Rabbi Meir Soloveichik

Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik is one of the world’s preeminent Jewish thinkers and educators, and he’s one of America’s most influential religious leaders. He is the senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He is also director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured internationally to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to faith in America, the Hebraic roots of the American founding, Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, Jewish-Christian relations, and more. He writes a monthly column in Commentary magazine, and his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Mosaic, First Things, Azure, Tradition, the Jewish Review of Books, and many other outlets. Rabbi Soloveichik is a descendent of one of the Jewish world’s great rabbinic dynasties. He graduated summa cum laude from Yeshiva University, received his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and studied at its Beren Kollel Elyon. He has also studied at Yale Divinity School, and in 2010, received his doctorate in religion from Princeton University.

Website: About – MeirSoloveichik.com

Kevin Roberts

Kevin D. Roberts, Ph.D., was named President of The Heritage Foundation in October 2021. He succeeded former Heritage President Kay C. James as the seventh President in the organization’s 50-year history.

Roberts previously served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an Austin-based nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute and the largest state think tank in the nation. Under Roberts’ leadership, TPPF more than doubled in size. He also expanded the Texas think tank’s influence nationwide, opening an office in Washington, D.C., so that TPPF research might better inform federal policy debates.

A lifelong educator, Roberts earned his PhD in American History from the University of Texas. After several years of teaching history at the collegiate level, Roberts in 2006 left the university to found John Paul the Great Academy, a co-ed, K-12 Catholic liberal arts school in Lafayette, Louisiana. Roberts served as the academy’s president and headmaster for seven years. In 2013, he resigned from the academy to become President of Wyoming Catholic College. Under his leadership, the college adopted a policy of refusing to accept federal student loans and grants, lest it be forced to violate Catholic tenets.

In addition to his doctorate, Roberts holds a master’s degree in history from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Roberts and his wife have four children.

Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm

Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm is a leading Jewish public intellectual using digital media to bring great Jewish ideas to the wider English-speaking public. He is the President of SoulShop Studios, producing faith content for next-gen audiences. He is the host of the top-ranked podcast on the Bible and society, Good Faith Effort. And his popular Twitter threads on “Why Read the Bible in Hebrew?” have reached millions and been covered by major international news outlets. For his leadership in the world of Jewish ideas, The Jerusalem Post recently ranked him #37 on its list of the world’s 50 Most Influential Jews.

Mary Eberstadt

Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC and is Senior Research Fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute. She is an American writer whose contributions to the intellectual landscape traverse genres. An essayist, novelist, and frequent public speaker, she is author of several books of non-fiction, including How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization; Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution; and Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Her social commentary draws from fields including anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, popular culture, sociology, and theology. Central to her diverse interests are questions concerning the philosophy and culture of Western civilization and the fate and aspirations of post-modern man. Website: Welcome | Mary Eberstadt

Fr. Benedict Kiely

Father Benedict Kiely is a Catholic priest, incardinated in the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Born in London and ordained in Canterbury, England, in 1994, Father Ben has spent most of his priestly ministry in the United States. In the summer of 2014, Father Ben perceived a call to devote his entire priestly ministry to aid and advocacy for persecuted Christians, especially in the Middle East. Founding Nasarean.org, a charity based in Stowe, Vermont and with the permission and support of his Ordinary, Father Ben divides his time between the US, UK, and the Middle East, speaking, preaching, writing, and trying to focus attention on the plight of persecuted Christians around the world. He has visited war-torn Iraq on multiple occasions since 2015 and has visited Syria and Lebanon where Nasarean is now supporting a number of family businesses.

Sohrab Ahmari

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact and a visiting fellow at the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at News Corp, as op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London.

In addition to those publications, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Spectator, Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, Dissent, and The American Conservative, for which he is a contributing editor. Ahmari’s books include Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What To Do About It (2023) and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (2021), both published by Penguin Random House.

Dr. Richard Crane

Richard Francis Crane is a professor of history at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, teaching there since August 2013. Between 1997 and 2013 he taught at Greensboro College in North Carolina, where he also served as curator of the library’s Levy-Loewenstein Holocaust Collection and coordinated the annual Karl Schleunes Lecture in Holocaust Studies. A specialist in the history of France during the Second World War and the Holocaust, Crane is particularly interested in the Catholic Church in that country. His essays, articles, and reviews have been published in periodicals such as The Catholic Historical Review, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, Theological Studies, and First Things.

Crane was the 2006-2007 Hoffberger Family Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he wrote his second book, Passion of Israel: Jacques Maritain, Catholic Conscience, and the Holocaust (2010). Further research on Maritain can be read in the article “Cracks in the Theology of Contempt: The French Roots of Nostra Aetate” (Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 2013).

Kathryn Jean Lopez

Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, where she directs the Center for Religion, Culture, and Civil Society. She is also editor-at-large of National Review magazine (where she has been on the editorial staff, including as editor of NationalReview.com, since 1997). She is published widely in Catholic and secular publications and is also a nationally syndicated columnist with Andrews McMeel Universal. Lopez is author of A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living (Saint Benedict Press, 2019). She speaks frequently on faith in public life, virtue, and prayer.

