Fred Rosenbaum, founding director of Lehrhaus Judaica, has written four books on Bay Area Jewish history and three books on the Holocaust. He has taught numerous courses on the history of contemporary Israel at Lehrhaus and the University of San Francisco. He has been awarded the S.Y. Agnon Gold Medal for Intellectual Excellence by the Scopus Society of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Covenant Award for Exceptional Jewish Educators, as well as the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers’ Award for making an exceptional impact on the Bay Area by writing on Jewish themes.

Professor Joel Schechter teaches Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theatre History at San Francisco State University. He previously taught at the New School for Social Research, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the Yale School of Drama, where he was a Professor of Dramatic Literature and Dramaturgy. His books include Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre (1985), Satiric Impersonations: From Aristophanes to the Guerrilla Girls (1994), and The Congress of Clowns (1998). He also served as Editor in Chief of Theater Magazine at Yale. While at SF State, he has planned and overseen “The Congress of Clowns: A Conference on Comedy,” coordinated the Circus Arts and Russian theatre workshops for CSU’s Summer Arts program, and SF State’s collaboration with the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Youth Project.

Owen Smith is a professor at California College for the Arts. His illustration clients include Sports Illustrated, Time, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, for which he has created 15 cover illustrations. He has recently completed work on a new children's book for Simon and Schuster. Owen's influences come from the WPA artists of the 1930s, Diego Rivera, and the lurid covers of pulp magazines and dime-store paperbacks of the 1930s and 1940s. His paintings have been featured in exhibitions in New York, Rome, and Milan, as well as solo shows in Los Angeles. In 1998, a set of mosaic murals Owen designed was permanently installed in a New York subway station at 36th Street in Brooklyn.

Oscar Villalon is a journalist and former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. A member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, he's also a long-time juror of the California Book Awards, sponsored by the Commonwealth Club. His writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Believer, and his reviews have aired on KQED's The California Report.