Michael Eric Dyson is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Basic Civitas Books, 2006).

David N. Myers is a history professor and director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies in Los Angeles. He is at work on a major history of the Jews of Los Angeles.

Rabbi Mendel Lifshitz and his wife, Esther, direct Chabad Jewish Center of Idaho in Boise. The center is part of Chabad Lubavitch, a New York community of Hasidim.

Havidán Rodríguez is former director of the Disaster Research Center and professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware in Newark.

Yechiel Shalom Goldberg teaches in the Jewish studies program at California State University, Long Beach, where he specializes in the study of Jewish mysticism.

Rabbi Daniel Fink leads Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel, a Reform congregation in Boise, Idaho. He is an expert on Jewish environmentalism.

Beverly Wright is founder and director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University in New Orleans. She is co-author of a report, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation and released in May 2006, which concluded that minorities and low-income residents have recovered more slowly after Katrina, in part because they have less […]

Manuel Sprung, assistant professor of psychology with a focus on social-cognitive development in children. He was one of the researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast in Long Beach, Miss., who studied how Katrina has affected children’s thinking – including the impact of intrusive thoughts about the storm on their concentration levels.

Carol Edelman is an associate professor in sociology and social work at California State University, Chico. Part of her research and teaching focuses on Jewish response to the Holocaust and to 20th-century genocide.