Shalom Auslander 

Shalom Auslander is an internationally-acclaimed writer of fiction, non-fiction, stage, TV and film. His memoir Foreskin’s Lament was an international bestseller, his novel Hope: A Tragedy was a finalist for the James Thurber Award and his recent Feh was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is the creator and writer of Showtime’s Happyish, and a long-time contributor to NPR’s This American Life. He has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, and GQ, among many others.

Rachel Kadish

Rachel Kadish is an award-winning fiction writer and essayist. Her work has been read on National Public Radio and has appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, and Ploughshares; her most recent novel, The Weight of Ink, was a U.S.A. Today bestseller and recipient of a National Jewish Book Award. She has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, the Bellagio Center, and the Bogliasco Foundation, a Koret writer-in-residence at Stanford University, and a Fordham Jewish Studies Fellow at the New York Public Library.

Maya Arad

Maya Arad is the author of twelve books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. A graduate of Tel Aviv University, she received a Ph.D. in linguistics from University College London and for the past twenty years has lived in California, where she is the Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. The Hebrew Teacher, her first book to appear in English (translated by Jessica Cohen), has won the National Jewish Book Award. Her second book, Happy New Years, came out in 2025 (also translated by Cohen). 

Headshot by Mira Mamon 

Rama Burshtein

Rama Burshtein is an award-winning director and writer. She wrote and directed Fill the Void, which premiered at Venice Film Festival, earning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and won seven Israeli Academy Awards. Her film The Wedding Plan premiered at Venice and Telluride film festivals and won three Israeli Academy Awards. Burshtein also wrote and directed the TV series Fire Dance, which premiered at the Series Mania festival. Over the years, Burshtein has led workshops and lectures that combine inner emotional work with writing and acting, guided by the saying, “What comes from the heart reaches the heart,” which shapes her work and her connection with the audience 

Headshot by Gideon Sharon 

Ruth Franklin

Ruth Franklin is a literary critic, biographer, and essayist whose work has appeared in many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the author of A Thousand Darknesses, a study of Holocaust representation; Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle for Biography; and The Many Lives of Anne Frank, which examines the life, afterlife, and cultural meaning of Anne Frank and her diary. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, and the National Institute for the Humanities, she is at work on a new project about the political controversies around Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Assaf Gavron

Assaf Gavron is an acclaimed Israeli writer, author of seven novels—Ice, Moving, Almost Dead, Hydromania, The Hilltop, Eighteen Lashes, and Don’t You Want Me—as well as the novella Hamelet: The Cement, the short story collection Sex in the Cemetery, and a nonfiction book of Jerusalem falafel-joint reviews, Eating Standing Up. His work has been translated into sixteen languages, adapted for the stage at Israel’s national theater, and optioned for film. He has received literary awards in Israel, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. 

Headshot by Julian Hartmuth 

Asaf Hanuka

Asaf Hanuka is an award-winning Israeli comic book writer, illustrator, and educator, renowned for his surreal visual metaphors and poignant social commentary. His work has been translated into dozens of languages and has earned numerous international accolades, including the Eisner Award, the Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators, and the International Manga Award. Hanuka is the Chief Creative Officer of Yuka Studios for animation and a co-editor at Yuka Books. He lives in Ramat Gan with his wife, illustrator and curator Hilit Shefer, and their two children. Not many people know that he’s also a professional hummus eater. 

Headshot by Cecile Gabriel 

Todd Hasak-Lowy

Todd Hasak-Lowy is a writer, professor, and translator. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, where he studied modern Hebrew literature. Hasak-Lowy is the author of a half-dozen books, including the short story collection The Task of This Translator, the middle-grade novel 33 Minutes, and the Holocaust memoir (which he co-wrote) Somewhere There is Still a Sun. He is also an award-winning translator of Hebrew fiction. Hasak-Lowy lives in Evanston, Illinois, and teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Lynn Melnick

Lynn Melnick’s most recent book of poetry, I Deserve This, Thank You, received the Stern Prize from American Poetry Review and will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2027. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Refusenik, winner of the Julie Suk award, and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Melnick is also the author of the memoir I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton. She teaches at Princeton University and Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn. 

Headshot by Ada Donnelly 

Tova Mirvis

Tova Mirvis is the author of four novels, We Would Never, Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary which was a national bestseller. Her memoir The Book of Separation was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and excerpted in the New York Times Modern Love Column. Her essays have appeared in publications including the Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine and Real Simple, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, a Fiction Fellow for the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is the writer-in-residence at Jewish Book Council’s Nu Reads project. 

Yerra Sugarman

Yerra Sugarman is the author of three volumes of poetry: Aunt Bird published by Four Way Books, which won the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award; The Bag of Broken Glass, which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone, which was awarded PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She holds an MFA in painting from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston.  

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker is the author of 19 poetry collections and a leading feminist critic. She has been twice nominated for the National Book Award and twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Her critical works include Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, as well as studies of poetry and the Bible such as The Nakedness of the Fathers and For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book. Her recent poetry collections include The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019 and The Holy and Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time. Her work is widely translated. She served as New York State Poet Laureate and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Shalom Auslander 
Joseph Cedar
Jessica Cohen
Alex Edelman 
Ira Glass 

Jane Hirshfield
Rachel Kadish
Ilya Kaminsky
Jodi Kantor 
Nicole Krauss

Alicia Ostriker
Liev Shreiber 
Judith Shulevitz
Regina Spektor
Deborah Treisman 

Carlie Hoffman

Carlie Hoffman is the author of three poetry collections, including When There Was Light, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Her translation from German of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Song of the Yellow Asters is out with World Poetry Books; her translations of Rose Ausländer are forthcoming. A 2025–26 Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellow, her honors include a 92NY “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, a Poets & Writers Amy Award, and a NYSCA/NYFA fellowship. Her work appears in Poetry Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Columbia University and a master’s in Literary Translation from Queens College.

Eli Zuzovsky

Eli Zuzovsky is a film and theater writer and director. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s in filmmaking and English. Zuzovsky holds a master’s in French and German and a practice-led Ph.D. in fine art from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His work has been shortlisted for an Israeli Academy Award and presented at the New York Jewish Film Festival, the American Repertory Theater, and Modern Art Oxford, among others. An Israeli Forbes “30 Under 30” honoree, he’s the winner of the 2025 Einstein Fellowship. Zuzovsky’s debut novel, Mazeltov—adapted from his undergraduate thesis film starring Amit Rahav (Unorthodox) and Amir Khoury (Fauda)—came out in 2025.

Headshot by Ilya Melnikov