She is also a columnist for Our Sunday Visitor’s Newsweekly and on the editorial advisory board of Angelus, where she contributes monthly essays and is co-author of the book How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice (Our Sunday Visitor, 2015). She is a contributor to recent books that include When Women Pray: Eleven Catholic Women on the Power of Prayer (Sophia Institute Press, 2017); Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (TAN Books, 2018); and St. Patrick’s Cathedral: The Legacy of America’s Parish Church. Her “Caught My Eye” feature can be heard daily on The Catholic Channel on Sirius XM, Channel 129.

Rabbi Mark Gottlieb

Rabbi Mark Gottlieb is chief education officer of Tikvah and founding dean of the Tikvah Scholars Program. Prior to joining Tikvah, Rabbi Gottlieb served as head of school at Yeshiva University High School for Boys and principal of the Maimonides School in Brookline, MA, and has taught at The Frisch School, Ida Crown Jewish Academy, Hebrew Theological College, Loyola University in Chicago, and the University of Chicago. He received his BA from Yeshiva College, rabbinical ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Chicago, where his doctoral studies focused on the moral and political thought of Alasdair MacIntyre. Rabbi Gottlieb’s work has been featured twice in the Wall Street Journal and his writing has appeared in First Things, Public Discourse, SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review, The University Bookman, Tradition Online, the Algemeiner, From Within the Tent: Essays on the Weekly Parsha from Rabbis and Professors of Yeshiva University, and, most recently, Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith. He is a trustee of the Hildebrand Project and serves on the Editorial Committee of Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought. He lives in Teaneck, NJ with his wife and family.

Robert Nicholson

Robert Nicholson is the President and Executive Director of The Philos Project. He is also co-founder and board member of Passages Israel, an advisory board member of In Defense of Christians, and an adjunct professor at The King’s College in New York City. He holds a BA in Hebrew Studies from Binghamton University, and a JD and MA in Middle Eastern history from Syracuse University. A former U.S Marine and a 2012-13 Tikvah Fellow, Robert founded Philos in 2014 to stimulate a new generation of religious and cultural exchange between the Near East and the West. His written work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Telegraph, New York Post, Jerusalem Post, Newsweek, Providence, First Things, The Hill, and National Interest.

Fr. Antoine Lévy

Fr. Antoine Lévy, O.P., joined the Dominican Order at the age of 26. During his theological studies, he chose to develop his thought on the difference between Byzantine Christianity and Western Christianity.
After a PhD in Freiburg in 2002 on Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas, Fr. Lévy was sent to Finland, at the border between Russia and the West. There, he headed the Dominican cultural center in Helsinki and taught comparative theology at the university, remaining the only Dominican friar there for about ten years.
In 2018, Fr. Lévy left Helsinki and was sent to the École Biblique et Archéologique Française of Jerusalem to follow his research in collaboration with the École and the University of Jerusalem. He plans to work on a second doctoral thesis on Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who was converted and murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. The intersection between philosophical reflection, Jewish-Christian identity, and the biblical universe – especially Esther’s book – is at the heart of this new research.

Simone Rizkallah

Simone Rizkallah is currently the Director of Program Growth for Endow Groups. Previously, she worked at St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Phoenix, Arizona, as the Theology Department Chair and Senior Theology Teacher, and at St. Ambrose Catholic Church in Annandale, Virginia, as the Director of Religious Education for both youth and adults. Her graduate degree is in Theological Studies with an emphasis in Systematic Theology from Christendom College. er undergraduate studies and professional background include marketing communications, media, radio, and theatre, which she pursued before discovering her passion for the Faith and the call to evangelize.
Simone is also an Institute of Catholic Theology Fellow, a Witherspoon/John Jay Institute Fellow, and an Acton Institute Fellow. She has studied at the St. Albert the Great Center for Scholastic Studies in Norcia, Italy, at the Phoenix Institute at the International Theological Institute in Trumau, Austria, and at the Tertio Millennio Seminar in Krakow, Poland.
She has led local chapters of both the ecclesial movement of Communion and Liberation in Virginia and Arizona and the Washington, D.C. based non-profit organization In Defense of Christians. She is an Episcopal appointee of the Eparchial Directors of Religious Education (ECED). The ECED is a catechetical committee of Eastern Catholic directors of religious education appointed by the USCCB’s Eastern Catholic Association of Bishops (ECA). As of 2022, she serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute of Catholic Culture.
As the daughter of immigrants from the Armenian Diaspora in Cairo, Egypt, she has a particular interest in matters of religious freedom and culture. In her free time, she enjoys teaching, speaking, writing, and mentoring people through the Vision for You process.
She has been published in Catholic Answers, ChurchPOP, Aleteia, Verily, CatholicU, Ethika Politika, The Catechetical Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Catholic Exchange and Angelus and was featured as a Guest Contributor in the book Road Signs for Catholic Teens published by Our Sunday Visitor.

