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.

April 11, 2013, report by the Congressional Research Service which provides an overview of the United States’ history of foreign assistance to Israel.

David Patterson is a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is an expert on the Holocaust and serves as an adviser to two U.S. Holocaust museums.

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.

Jack Kugelmass is an anthropology professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he is also director of its Jewish studies center. He specializes in American and European Jewry, Israel and Jews in New York.

Read an April 4, 2006, Beliefnet story from a Katrina survivor who writes that “the only thing that keeps me sane is knowing that God has a purpose for me.”

Jonathan Hess is director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Its faculty members are drawn from the humanities and social sciences.