Dr. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how moral thinking varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff).  He has given four TED talks. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction, which is the subject of his most recent book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. His next book will be titled, Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.

Nikki R. Haley is the Walter P. Stern Chair at the Hudson Institute. She previously served as United States ambassador to the United Nations, as a member of the president’s cabinet, and on the National Security Council. While ambassador, she ensured the American people saw value for their investment, defended US interests, kept our country safe, and championed human rights. On the UN Security Council, Amb. Haley spearheaded negotiations that led to the strongest set of sanctions ever placed on a country, North Korea, for its nuclear weapons program. She proudly issued the first American veto in years defending the United States’ sovereign right to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel’s true capital. And, during her presidency of the UN Security Council, she hosted the first-ever session devoted to promoting human rights. For Amb. Haley’s work at the UN, Forbes named her one of the world’s 100 most powerful women.

Prior to becoming UN ambassador, she was elected the 116th governor of South Carolina. Haley led the state through some of its most difficult periods—forging unity and consensus in the wake of a racially-driven church shooting, signing the first body camera bill in the country, and managing South Carolina’s emergency response during multiple natural disasters.

Born in Bamberg, South Carolina, she is the daughter of Indian immigrants and a proud graduate of Clemson University. She and her husband have two children.

Ben Sasse joined the University of Florida (UF) as a professor and 13th president of the 170-year-old institution in February 2023. During his tenure, Sasse moved swiftly to cultivate fresh leadership, construct a UF-wide strategic planning initiative, and ground UF’s priorities in making the highest and best use of public funds. He led UF’s response to post-October 7th campus unrest, launched the President’s Strategic Initiative, and implemented new post-tenure review efforts. Under Sasse’s tenure, UF was named the number one public university by the Wall Street Journal.

Before being twice elected to the United States Senate and a two-time New York Times national best-selling author, Ben taught at Yale University, the University of Texas, and Midland University in his Nebraska hometown. Professor Sasse has won teaching awards and holds a history Ph.D. from Yale, where his dissertation won both the Egleston and Theron Rockwell Field best dissertation prizes.

Statesman, historian, soldier, author, Michael Oren has had long and distinguished career.

Born in New York and educated at Princeton and Columbia, he was a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown. He has received fellowships from the US State Department and the British and Canadian governments. He was the Lady Davis Fellow at Hebrew University, a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel Aviv University, and the Ambassadorial Scholar at the Atlantic Council. Oren holds four degrees in Middle East history and has received four honorary doctorates.

Moving to Israel in the 1970s and joining the IDF, Dr. Oren served as a lone soldier in the paratroopers. He fought in the 1982 Lebanon War, and later served as an army spokesman in the Second Lebanon War and several Gaza operations, reaching the rank of major. He served as an advisor to Israel’s delegation to the UN, to former Foreign Minister Abba Evan, and to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A passionate oarsman, he won two gold medals in the Maccabiah Games.

In 2009, Michael Oren was appointed Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Interacting with the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, and the CIA, he dealt with crucial strategic issues such as the Iron Dome defense system and the Iran nuclear threat. He reached out to communities across America, spoke on numerous campuses, and defended Israel in the media. He received the Statesman of the Year Medal from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Dr. Martin Luther King Legacy Prize for International Service.

Returning to Israel, Oren was elected to Knesset—Israel’s parliament—where he headed a classified committee on international affairs and served as Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, in charge of diplomacy. He made state visits to Europe, Central America, and the Far East. Politico named him as one of the fifty most influential thinkers in America, by the Forward as one of the five most influential Jews in America, and the Jerusalem Post as one of the ten most influential Jews worldwide.

Oren has written numerous books. His last three works of non-fiction—Six Days of War, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, and Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide—were all New York Times bestsellers. He won the Los Angeles Times History Jewish Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and a National Humanities Prize. He is currently working on the history of Israel’s War of Independence, to be published by Random House.

Michael Oren has also been prominent figure in the media, serving as Middle East analyst for both CNN and CBS news. He has had appeared on the Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher shows, 60 Minutes, and the View. His collected essays and op-eds, published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic, total some 700 pages. NPR listed him among the best college commencement speakers ever.

Throughout, Michael Oren has been a writer of fiction. A teen poet, he later won the PBS National Young Filmmakers Award and wrote for both Hollywood and stage. His two novels and collections of stories draw on his diverse experiences. His latest novel, Swann’s War, was hailed by Kirkus Review as “intriguing, wonderfully delineated, and tension-filled,” and awarded it the coveted star.

Since leaving public office, Michael Oren has represented Israeli high tech abroad and served as an advisor to United Hatzalah, the Secure Community Network, and other NGOs. He is the president of the Hadas Malka Center, which supports Israel Border Police and their families, and is the founder of Israel 2048, dedicated to stimulating and facilitating dialogue on Israel’s future. His book, 2048 – The Rejuvenated State, was published in English, Hebrew, and Arabic in 2023.
Michael Oren is the father of three and the grandfather of six—his proudest achievements.

Daniel S. Senor is a bestselling author, host of the “Call Me Back” podcast, and a co-founder and member of the board of directors of the Foreign Policy Initiative. His most recent government position was in the administration of George W. Bush, where Mr. Senor served as chief spokesman and senior adviser to the Coalition in Iraq. One of the longest-serving civilian officials in Iraq, Mr. Senor also served as a Pentagon adviser to U.S. Central Command in Qatar and as a foreign policy and communications aide in the U.S. Senate. He has also advised a number of candidates for U.S. Senate. During the 2012 presidential election, Mr. Senor was a senior foreign policy adviser to Governor Mitt Romney. His analytical pieces have been published by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, Time, and Newsweek. He is co-author of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (2011) and The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World (2023). From 2001 to 2003, Mr. Senor worked as an investment banker at the Carlyle Group. He earned a BA in History from the University of Western Ontario and an MBA from Harvard.

Dr. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. Dr. Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush, and was also executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.

In addition to being interviewed frequently on radio and television, Dr. Levin has published essays and articles in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, First Things, Commentary, and Mosaic. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again. He holds an MA and PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik is a senior fellow 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 Journey Through the Siddur daily podcasts. Rabbi Soloveichik previously served as associate rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan.

He has lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to Jewish theology, 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 by Koren’s Maggid Press. In August 2012, Rabbi Soloveichik gave the invocation at the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. 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.

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.

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.