Elliott Abrams is the chairman of the Tikvah Fund, as well as chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition and Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. He served as Special Assistant to the President and NSC Senior Director for the Near East and North Africa in the first term of George W. Bush, and as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor in the second term. In the Trump administration he served in the State Department as Special Representative for Iran and for Venezuela.

He is the author of Undue Process, Security and Sacrifice, and Faith or Fear, and writes widely on U.S. foreign policy with special focus on the Middle East and the issues of democracy and human rights. His most recent book is Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring.

Eric Cohen has been Tikvah’s chief executive since 2007.  He was the founder and remains editor-at-large of the New Atlantis, and he serves as the publisher of Mosaic. Mr. Cohen has published in numerous academic and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Weekly Standard, Commentary, The New Republic, First Things, and numerous others. He is the author of In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology (2008) and co-editor of The Future is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics (2002). He was previously managing editor of the Public Interest and served as a senior consultant to the President’s Council on Bioethics. Mr. Cohen currently serves on the board of directors of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Witherspoon Institute, and National Affairs and on the Editorial Advisory Board of First Things.

Senator Ted Cruz has represented Texas in the United States Senate since 2013. He previously served as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to 2008 and held positions in the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, he clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court. Cruz was elected to the Senate in 2012, reelected in 2018 and 2024, and served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation during the 119th Congress. In 2016, he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

Michael Doran is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at Hudson Institute. He specializes in Middle East security issues and cohosts Israel Update. In the administration of President George W. Bush, Doran served in the White House as a senior director in the National Security Council, where he was responsible for helping to devise and coordinate United States strategies on a variety of Middle East issues, including Arab-Israeli relations and U.S. efforts to contain Iran and Syria. He also served in the Bush administration as a senior advisor in the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon. His book Ike’s Gamble was published by Free Press in 2016. He appears frequently on television, and has published extensively in Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, Commentary, Mosaic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Dara Horn is the award-winning author of seven books, including the novels A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013) and Eternal Life (Norton 2018), the Passover-themed graphic novel One Little Goat (Norton 2025), and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Norton 2021). Her eighth book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question (Simon & Schuster 2026) will be released on September 1. She is the recipient of three National Jewish Book Awards, and her nonfiction work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Smithsonian, Tablet, and the Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications. She held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard, and has lectured for audiences in hundreds of venues throughout North America, Israel, and Australia.

Horn is also the founder and president of a new non-profit, The Tell Institute, devoted to educating the broader American public about Jewish civilization, including in K-12 schools.

His Excellency Mike Huckabee serves as the United States Ambassador to Israel. During his tenure, the U.S.-Israel alliance reached unprecedented levels of cooperation and all remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza were returned. Huckabee previously worked in Christian broadcasting and advertising and served as a pastor. In 1993, he was elected lieutenant governor of Arkansas and, after his predecessor’s resignation, served as governor until 2007. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016. Huckabee and his wife Janet have three children and seven grandchildren.

Dr. Jonathan Silver is senior vice president and the chief programming officer of Tikvah, the editor of Mosaic, and the Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization. As the host of the Tikvah Podcast, he has hosted hundreds of writers, rabbis, educators, military officers, artists, and political figures, including members of Israel’s Knesset, the U.S. Senate, and the prime minister of Israel.

Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik is one of the world’s preeminent Jewish thinkers and educators, and he’s one of America’s most influential religious leaders. He is the senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He is also director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured internationally to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to faith in America, the Hebraic roots of the American founding, Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, Jewish-Christian relations, and more. He writes a monthly column in Commentary magazine, and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Mosaic, First Things, Azure, Tradition, Jewish Review of Books, and many other outlets. Rabbi Soloveichik is a descendant of one of the Jewish world’s great rabbinic dynasties. He graduated summa cum laude from Yeshiva University, received his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and studied at its Beren Kollel Elyon. He has also studied at Yale Divinity School, and in 2010 received his doctorate in religion from Princeton University.

Dr. Ruth Wisse is Distinguished Senior Fellow at Tikvah and formerly served as the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her books on literary subjects include an edition of Jacob Glatstein’s two-volume fictional memoir, The Glatstein Chronicles (2010), The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture (2003), and A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988). She is also the author of two political studies, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992) and Jews and Power (2007). Her latest book, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, a volume in the Tikvah-sponsored Library of Jewish Ideas, was published by Princeton University Press.