Stanley Katz is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, the national humanities organization in the United States. Trained in British and American history at Harvard (PhD, 1961), where he also attended Law School in 1969-70, Dr. Katz’ research focuses upon recent developments in American philanthropy, the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime. He is the Editor in Chief of the recently published Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, and the Editor Emeritus of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the United States Supreme Court. He also writes about higher education policy, and has published a blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is the co-founder and editor of the history of philanthropy blog www.histphil.org and author and editor of numerous books and articles.

Ari Y Kelman is the Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.  Dr. Kelman is the author of a number of books and articles examining the multiple ways in which in which cultural and social formations help people to cultivate deep commitments.

Shaul Kelner is Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, specializing in the political culture of contemporary Jewish life. His research on issues of philanthropy and agenda-setting in the American Jewish community includes, “Religious Ambivalence in Jewish American Philanthropy,” in Family, Friend, Foe? The Relationship of Religion and Philanthropy in Religious Philanthropic Organizations (ed., T. Davis, Indiana 2013), and “In Its Own Image: Independent Philanthropy and the Cultivation of Young Jewish Leadership,” The New Jewish Leaders: Reshaping the American Jewish Landscape (ed., J. Wertheimer, UPNE 2011). An alumnus of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship program, Kelner’s first book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU 2010), won awards from the Association for Jewish Studies and American Sociological Association.

Rebecca Kobrin, Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, works in the fields of immigration history and American Jewish History.  Previously, Professor Kobrin served as the Hilda Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-2006). Dr. Kobrin’s publications include Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010). winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Prize; Chosen Capital: the Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press); and Purchasing Power: the Economics of Jewish History, coedited with Adam Teller (University of Pennsylvania Press)

Amanda B. Moniz, Ph.D., is the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History. Her first book, From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism won the inaugural Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Prize.

Hanna Shaul Bar Nissim completed her PhD at the School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a focus on philanthropic studies. She joined the Ruderman Family Foundation after completing a two-year Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Brandeis University. For more than a decade she has focused on documenting and analyzing the activities of multiple foundations and community philanthropies, while working closely with hundreds of philanthropists and practitioners of philanthropic organizations. In addition to peer-reviewed research. she publishes frequently in national and international media outlets including NPQ, The Forward, Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, The Conversation and E-Jewish Philanthropy.

Benjamin Soskis, a historian of American philanthropy, is a research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute and the co-editor of HistPhil, a web publication devoted to the history of philanthropy, nonprofits and civil society. He is a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, to the Washington Post, and to the Atlantic.com, among other publications. He is also the author, most recently, of “A History of Associational Life and the Nonprofit Sector in the United States,” in The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook Third Ed. (Stanford University Press, 2020).