Rabbi Angela W. Buchdahl

Senior Rabbi, Central Synagogue

Rabbi Angela W. Buchdahl serves as the Senior Rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City and is the first woman to lead Central’s Reform congregation in its 185-year history. Rabbi Buchdahl first joined Central Synagogue as Senior Cantor in 2006. In 2014, she was chosen by the congregation to be Senior Rabbi.

Rabbi Buchdahl was invested as a cantor in 1999 and ordained as a rabbi in 2001 by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, where she was a Wexner Graduate Fellow. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in religious studies from Yale University in 1994. Born in Korea to a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother, Rabbi Buchdahl is the first Asian American to be ordained as a cantor or rabbi in North America. Prior to her service at Central Synagogue, Rabbi Buchdahl served as Associate Rabbi/Cantor at Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, New York.

Rabbi Buchdahl has been nationally recognized for her innovations in leading worship, which draw large crowds in the congregation’s historic Main Sanctuary and via livestream and cable broadcast to viewers in more than 100 countries.

Rabbi Buchdahl has been featured in dozens of news outlets, including the Today Show, NPR, and PBS, and was listed as one of Newsweek’s “America’s 50 Most Influential Rabbis.” She serves on the boards of the Avodah Jewish Service Corps, AJC, the New York Board of Rabbis, UJA-Federation of New York, Yale University President’s Council, and the Israel Center at Seoul National University.

Rabbi Buchdahl and her husband, Jacob, have three children.

Rabbi Elliot J. Cosgrove

Senior Rabbi, Park Avenue Synagogue

Rabbi Elliot J. Cosgrove, a leading voice of American Jewry, is Senior Rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. Ordained in 1999 at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago Divinity School and is a Senior Hartman Rabbinic Fellow.

Rabbi Cosgrove sits on the Chancellor’s Cabinet of the Jewish Theological Seminary and on the editorial board of Masorti: The New Journal of Conservative Judaism. An officer of the New York Board of Rabbis, he serves on the boards of UJA-Federation of New York, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and Hillel at the University of Michigan. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Rabbi Cosgrove represented the Jewish community at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum during the visit of Pope Francis to New York in 2015.

A frequent contributor to Jewish journals and periodicals, he is the author of 16 volumes of sermons, the editor of Jewish Theology in Our Time, and the author of For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today. He is the host of Conversations with Cosgrove, a podcast featuring sermons, conversations, and selected programs.

Rabbi Cosgrove and his wife, Debbie, have four children.

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz

Senior Rabbi, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He has been a congregational Rabbi for over 30 years, and previously served pulpits in Montreal, Quebec and Mount Vernon, New York.

Rabbi Steinmetz has always been deeply engaged in community affairs, and he sits on multiple organizational boards. He is a founding board member of the Moral Hearts Alliance, which builds Jewish-Christian cooperation in support of Israel. He writes a weekly column for The Jewish Journal and has written for many other publications, including The Washington Post, The Daily News, The Globe and Mail, La Presse, Haaretz, and The Jerusalem Post.

In October, Rabbi Steinmetz published his first book, Despite Everything: A Chronicle of Jewish Resilience in the Aftermath of October 7th.

Rabbi Steinmetz and his wife, Lisa Schwartz, have four children.

Dr. Linda G. Mills

President, New York University

Dr. Linda G. Mills is the 17th president of New York University and the Lisa Ellen Goldberg Professor of Social Work, Public Policy, and Law. Dr. Mills is also founder of the NYU Center on Violence and Recovery and a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Dr. Mills’ scholarship is influenced by her family’s experience during the Holocaust, including her Jewish mother’s escape from Vienna in 1939 and her great-grandmother’s murder by the Nazis in Riga. This history has driven her to explore questions related to justice, resiliency, and recovery.

Dr. Mills’ groundbreaking research funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice has reshaped the field of treatment in domestic violence, and her restorative justice-based programs are currently being adopted in several jurisdictions across the U.S. She is a widely published author of articles appearing in Harvard Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Journal of Experimental Criminology, and Nature: Human Behavior, among others. Her books have been published by Princeton University Press, University of Michigan Press, Springer, and Basic Books. As a filmmaker, she has produced award-winning documentaries that have debuted at Tribeca Film Festival and the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival and have been shown in Abu Dhabi, Austria, and Tunisia, among other countries. Of Many: Then and Now appeared on ABC to 8.1 million viewers.

Dr. Mills first came to NYU as an Associate Professor of Social Work in 1999 and in 2001 was promoted to full Professor. In 2002, she was named Vice Provost (and in 2006 Senior Vice Provost) for Undergraduate Education and University Life. She served as NYU’s Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice Provost for Global Programs and University Life from 2012 to 2023.

Craig Newmark

Founder, craig newmark philanthropies and craigslist

Craig Newmark is best known as the founder of the classifieds ad site craigslist, which showed tens of millions of Americans that the Internet could be reasonably useful and easy to use.

Now, he engages in full time philanthropy, focusing on helping and protecting the people who help and protect our country. That includes cybersecurity, trustworthy journalism, and support for military families and veterans.

He was greatly influenced by his Sunday School teachers who had escaped the Holocaust, set his moral compass, and taught him to treat people like you want to be treated, and how to know when enough is enough.

Craig might be #nerdpatient0, having worn plastic pocket protectors, thick black glasses, taped together, and being poorly socialized. He remains poorly socialized but can simulate social skills as needed.

He originally intended to study Large Language Models like ChatGPT in the early seventies, but decided he wanted gainful employment, and went into software development.

Since then, he’s worked at IBM, Charles Schwab, Bank of America, and worked at craigslist for about 25 years. He retired from a craigslist customer service job some years ago.

He ascribes any success to accidentally being in the right place at the right time, making him the Forrest Gump of the Internet.

Louis J. Jerome

President, Sephardic Community Center

Louis Jerome is a Principal at JEMB Realty, a multigenerational family-run real estate company based in New York City. He manages residential property, hospitality, and acquisitions across the United States.

Beyond his real estate career, Louis is deeply committed to community service. As President of the Sephardic Community Center in Brooklyn, he leads the premier community institution of the Syrian Sephardic community of New York City. Under his leadership, the center has flourished, offering a wide range of programs, services, and events that reinforce the community’s foundational value of unity and togetherness.

Louis’s dedication to the community follows a family tradition set by his father, Joseph, and his grandfather, Morris Bailey. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Raquel, and their four children.