College Commons HUC-JIR

Stephen Mills shares his story of sexual abuse and reminds us of our still-unfulfilled obligations of protection and justice.

Stephen Mills is the author of Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood, a winner of the National Jewish Book Award. He's also the co-author of Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Since 1982 he has advised and written for an array of public interest organizations in the fields of human rights and environmental protection. Stephen is honored to serve as an Ambassador for CHILD USA, the leading nonprofit think tank fighting for the civil rights of children. He lives in California with his wife, Susan.

The best of all worlds: Jewish and Italian food from award winning cook and author Benedetta Guetta.

Benedetta Jasmine Guetta is an Italian food writer and photographer. She was born in Milan, but she lives in Santa Monica, California. In 2009, she cofounded a website called Labna, the only Jewish/Kosher cooking blog in Italy, specializing in Italian and Jewish cuisine. Since then, she has been spreading the word about the marvels of Italian Jewish food in Italy and abroad, teaching the recipes of the cuisine to a growing number of people in cooking schools, synagogues, and community centers, among other institutions. Her work has been featured in numerous news outlets in Italy and abroad, including the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Elle à Table, Saveur, and Tablet. Guetta has previously coauthored two cookbooks in Italian; Cooking alla Giudia: A Celebration of the Jewish Food of Italy is her first English-language cookbook.

Kiryas Joel, a chartered municipality in New York State functions as a religious community and American village.

Nomi M. Stolzenberg holds the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She is a legal scholar whose research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including law and religion, law and liberalism, law and feminism, law and psychoanalysis, and law and literature. After getting her J.D. at Harvard Law School in 1987 and clerking for the Honorable John Gibbons, chief judge of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, she joined the faculty at the USC Gould School in 1988. There, she helped establish the USC Center for Law, History and Culture, one of the preeminent centers for the study of law and the humanities. She is the co-author with David N. Myers of American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022), and the author of numerous articles on law and religion, including the widely cited “He Drew a Circle That Shut Me Out: Assimilation, Indoctrination, and the Paradox of a Liberal Education,” published in the Harvard Law Review, “Righting the Relationship Between Race and Religion in Law,” and “The Return of Religion: Legal Secularism's Rise and Fall and Possible Resurrection.” She is spending the 2022-2023 academic year as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and as a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she will be working on a new project on religious exemptions and the theory of “faith-based discrimination.”  

David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, where he serves as the director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. He also directs the new UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. He is the author or editor of more than fifteen books in the field of Jewish history, including, with Nomi Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022), which was awarded the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish studies. From 2018-2023, he served as president of the New Israel Fund.

Jessica Marglin: The Citizen Who Didn’t Belong
Jessica Marglin discusses the 19th-century Italian Jew, whose estate became a test of the nascent idea of “citizenship.”

Jessica Marglin is Professor of Religion, Law, and History, and the Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California. She earned her PhD from Princeton and her BA and MA from Harvard. Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on law. She is the author of Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016) and the co-editor, with Matthias Lehmann, of Jews and the Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2020). Her book The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean came out with Princeton University Press in 2022.

Dr. Sivan Zakai uncovers the world of children’s opinions and insights about Israel, in peace and in crisis.

Sivan Zakai, Ph.D., is the Sara S. Lee Associate Professor of Jewish Education at HUC-JIR/Los Angeles. A thought leader in Jewish and Israel education, Dr. Zakai is the director of the Children’s Learning About Israel Project and co-director of Project ORLIE: Research and Leadership in Israel Education and the Learning and Teaching about What Matters Project. She also serves as a senior editor of the Journal of Jewish Education and as a member of the faculty at the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute. Her books include My Second-Favorite Country: How American Jewish Children Think about Israel, winner of the 2022 National Newish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity, and the forthcoming Teaching Israel: Studies of Pedagogy from the Field.

Rabbi Debra J. Robbins offers insight and practice to bring the Psalms into our lives.

Rabbi Debra J. Robbins is a member of the clergy team at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas, focusing on teaching, pastoral care, and spiritual practice. She was ordained in 1991 at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, and is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality Clergy Leadership Program. She is the author of Opening Your Heart with Psalm 27: A Spiritual Practice for the Jewish New Year (2019) and New Each Day: A Spiritual Practice for Reading Psalms (2023), both with CCAR Press.