The Orthodox Union Institute for Public Affairs advocates for the rights and interests of Orthodox Judaism. The executive director is Nathan Diament.

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is the advocacy arm of the Union for Reform Judaism. Rabbi David Saperstein is its director and counsel.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center is a conservative, Washington, D.C.-based think tank and advocacy group. Founded in 1976, the group describes itself as “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy” and advocacy of founding principles such as the rule of law. The EPPC’s president is Ryan T. Anderson.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin is a prominent Washington-based rabbi who supported the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act of 2005.

Rabbi Rayzel Raphael leads drum circles in Philadelphia.

Jay Geller is an associate professor of modern Jewish culture and religious studies at the divinity school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He has written on atheism and modern Judaism. He is also an expert on Judiams and modernity and the Holocaust on film and in literature.

The Society for Humanistic Judaism says it “offers a nontheistic alternative in contemporary Jewish life.” It was organized in Detroit in 1969 and has since added chapters and affiliated congregations around the United States.

Samuel Oliner is emeritus professor of sociology and director of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. Oliner co-founded the institute in 1982 to study altruism and seek ways to enhance altruism and prosocial behavior in society. A native of Poland, Oliner was rescued by a non-Jewish family at age […]

Stephen Jacobs is professor of religious studies and chairman of Judaic studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He can comment on altruism as a scholar of modern Jewish thought and from a post-Holocaust perspective.