Refusnik, Human Rights Pioneer, Israeli Leader, and Chairman of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky is the winner of the Inaugural Tikvah Prize.

Co-chairman of the Jewish Leadership Conference, President of the Hertog Foundation, Chairman of the Tikvah Fund. Noted businessman and philanthropist.

Israel’s Minister of Justice since May 2015, Minister Shaked is a member of the Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party in the Israeli Knesset.

• @Ayelet__Shaked on Twitter

Award-winning professor of Yiddish literature, author on Jewish history and culture with books including Jews and Power and If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund.

Director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, Rabbi of Shearith Israel congregation in New York City, writer on theology, ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations.

William Kristol is the editor at large of The Weekly Standard, is a regular on ABC’s This Week and on ABC’s special events and election coverage, and appears frequently on other leading political commentary shows.

• @BillKristol on Twitter

Rich Lowry was named editor of National Review in 1997. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications.

• @RichLowry on Twitter

Author, journalist, and founding editor of Standpoint, a monthly British cultural and political magazine.

Senior at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser in the administration of George W. Bush.

Co-Chairman of the Jewish Leadership Conference and has been the Executive Director of the Tikvah Fund since 2007.

Senior Director at the Tikvah Fund, where he hosts the Tikvah Podcast on Great Jewish Essays and Ideas, Tikvah’s library of Online Courses, and oversees a range of educational programs and publishing ventures.

Director of religion research at Pew Research Center, he is an expert on religion’s role in U.S. politics and was a co-author of the Pew study, “A Portrait of American Jews.”

Executive Director of The Philos Project, an American nonprofit that seeks to promote positive Christian engagement in the Middle East, and co-publisher of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy.

Melanie Phillips, journalist, broadcaster and author, is Britain’s best known and most controversial champion of traditional values in the culture war.

Heads of the Tikvah Fund’s chareidi education division in Israel, teaches at Yeshivas Chedvas HaTorah, and editor-in-chief of the new Tzarich Iyun (“Needs Further Study”) online journal.

Author of the New York Times bestseller Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World. Noted businessman, activist, and writer.

Founding president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, prolific author and teacher.

President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, and the founder and former head of the Shalem Center. Noted philosopher, Bible scholar and political theorist.

• @yhazony on Twitter

Senior contributing and chief columnist for the Jerusalem Post, and a senior columnist at Breitbart and Maariv. She is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, (Crown 2014).

• @CarolineGlick on Twitter

Co-author of bestseller Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. Co-founder and a member of the board of directors of the Foreign Policy Initiative. Former advisor to Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, and the administration of George W. Bush.

• @dansenor on Twitter

Social psychologist at the NYU-Stern School of Business. Received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and spent most of his career (1995-2011) at the University of Virginia.

• @JonHaidt on Twitter

The Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. 2017 winner of the Bradley Prize. Dean of students for the Hertog Political Studies Program and for The Public Interest Fellowship.

• @BerkowitzPeter on Twitter

President of the American Enterprise Institute and bestselling author of 11 books, including The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America (Broadside Books, 2015).

• @arthurbrooks on Twitter

Matthew Continetti is editor and co-founder of The Washington Free Beacon and a columnist for Commentary magazine.

Elliot Kaufman is the inaugural Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow at The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page.