Rabbi Stephen Pearce leads Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue and San Francisco’s largest Jewish congregation.

National Disaster Interfaith Services, based in New York City, is a faith-based network provides training for clergy, religious leaders and faith-based groups, to help them plan for responding to disasters, and helps with recovery when a disaster does occur. Contact through executive director Peter Gudaitis.

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.

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.

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.

Mira Amiras is a professor of humanities at San José State University in California. She teaches courses in Judaism, Zionism and the state and Jewish mysticism, among others.

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history and director of the Roosevelt Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. He is the author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (William Morrow, 2006), which tells the story of the great storm through the eyes of its survivors and examines the failures […]