University Synagogue Podcasts

Rabbi Barbara Aiello - The Secret Jews of Italy October 21, 2011

Rabbi Barbara Aiello is the first woman rabbi in Italy and also has served the progressive Jewish community in Milan as the country's first non-Orthodox rabbi. She continues to travel throughout Italy as a spokesperson for modern, pluralistic Judaism. As founder and director of the Italian Jewish Cultural Center of Calabria, Rabbi Aiello's mission is to help Italians, whose ancestors were forced into conversion from Jewdaism, to discuver and connect with their Jewish roots.

Rabbi Barbara Aiello on 10-21-2011

Danielle Berrin September 9, 2011

 

Danielle Berrin writes the “Hollywood Jew” blog, a cutting edge, values-based take on the entertainment industry for jewishjournal.com. An LA Times profile dubbed her “a natural born provocateur” for her commentaries on the business, culture and characters of Hollywood.

What is the impact of the Jewish presence in Hollywood? How have Jewish values informed and influenced the industry from its inception through today? And how do Hollywood Jews express those Jewish impulses in their lives and in their work? After all, Jews hail from a culture of storytelling, beginning with the Bible, which has become the most influential story in the Western canon.  Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, British Esquire and The Huffington Post.

Danielle Berrin 09-09-2011

Social Entrepreneurship June 17, 2011

Marshall Kaplan is the former Executive Director of the Merage Foundations and the former Dean of the University of Colorado's Graduate School of Public Affairs, where he also headed the Wirth Chair and Institute for Public Policy. Marshall was a senior official at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and a principal in the policy advisory firm Marshall Kaplan, Gans & Kahn. He has written widely on urban policy, the environment, infrastructure financing, and poverty. He holds BA and MA degrees from Boston University and the MCP degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

 

Shalom C. Elcott is President and Chief Executive Officer of Jewish Federation & Family Services, Orange County, a position to which he was appointed in 2004.  Over the past 7 years under his leadership, the Federation campaign has doubled and exciting new ventures have been launched for the benefit of our community, among them SKILLSETnpo^®, an executive level lay leadership development program;  The Rose Project, training young leaders to successfully advocate for Israel and combat hate speech on campus;  Israel Expo, which brings over 6,000 people to the Samueli Jewish Campus every year to celebrate Israel’s birthday; and, most recently the merger of Jewish Federation & Family Services.

 

 

 

Shelley Hoss is President of the Orange County Community Foundation and she has combined the best of the nonprofit and corporate worlds for the good of her community for nearly 25 years.  For the past 11 years she has served as president of one of Orange County’s most prominent philanthropic organizations - the Orange County Community Foundation, whose mission is to encourage, support and facilitate local philanthropy. Under Hoss’ leadership, the Community Foundation has become recognized as the “center of gravity” for philanthropy in Orange County. Her impact on the growth of the organization has been dramatic.

 

 

 

Kelly Smith is the Founder and Board Chair of the Center for Living Peace. Ms. Smith is also an active philanthropist in Orange County and beyond, most notably as a member of the Orange County Community Foundation Board of Directors and the Foundation Board, Orange County High School for the Arts. She is also on the Western Regional Advisory Board of Jumpstart and has played an active role in their well-known Read for the Record event.

 

Social Entrepreneurship June 17, 2011

 

Gal Beckerman April 15, 2011

Gal Beckerman is the opinion editor at The Forward. He was a longtime editor and staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review and has also written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He was a Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin and the recipient of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. His first book, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, a history of the Soviet Jewry movement, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September 2010. It was named was one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and the Washington Post, as well as winning the 2010 National Jewish Book Award.

Gal Beckerman 04-15-2011

Norman J. Ornstein

Norman J. Ornstein is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He also serves as an election analyst for CBS News. In addition, Ornstein writes for USA Today as a member of its Board of Contributors and writes a weekly column called "Congress Inside Out" for Roll Call newspaper. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and other major publications, and regularly appears on television programs like The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, and Charlie Rose. He serves as senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission, working to ensure that our institutions of government can be maintained in the event of a terrorist attack on Washington; his efforts in this area are recounted in a profile of him in the June 2003 Atlantic Monthly. His campaign finance working group of scholars and practitioners helped shape the major law, known as McCain/Feingold, that reformed the campaign financing system. Legal Times referred to him as "a principal drafter of the law" and his role in its design and enactment was profiled in the February 2004 issue of Washington Lawyer. He is also co-directing a multi-year effort, called the Transition to Governing Project, to create a better climate for governing in the era of the permanent campaign. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Campaign Legal Center and of the Board of Trustees of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His many books include The Permanent Campaign and Its Future; Intensive Care: How Congress Shapes Health Policy, both with Thomas E. Mann; and Debt and Taxes: How America Got Into Its Budget Mess and What to Do About It, with John H. Makin.

Download Ornstein.mp3 (audio mpeg Object)