Camille Shira Angel has been the spiritual leader of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, San Francisco’s all-inclusive LGBT synagogue, since 2000. She is author of Intimate Connections: Integrating Human Love with God’s Love, a curriculum that sensitizes students to the lesbian/gay experience using Jewish values.

Caryn Aviv is a sociologist and Academic Director of the Certificate in Jewish Communal Service at the University of Denver. Aviv, along with David Shneer, is the author of New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (also available from NYU Press). Aviv and Shneer also coauthored American Queer, Now and Then and co-edited the anthology Queer Jews. Caryn Aviv is a cofounder and the director of research for Jewish Mosaic: The National Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity.

Julia Watts Belser is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University, where she teaches courses in rabbinic literature, Jewish history, religion and ecology, and world religions. She received her rabbinic ordination from the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, and her Ph.D. in rabbinic literature from the Joint Doctoral Program in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Graduate Theological Union.

Allen Bennett is the rabbi at Temple Israel in Alameda, California, and President of the Board of Rabbis of Northern California.

Rachel Biale is Bay Area Regional Director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance. She is the author of Women and Jewish Law and two books for parents and children, My Pet Died and We Are Moving.

Marla Brettschneider is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. She is founder and past Coordinator of Queer Studies at UNH and currently serves as Coordinator of Women’s Studies. Her most recent book is The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives—winner of a 2007 IPPY (Independent Publishers) Award in the GLBT category. Her earlier books include The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multiculturalism, winner of the Gustavus Meyers Human Rights Award.

Rachel Brodie is the cofounder and Executive Director of Jewish Milestones and coauthor of Jewish Family Education: A Casebook for the Twenty-first Century, with Vicky Kelman.

David Brodsky is Assistant Professor and Co-chair of the Department of Rabbinic Civilization at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He teaches courses on Talmud, midrash, and other aspects of rabbinic literature and civilization.

Ayelet Cohen is Associate Rabbi of New York City’s Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST), the world’s largest synagogue serving the LGBT community, family, and friends.

Menachem Creditor serves as rabbi of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, California. He is founder of ShefaNetwork: The Conservative Movement Dreaming from Within (www.ShefaNetwork.org), cofounder of Keshet-Rabbis: The Alliance of Gay-Friendly Conservative/Masorti Rabbis (www.KeshetRabbis.org), and author of The Tisch: A Jewish Spiritual Commentary.

Elliot N. Dorff is a rabbi and Rector and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the American Jewish University, and coauthor of the rabbinic ruling that permitted commitment ceremonies and ordination of gays and lesbians in the Conservative Movement. His books that articulate his thinking on homosexuality include Matters of Life and Death (on medical ethics) and Love Your Neighbor and Yourself (on personal ethics). He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University.

Gregg Drinkwater is Executive Director of Jewish Mosaic: The National Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, an organization dedicated to helping Jewish institutions become more welcoming of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jews and their families. Drinkwater, with the help of the World Congress of GLBT Jews, launched Torah Queeries as an online project on Purim in 2006. He earned his B.S. and M.A. degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also devoted several years to a Ph.D. in history.

Noach Dzmura is Online Projects Consultant for Jewish Mosaic and since spring 2008 has edited Torah Queeries. He is editor of an anthology about gender-variant Jews and is a founding member of Kol Tzedek’s Gender Variant Task Force, a Bay Area initiative to give voice to gender-variant Jews.

Laurence Edwards serves as the rabbi of Congregation Or Chadash in Chicago. For twenty-two years he was a Hillel Director, first at Dartmouth College and then at Cornell University. He was ordained at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and received a Ph.D. from Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the brother of Lisa Edwards.

Lisa Edwards has been the rabbi of Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC) in Los Angeles since 1994. She holds a Ph.D. in literature and lives in Los Angeles with her wife, Tracy Moore, editor of Lesbiot: Israeli Lesbians Talk about Sexuality, Feminism, Judaism and Their Lives.

Denise L. Eger is the founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami, West Hollywood’s Reform synagogue. She has served as the rabbi of the LGBT community in Los Angeles since 1988. Eger is President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California and President of the Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis. She has written extensively on LGBT issues and coauthored, with Yoel Kahn, the official liturgy of the Reform Movement for gay weddings and commitment ceremonies.

David Ellenson, a rabbi and President of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, is the author of Tradition in Transition: Orthodoxy, Halakhah and the Boundaries of Modern Jewish History, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy, Between Tradition and Culture: The Dialectics of Jewish Religion and Identity in the Modern World, and After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1981.

