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 […]

Norbert Samuelson is a professor of religious studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, where he is an expert in Jewish philosophy and thought.

Rachel Baum is deputy director of the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also teaches courses on the Holocaust, contemporary American Jewish identity and Jewish feminism. Additionally, she co-directs the Stephen Weinstein Holocaust Symposium, an international gathering of Holocaust scholars.

Rabbi Jonathan Schick is an adjunct philosophy and Jewish studies professor at the University of North Texas in Denton. He is an expert on Jewish education and has served as headmaster of two Jewish prep schools. He writes a monthly ethics column.

Lee Shai Weissbach is a history professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. He is an expert on small-town Jewish life in America, especially in the South, where surveys show traditional observance tends to be lower than in other areas.

Michael Weil heads the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans. The federation is working to revitalize the local Jewish community in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which cut the city’s Jewish population by one-third.

Julian Henri Preisler is an archivist and genealogist in the Eastern Panhandle region of West Virginia. He formerly ran a website about West Virginia Jewish history.

Sharon Miller is the principal of Ben Gamla Charter School in Hollywood, Fla., the first publicly funded Hebrew-language school in the U.S.

Rabbi Martin Beifield Jr. leads Congregation Beth Ahabah, a Reform synagogue in Richmond, Va. He is an expert in Jewish-Christian relations and the impact of the Holocaust.