The Honorable Elliott Abrams is the chairman of Tikvah, 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. 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 (1993), Security and Sacrifice (1995), Faith or Fear (1997), Tested by Zion (2013), and Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring (2017), and writes widely on U.S. foreign policy, with special focus on the Middle East and issues of democracy and human rights. His most recent book is If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century.

Eric Cohen is the CEO of Tikvah, which he has led since 2007, and co-chairman of the Jewish Leadership Conference. He is the publisher of Mosaic and also serves on the board of directors of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and National Affairs. He was the founding editor of the New Atlantis and the founding publisher of the Jewish Review of Books. Mr. Cohen has published in numerous academic and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Mosaic, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, and First Things. 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.

Elliot Kaufman is a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and a member of the Journal’s editorial board, for which he has covered the Middle East war since October 7. He speaks regularly with top Israeli and U.S. officials and has published “Weekend Interviews” with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz. He has worked at the Journal since 2018, previously editing op-eds and the letters section, and also writes occasionally for Commentary and the Jewish Review of Books. Elliot is an alumnus of Tikvah student programs and lives with his wife and son in New York.

Joe Lonsdale is the founder and managing partner of 8VC, a venture capital firm managing over $6 billion in committed capital, and the co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Addepar, OpenGov, and more than a dozen other companies. He also co-founded the Cicero Institute, sits on the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, and serves as founding chairman of the University of Austin (UATX).

Tayler Lonsdale directs the family’s public policy work and philanthropic giving, and serves on the board of the Cicero Institute, which promotes transparency, accountability, and incentives in government services. In 2016, Tayler co-founded Esper, a regulatory policy software platform. A Stanford graduate, she previously led teams at Palantir and helped launch Zhen Fund, one of China’s most successful early-stage venture firms. Tayler is passionate about education freedom and founded Hadar Academy to serve Jewish families interested in a classical education. Joe, Tayler, and their six children live in Austin, Texas.

Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute, the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal, and the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft with the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

He is also a member of Aspen Institute Italy and a board member of Aspenia. Before joining Hudson, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He has authored numerous books, including the widely-recognized Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2004). Mr. Mead’s most recent book is titled The Arc of A Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (2022).

Dan Senor is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling books The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World (2023) and Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (2009), which has been translated into more than 30 languages. He is also the host of the Call Me Back podcast.

Dan is a partner and a member of the management committee at Elliott Investment Management L.P. During the presidential administration of George W. Bush, Dan was based in Baghdad for one year, where he served as chief spokesperson for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. For his service, he was awarded the Pentagon’s highest civilian honor—the U.S. Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service—by the Secretary of Defense.

Dan currently serves on the boards of The Paul E. Singer Foundation, Start-Up Nation Central, and the Abraham Joshua Heschel School. He appears frequently on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS”, “CBS Mornings” and Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom”.

Dan holds a B.A. in history from the University of Western Ontario and studied in the one-year international program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Benjamin Shapiro is co-founder of the Daily Wire and host of the Ben Shapiro Show, one of the top conservative podcasts in the nation. A #1 New York Times bestselling author, Shapiro graduated from UCLA summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2004, then from Harvard Law School cum laude in 2007. His work has been profiled in nearly every major American publication, and his social media following numbers in the tens of millions. Shapiro’s newest book, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America and Her Critics, will be released on September 2 of this year. He is an Orthodox Jew and lives in Florida with his wife and four children.

Dr. Jonathan Silver is 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 a senior fellow and contributor at Tikvah, director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, and senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He is also the host of the popular Bible 365, Jerusalem 365, and Ten-Minute Mitzvah daily podcasts. He has lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to Jewish theology, Zionism and the miracle of modern Israel, the Hebraic roots of America, Jewish and American history, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. Rabbi Soloveichik’s essays on these subjects have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Commentary, Mosaic, First Things, Azure, Tradition, and the Torah U-Madda Journal. His book Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship was published by Encounter in 2023, and Sacred Time was published in 2024 by Koren’s Maggid Press. He is the son of Rabbi Eliyahu Soloveichik, grandson of the late Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, and the great-nephew of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik proudly represents New York’s 21st District in her sixth term and is the most senior elected Republican in New York. She was previously the chairwoman of House Republican Leadership. At the time of her first election, Rep. Stefanik was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and she now serves as a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, the Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She was also a founding Member of the China Task Force. Rep. Stefanik is widely recognized for her policy leadership and record of results on national security issues, as well as on domestic issues including economic policy, rural healthcare, constitutional protections, K-12 & higher education, law enforcement, border security, and government accountability. She is one of the most effective questioners in congressional hearings, and her questioning of Ivy League university presidents forced multiple resignations and set the record for the most viewed congressional testimony in history.

Bari Weiss is the founder and editor of The Free Press and host of the podcast Honestly. She is the winner of the LA Press Club’s 2021 Daniel Pearl Award, Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, and the Dao Prize for The Free Press’s work on the Twitter Files. In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times‘s “star opinion writer.” Her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, was the winner of a 2019 National Jewish Book Award.

Recently retired from her position as Martin Peretz professor of Yiddish Literature and professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, Professor Wisse is currently a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah, where she writes regularly for Mosaic, teaches, and hosts the Stories Jews Tell podcast. Her books on literary subjects include an edition of Jacob Glatstein’s two-volume fictional memoir, The Glatstein Chronicles (2010),  A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988), The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture (2003), and No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (2013), a volume in the Tikvah-sponsored Library of Jewish Ideas with Princeton University Press. 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 memoir, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, was published in 2021.