Sue Levi Elwell, is a Worship Specialist for the Congregational Consulting Group of the Union for Reform Judaism and has served as rabbi for congregations in California, New Jersey, and Virginia. A Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, she is the editor of The Open Door, the CCAR Haggadah, and served as one of the editors of the acclaimed The Journey Continues: The Ma’yan Haggadah. Elwell also served as editor, with Rebecca Alpert and Shirley Idelson, of Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation and as Consulting Poetry Editor of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary. She earned her doctorate at Indiana University.

Karen Erlichman is the director of Jewish Mosaic’s San Francisco Bay Area office and a licensed clinical social worker in private practice in San Francisco.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender, which won the Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish studies of that year. She also co-edited the Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, to which she contributed the chapter “Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender.”

Ari Lev Fornari is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and a member of the TransTorah collective.

Mark George is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Iliff School of Theology. He is the author of a forthcoming book, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space, that examines the social nature of the Tabernacle.

Steven Greenberg is an Orthodox rabbi, ordained at Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. Since 1985 he has served as a senior educator for CLAL, a think tank, leadership training institute, and resource center. Rabbi Greenberg is the author of Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, which won the 2005 Koret Jewish Book Award. He is currently rabbi-in-residence at Hazon, a leading Jewish environmental organization, and Keshet, a grassroots organization dedicated to LGBT inclusion in the Jewish community.

David Greenstein is the rabbi of Congregation Shomrei Emunah, Montclair, New Jersey He was formerly Rosh Ha-Yeshivah of the Academy for Jewish Religion (AJR), New York. He has published essays on Jewish thought and culture, exploring possibilities for rethinking Jewish tradition. He holds a Ph.D. in Kabbalah and Rabbinics from New York University.

Steve Gutow is a rabbi, an attorney, and President of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. He served a pulpit in St. Louis, and as an adjunct professor at the St. Louis University Law School, and as Founding Director of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

Jill Hammer is a rabbi and Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion. She is also Director of Tel Shemesh, a website and community celebrating Jewish traditions connected with the earth, and the cofounder of Kohenet, a program in Jewish women’s spiritual leadership. Rabbi Hammer is the author of two books: The Jewish Book of Days and Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.

Linda Holtzman is the senior rabbi at Mishkan Shalom. She has served as Director of Practical Rabbinics at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and has worked closely with the Philadelphia LGBT and progressive Jewish community.

Shirley Idelson is a rabbi and Dean of the New York campus of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. She is coeditor, together with Rebecca Alpert and Sue Levi Elwell, of Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation, and a Ph.D. candidate in history at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Yoel Kahn is the rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Berkeley, California. He has served on the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ Responsa (Law) Committee and on the Editorial Committee for Miskhan Tefilah. His forthcoming book The Three Blessings looks at identity, censorship, and boundaries in Jewish liturgy over time. He received a Ph.D. through the Center for Jewish Studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union.

Tamar Kamionkowski is Vice President for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She is the first woman and lesbian to hold the senior academic-administrative position at a rabbinical seminary. Kamionkowski is the author of Gender Reversal and Cosmic Chaos: Studies in the Book of Ezekiel and numerous articles on prophetic and priestly literature and feminist readings of Biblical texts.

Martin Kavka is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He is the author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy and coeditor of Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader and Saintly Influence: Texts for Edith Wyschogrod.

Gwynn Kessler teaches at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives, “Let’s Cross That Body When We Get to It,” and “Bodies in Motion: Preliminary Notes on Queer Theory and Rabbinic Literature” in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses.

Jason Gary Klein currently serves as the director of Hillel at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Campaign Chair of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.

Elliot Kukla is a rabbi at the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center in San Francisco, offering spiritual care to those struggling with life-altering illness or grief or dying. Throughout the United States, he has lectured and led workshops on gender and sexual diversity in sacred texts, spiritual care at the end of life, and Judaism and mental illness. His articles are published in numerous magazines and have been anthologized widely, and his prayers and rituals for new life-cycle moments have been used by synagogues across the country.

Benay Lappe is a rabbi and Executive Director and Rosh Yeshiva of SVARA, a traditionally radical queer yeshiva. She was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1997 and holds three additional advanced degrees, in teaching and rabbinics. An innovator in combining Talmud study and queer theory, she currently serves as Professor of Talmud at the Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf, in Chicago, Visiting Professor of Talmud at the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, at the University of California, Berkeley, and is an Associate at CLAL, a think tank in New York City.

Amichai Lau-Lavie is the founder of Storahtelling, Inc. and is an Israeli-born performer and teacher of Judaic literature, hailed by Time Out New York as a “Super Star of David” and an “iconoclastic mystic” and by New York Jewish Week as “one of the most interesting thinkers in the Jewish world.” Lau-Lavie is a 2008 Jerusalem Fellow, a consultant to the Reboot Network, and the recipient of a Joshua Venture Fellowship award 2002–2004.