Sister Eliana Kurylo

Sister Eliana Kuryło, CB, is a tutor of ancient Hebrew at the Biblical Institute of Toulouse and a contributor to “Jewish commentaries of the Gospels project” at the Heschel Centre of the Catholic University in Lublin, Poland. She has led sacred scripture workshops at the student chaplaincies in New Zealand and Toulouse, France. Several of her family members survived concentration camps in Poland and Germany during WWII which has informed her work in Jewish-Christian dialogue. In her work, Sr. Eliana has been inspired by her father’s words telling her to contribute in any way possible to building bridges between Christian and Jewish communities in order to promote more mutual understanding. She is currently the superior of the sisters at the Community of the Beatitudes in Emmaus-Nicopolis, Israel. 

Montse Alvarado

Montse Alvarado is President and COO of EWTN News. She has also served as founding host of EWTN’s weekly discussion show, EWTN News in Depth since 2021. Previously, she was the Executive Director and COO of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty from 2017-2023. Profiled by the Wall Street Journal as “A defender of all religion, on the front lines of America’s culture wars,” Montse Alvarado had worked at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty since 2009 to secure twelve victories at the Supreme Court for Becket clients such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, Yeshiva University in New York, archdiocesan schools and death-row prisoners across the country, as well as charitable groups like Philadelphia Catholic Social Services on television and radio. Montse serves on the advisory boards of various leading Catholic non-profits including the Fellowship of Catholic University Students and the GIVEN Institute. She advises the U.S. Bishops through the USCCB Religious Liberty Committee. Born in Mexico City, she is fluent in Spanish and French.

Jason Guberman

Jason Guberman, a social entrepreneur who specializes in building broad coalitions and melding intellectual and technical innovation, is the American Sephardi Federation’s Executive Director (since 2014), founding Executive Director of Digital Heritage Mapping (2008), and coordinator of DHM’s flagship initiative, the Diarna Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life, which was a 2017 cover story in Newsweek and profiled by Dara Horn in the June 2020 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine.

A summa cum laude graduate of Sacred Heart University, where he served as the first Jewish class president, he was a fellow of a Muslim civil rights organization, and organized a Freedom Concert for Iranian liberal democracy activists. Jason was named to Connecticut Magazine’s “40 under 40” and to the New York Jewish Week’s “36 under 36.” He has presented Diarna at Stanford University’s Digital Humanities Center and the USC Shoah Foundation, conferences of the Association of Jewish Studies, Association of Jewish Libraries, Limmud UK, and US State Department/Moroccan Rabita Mohammadia of Ulema’s 1st Regional Conference on the Preservation of Cultural and Religious Heritage, guest lectured classes at Harvard’s Middle East Studies Center and at Wellesley College, represented the American Sephardi Federation at the Mecca-based Muslim World League’s “National Conference on Peace, Harmony and Coexistence” in Sri Lanka, at the Moroccan Royal Inauguration of Bayt Dakira in Essaouira, the World Sephardi Federation Youth Conference in Montreal, and on the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ Missions to Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, written for AJS Perspectives, Sh’ma Journal, Wexner Foundation Newsletter, The Algemeiner, Newsweek, and MyJewishLearning.com, as well as appeared on NPR’s “Here & Now” and in SmartHistory. Jason is an alumnus of the Tikvah Fund’s Fellowship and Core18 Leaders Laboratory.

Catherine Szkop

Catherine Szkop serves as the Partnerships and Diplomatic Relations Manager for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM). Prior to her role in Washington, D.C., Catherine interned in the research department at Yad Vashem as a Polish-English translator for the Holocaust in Occupied-Poland Deportation Database project, and at the World Jewish Congress in Geneva on the UN Combating Antisemitism team, specializing in reporting on Central and Eastern Europe. She writes quarterly for the Croatia-based Glasnik B’nai B’rith Magazine and appears periodically on TVP: World as a DC-based correspondent. She graduated with distinction from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science in 2019, and completed her Master of Arts in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021.

Remote

Faydra Shapiro

Dr. Shapiro is a specialist in contemporary Jewish-Christian relations, with a focus on evangelical Christian-Jewish and Jewish-Catholic relations. She has published and presented extensively on the topic of Christian Zionism and evangelical Christian support for Israel. Dr. Shapiro’s most recent book (2016) is Christian Zionism: Navigating the Jewish-Christian Border. She received her PhD in 2000 and her first book received a National Jewish Book Award (2006). Dr. Shapiro is also a Senior Fellow at the Philos Project and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religions at Tel Hai College in northern Israel.
Prior to making aliyah, Dr. Shapiro was a university professor for over a decade in a department of Religion and Culture in Canada. A dynamic speaker with extensive experience teaching both Christians about Judaism and Jews about Christianity, Faydra is proud to live in the Galilee with her family.

Via Video Presentation

Robert George

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. He is a specialist in moral and political philosophy, constitutional law, bioethics, and the theory of conscience.

Beyond the classroom, George is chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and has previously served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and as a member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology.