior Advisor to the Havana Incidents Task Force, where she was responsible for coordinating an inter-agency effort to address the causes of unexplained health incidents affecting U.S. personnel, and identifying proper long-term care mechanisms. Prior to these roles, Carrie served as a Senior Policy Advisor for the United States Mission to the United Nations (USUN), where she advised U.S. Ambassador Nikki R. Haley on issues related to counterterrorism, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.

Steven Frankel will be the Robert M. Beren Professor of Jewish Civilization starting in January 2026. He will join the Hamilton School from Xavier University, where he currently serves as the Smith Professor of Political Economy and Executive Director of the Stephen S. Smith Center. He received his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and began his teaching career at the American University of Paris, where he was honored with the Board of Trustees Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Dr. Samuel Goldman is associate professor of humanities at the Hamilton School. His scholarship is at the intersection of political theory and intellectual history, with a focus on religious sources of American national identity. Goldman is author of two books: After Nationalism: Being American in a Divided Age (UPenn, 2021) and God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America (UPenn, 2018). Goldman received his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught at Harvard and Princeton before coming to GW. In addition to academic work, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many other publications.

Jake Greenspan is CEO of Skolay, a startup which connects writers and readers for 1:1 conversations. Previously, Jake received a Fulbright scholarship to Greece, developed humanities curricula for Tikvah, taught pre-college philosophy on the South Side of Chicago, and wrote about the aims and limits of liberal learning. On the side, Jake is helping produce a documentary about the post-war prosecution of Nazis, as well as a musical about DC. He also advises several experimental education ventures. Jake studied Fundamentals at the University of Chicago, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Student Marshal.

Rabbi Ari Israel is in his thirtieth year as a Hillel Executive Director.  He returned in 2003 from Rochester, NY to Silver Spring, MD, where he grew up, to lead the University of Maryland Hillel.  In addition to Rabbinic ordination, Ari holds master’s degrees in Medieval Jewish History and Secondary Education. He serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, where he teaches a course on Jewish Leadership and Community.

Zach Kessel is politics editor at the Washington Free Beacon. He was a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review, a Tikvah Krauthammer Fellow, and a Beren Summer Fellow. He maintained an account on National Review’s website of the myriad attacks against Jewish people in the West after October 7. In addition to the Washington Free Beacon, his writings have appeared in publications including National Review, the Dispatch, the Washington Free Beacon, and the Washington Post.

Jonathan Mack is associate director of university programs at Tikvah and an alumnus of multiple Tikvah fellowships and programs. Previously, he worked as a corporate strategy analyst at DaVita, where he focused on the financial impact of federal value-based care and home healthcare policy. Jonathan holds a BA in Middle Eastern Studies from Washington University in St. Louis and studied at Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi and Yeshivat Har Etzion.

Hon. Steven Menashi was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on November 14, 2019. Previously, he served as special assistant and associate counsel to the President in the White House and as acting general counsel at the U.S. Department of Education. He was assistant professor of law at Scalia Law School, George Mason University, where he taught administrative law and civil procedure, and a research fellow at New York University School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center. He was also a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in New York, where he practiced appellate and commercial litigation, and served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court of the United States and to Judge Douglas Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He graduated from Stanford Law School, where he was elected to Order of the Coif and served as senior articles editor of the Stanford Law Review, and from Dartmouth College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Alana Newhouse is the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine–the online magazine of Jewish culture, news, and ideas–which she founded in 2009. Prior to founding Tablet, Newhouse spent five years as culture editor of The Forward. She also started a line of Forward-branded books with W.W. Norton and edited its maiden publication, A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward. Newhouse is the author of The 100 Most Jewish Foods, a list of most significant foods culturally and historically to the Jewish people, explored with essays, recipes and stories. Contributors include Ruth Reichl, Yotam Ottolenghi, Tom Colicchio, Michael Solomonov and several other famed chefs. A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Newhouse is a regular contributor to The New York Times, among other outlets, and serves on award juries for both the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Pulitzer Prizes.

Michael Oved is a staffer at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he oversees financial markets and innovation policy. He is also the founder and host of the award-winning 30 Years in 30 Minutes podcast.

Zineb Riboua is a research fellow with Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations. She is an associate at the Association for Global Political Thought at Harvard University and a member of Tikvah's Young Professional Advisory Council. Prior to joining Hudson Institute, Ms. Riboua was a research assistant at the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, where she worked on Jewish identity in Morocco, Moroccan-Israeli relations, and the cultural impacts of the Abraham Accords.

Rabbi Dr. Mitchell Rocklin is Director of the Jewish Classical Education Concentration track at the University of Dallas and the academic director and dean of the Lobel Center for Jewish Classical Education. His prior work on Jewish Classical Education as a research fellow with Tikvah was featured in the Wall Street Journal. He received his Ph.D. in history from the CUNY Graduate Center, held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and Yeshiva University, and taught at both CUNY and Princeton. He is also a chaplain in the Army National Guard with the rank of Major. Rabbi Rocklin is also the president of the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, as well as a member of the Rabbinical Council of America’s Executive Committee and Military Chaplaincy Committee. Prior to his work at Tikvah, he served as a congregational rabbi in Connecticut. His writings have been featured in publications including The Los Angeles Times, National Review Online, The Daily Wire, The Forward, The Public Discourse, and Mosaic.

Alan Rubenstein is the executive director of the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars Program at the University of Florida and a senior director at Tikvah. He is also now serving as a lecturer at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Alan was educated in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, and also at Georgetown University. Before his move into Jewish classical education, he served as a senior consultant for the President’s Council on Bioethics. For over a decade, he was the Hanson Scholar of Ethics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught ethical thought through the close reading of great literature of the West—in particular, Plato, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare. His published essays have focused on the philosopher Hans Jonas, the Hebrew Bible, and Judaism in middle America.

Reihan Salam is the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute, a research and advocacy organization that advances opportunity, individual liberty, and the rule of law in America and its great cities. Before joining MI in 2019, Mr. Salam served as the executive editor of National Review. Mr. Salam previously worked for The New York Times op-ed page and NBC News. He was a 2010 Bernard L. Schwarz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a 2015 Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago, and in 2017, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.

David Schwartz practices corporate law in the New York office of an international law firm. Prior to his legal career, David taught the humanities for several years—including on several Tikvah Scholars Programs and for three years in Tikvah's Great Books program. David is a graduate of Yeshiva College and Fordham Law School, and lives in Teaneck with his wife and children.

Jonathan Silver is the Chief Programming Officer of Tikvah, the editor of Mosaic, and the Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. As the host of the Tikvah Podcast, he has hosted hundreds of writers, rabbis, educators, military officers, artists, and political figures, including members of Israel’s Knesset, the U.S. Senate, and the prime minister of Israel.

Sabrina Soffer is the forthcoming co-author of A Light Amid the Storm with Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Yechiel Leiter, and serves as the Young Leadership Research and Diplomacy Fellow at the Jerusalem Center on Security and Foreign Affairs. Her professional background includes policy development as Deputy Chief of Staff at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, participation in the congressional investigations into campus antisemitism, and research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She was recently appointed a Cohort Member of President Isaac Herzog’s Voice of the People initiative, focused on Israel–World Jewry relations. Sabrina holds degrees in Philosophy with a Public Affairs concentration, and Judaic Studies from George Washington University, where she graduated in May 2025.

Josh Tolle is associate director of university programs at Tikvah, where he was also a Krauthammer Fellow. He served as education director at the Cleveland Hillel Foundation and at Ohio State Hillel. He earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan and has written for Commentary and the Jewish Review of Books.

Rabbi Eitan Webb co-founded the Chabad House of Princeton in 2002, with his wife Gitty and has served as a Jewish Chaplain at Princeton University since 2007. In addition to his service to university students, Rabbi Webb serves on the board of directors of the Chabad on Campus International Foundation and of the Sinai Scholars Society.

Paul Wilford is Associate Professor of Teaching at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Prior to joining the Chase Center, Wilford was Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College, where he taught modern political philosophy with a focus on 19th and 20th century German philosophy. Wilford earned a PhD from Tulane University; a master’s and an undergraduate degree were both earned at King’s College. Wilford also earned an undergraduate degree from St. John’s College. Wilford has received teaching awards for student mentorship (from Boston College) and for civic education (from the Jack Miller Center). He has co-edited two collections of essays and published articles and chapters on a wide variety of themes spanning politics, philosophy, and theology.

Ofir Zigelman is Director of Product Management at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he leads expansion strategy across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with responsibility for large-scale cloud and AI infrastructure. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge, where his research examines the implications of artificial intelligence for world order and statecraft. Previously, Ofir served as a Senior Intelligence Officer in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and as a team commander in IDF Unit 8200, Israel’s elite technology intelligence unit. Ofir served as Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, an MSt in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, and an LLB from Tel Aviv University. He serves as Co-President of the Harvard Club of Israel and sits on the advisory board of Tikvah.