Lori Hope Lefkovitz is the Sadie Gottesman and Arlene Gottesman Reff Professor of Gender and Judaism at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she directs Kolot: The Center for Jewish Women’s and Gender Studies. She is Executive Editor of the website ritualwell.org, and her publications include Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust.

Joshua Lesser is the rabbi of Congregation Bet Haverim in Atlanta, a Reconstructionist community founded by gays and lesbians. He is also the founder of the Rainbow Center, a resource, information, and educational center addressing the needs of LGBT people and their families.

Sarra Lev is chair of the Department of Rabbinic Texts at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She has taught courses on Judaism for a range of programs and institutions including Jewish Alive & American, the Feminist Center of the American Jewish Congress, New York University, and Bat Kol: A Feminist House of Study, which she cofounded. Lev received her rabbinic ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a doctorate in rabbinic literature from New York University.

Jane Rachel Litman is Western Regional Director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation and serves as the rabbi of Kolot Mayim Temple of Victoria, Canada. Widely published in the fields of gay rights, Jewish women’s history, and contemporary theology, Rabbi Litman is the coeditor of the award-winning Lifecycles 2 anthology. Her recent writing on the politics of gender expression appears in the anthology New Jewish Feminism.

Jay Michaelson (www.metatronics.net) is a writer, scholar, and activist. He is the executive director of Nehirim, a nonprofit organization for GLBT Jews, partners, and allies; a columnist for the Forward newspaper and Reality Sandwich magazine; and a contributor to the Huffington Post, Zeek, Tikkun, and Slate. His books include Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, Another Word for Sky: Poems, and God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual Practice. A recent visiting professor at Boston University Law School, Jay is completing a Ph.D. in religious studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ayala Sha’ashoua Miron was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel. Miron was ordained as a rabbi at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem in November 2005. She is the founding rabbi of Bavat Ayin Congregation in Rosh HaAyin, a thriving Kehila of the Israeli Movement for Progressive Judaism (IMPJ) established in September 2004.

Julie Pelc is a rabbi, Assistant Director of the Kalsman Institute on Judaism and Health, and Director of the Berit Mila Program of Reform Judaism. She is coeditor of the anthology Joining the Sisterhood: Young Jewish Women Write Their Lives, and she contributed to The Torah: A Women’s Commentary and Celebrating the Jewish Year: The Winter Holidays.

Sarah Pessin is Associate Professor of Philosophy, the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies, and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver.

Judith Plaskow is Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian. She is author of many books and articles, including Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective and The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003.

Amber Powers serves as Dean of Admissions and Recruitment at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She previously served as the rabbi of Temple Menorah Keneseth Chai in Northeast Philadelphia and as Mid-Atlantic Regional Director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation.

Dawn Rose is the rabbi of Temple Emanuel of the Merrimack Valley, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Forced from the Rabbinic Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary because of her sexual orientation, Rose cofounded the Incognito Club, JTS’s first lesbian/gay organization while she completed a Ph.D. there in Jewish philosophy. Rabbi Rose has taught theology and ethics at JTS and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she was also Director of the Center for Jewish Ethics. Currently, Rose is working on a novel about the search for faith in an era of religious extremism.

David Shneer is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His most recent books include Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (coauthored with Caryn Aviv and also available from NYU Press), and American Queer, Now and Then (also coauthored with Caryn Aviv). Aviv and Shneer also coedited the groundbreaking anthology Queer Jews. Additionally, Shneer is a co-founder of Jewish Mosaic: The National Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity.

Jhos Singer serves as the maggid/rabbi for the Coastside Jewish Community in Half Moon Bay, California, which has put up with his trance/gender approach to Judaism’s profound, paranormal, and paradoxical practices since 5760.

Toba Spitzer is the rabbi of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek in West Newton, an affiliate of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation. President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association from 2007 to 2009, she was the first gay or lesbian to serve as the president of a denominational rabbinic organization.

Jacob J. Staub is a rabbi and serves as Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Spirituality at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where he directs the program in Jewish Spiritual Direction. He is a member of the Nehirim faculty and directs Shalshelet, the Nehirim queer Jewish mentoring program. He is coauthor, with Rebecca Alpert, of Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach.

Margaret Moers Wenig is Rabbi Emerita of Beth Am, The People’s Temple, and Instructor in Liturgy and Homiletics at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion.

Reuben Zellman will complete his rabbinical studies at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in 2010. He currently serves at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco and Congregation Beth El in Berkeley, California.