Morgan Blum is the Director of Education with the JFCS Holocaust Center. Originally, from the San Francisco Bay Area, Morgan graduated cum laude from Clark University with a B.A. in history specializing in Holocaust and genocide studies. Her Masters thesis focused on the forced removal of Aboriginal children as a case of genocide. A section of this thesis was published in Genocide Perspectives III edited by Colin Tatz.

Morgan currently develops curriculum and leads professional development workshops for Bay Area educators at the JFCS Holocaust Center. Morgan is an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area Darfur Coalition and sits on the advisory board of the Genocide Education Project. Recent papers presented include Genocide prevention through Holocaust education at the International Association of Genocide Scholars conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

Sheila Braufman has been lecturing and teaching throughout the Bay Area on the rich visual heritage of the Jewish people for over 25 years. She is an independent curator and museum consultant who was the Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley for 17 years.

Linda Frank’s first novel, After the Auction, follows a woman searching for a family treasure looted by the Nazis. Through fiction, the story weaves Linda’s substantial research on art looting and other Holocaust and pre-State Israel history into the context of a suspenseful plot.

In addition to a (recently retired) career in financial services and involvement in non-profit volunteerism, Linda has published numerous articles on business and travel and has produced and hosted a cable TV show. She’s just begun to work on her second novel. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s from the University of Wisconsin. For more information check out her web site at www.lindafrankbooks.com.

Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. He began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983. He is the author of Art as Politics in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2000); and Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2006).

From 1998 to 2000, he served as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. In this capacity, he supervised a staff of researchers who combed archives in the U.S. and Europe in order to better understand how representatives of the U.S. government (including the Armed Forces) handled the assets of Holocaust victims both during and after the war. He has served as an expert witness in a number of cases where Holocaust victims have tried to recover lost artworks, and has also participated in a number of international conferences on the subject of Nazi art looting and Allied restitution, including the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets in 1998, and the Vilnius International Forum on Holocaust-Era Looted Cultural Assets in 2000.

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.