After receiving his degree in writing and graduating cum laude from Northwestern University then studying at Trinity College, Oxford University, Rabbi Steven Z. Leder spent five years studying at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. He then received a Master’s Degree in Hebrew Letters and Rabbinical Ordination in 1987.

Rabbi Leder currently serves as Senior Rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, a large and prestigious synagogue in Los Angeles.

In addition to his many duties at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Rabbi Leder teaches Homiletics to Rabbinical students at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. Rabbi Leder has been quoted in Time magazine and has published essays in Reform Judaism, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, where his Torah commentaries were read weekly by more than fifty thousand people. He has been awarded the Louis Rapoport Award for Excellence in Commentary by the American Jewish Press Association, the Kovler Award from the Religious Action Center in Washington D.C. for his work in African American/Jewish dialogue. He is a fellow in the British American Project, a think tank devoted to bringing together influential leaders from America and Great Britain.

Rabbi Leder’s first book, The Extraordinary Nature of Ordinary Things, enjoyed two weeks on the Amazon.com number one bestseller list for Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, and has brought Rabbi Leder national acclaim. In the New York Times, William Safire called Rabbi Leder’s first book “uplifting.” Playwright Wendy Wasserstein said he “is everything we search for in a modern wise man. . . . In this book he finds the true fabric of our spiritual lives.”

Julie Salamon is a culture writer and critic for The New York Times and was previously a reporter and film critic for The Wall Street Journal. Her journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Bazaar, and The New Republic. Salamon is the author of six books, "White Lies," a novel; "The Devil's Candy," a study of Hollywood film making gone awry; "The Net of Dreams," a family memoir; "The Christmas Tree," a novella that was a New York Times best-seller; and "Facing the Wind," a nonfiction narrative about a killing and the lives affected by it, published by Random House in 2001. Her new book, "Rambam's Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why it is Necessary to Give," was published this October [2003] by Workman Press. Salamon received a B.A. degree from Tufts University and a J.D. degree from
New York University Law School. She lives in New York with her husband and two children.