Andrea Bernstein, who won a Peabody award for her work uncovering abuses of power in the Bridgegate scandal, is the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power and the co-host of the Trump, Inc. podcast from WNYC and ProPublica.

Kristen Muller, as Southern California Public Radio’s Chief Content Officer, oversees the station’s programming, podcasting, and excellent local journalism. She leads an award-winning team of hosts, reporters, producers, and editors who are dedicated to informing, entertaining, and connecting the diverse communities of LA.

Kwame Anthony Appiah pens the Ethicist column for the New York Times, and is the author of the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism, among many other works. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah lives in New York.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby draws on art historical, political, and personal references to create densely layered figurative compositions that, precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience. Akunyili Crosby was born in Nigeria, where she lived until the age of sixteen. In 1999 she moved to the United States, where she currently lives. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work. Crosby is the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and was awarded Financial Times‘ Women of the Year, 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include Front Room: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Baltimore Museum of Art, alongside Prospect.4, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans. Among her current projects is an outdoor mural for LA MOCA Grand Avenue, which will be on view until December 31, 2018. She lives in Los Angeles.

Erin Christovale is the Assistant Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She is also the curator of Black Radical Imagination with Amir George, which has screened both nationally and internationally in spaces such as MoMA PS1, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco. Exhibitions include a/wake in the water: Meditations on Disaster(2014) at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Memoirs of A Watermelon Woman (2016) and A Subtle Likeness (2016) at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and S/Election: Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom (2016) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and baby boy(2017) at Transmission Glasgow. She recently organized the 28th anniversary of "Alternative Endings, Radical Beginnings" with Vivian Crockett as part of Visual AIDS project, A Day With(Out) Art and Made in L.A. 2018, the Hammer Museum’s biennial showcasing artists from the greater Los Angeles area with Anne Ellegood.

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of seven books, including Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in upstate New York.

Attica Locke’s latest novel Bluebird, Bluebird won the Edgar Award for best novel and was named a Best of 2017 book by the New York Times. Her other works include the novels Pleasantville, winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction; Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award; and The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and the winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab, Locke has worked as a screenwriter as well. Most recently, she was a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire and worked with Ava Duvernay on the Netflix project em>Central Park Five. She is currently developing Bluebird, Bluebird into a TV series with FX. She serves on the board of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and winner of the California Book Award, and The Union of Their Dreams—Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. She is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning editor and reporter who spent twenty-five years at Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Southern California.

Kathleen L. Brown is a partner of the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP and serves as a director of Sempra Energy, Stifel Financial Corp., Five Points Communities, and Renew Financial. She served as California state treasurer from 1991 to 1995. Ms. Brown currently serves on the boards of directors of the National Park Foundation and the Mayor’s Fund Los Angeles and on the Investment Committee for the Annenberg Foundation. She is on the Advisory Boards of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the UCLA Medical Center. Ms. Brown is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Natalia Molina’s work lies at the intersections of race, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of two award-winning books, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 and How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Her current book project examines eight decades of place-making, community formation, and gentrification in the historically multiethnic Los Angeles community of Echo Park. She is a Professor of History and Urban Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Heather Ann Thompson is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and the J. Willard Hurst Prize. She is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given congressional staff briefings on the subject.

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez is the Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration. She is the author of the award-winning book, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol; and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles. Currently, Professor Lytle Hernandez is the research lead for the Million Dollar Hoods project, which maps how much is spent on incarceration per neighborhood in Los Angeles County.

Steven J. Ross is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hollywood Left and Right, recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholars Award and nominated for a Pulitzer; Working-Class Hollywood, nominated for a Pulitzer and the National Book Award; Movies and American Society; and Workers on the Edge. He lives in Southern California.

Rob Eshman is the former Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Journal.

Benjamin Madley is a historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history. Born in Redding, California, Madley spent much of his childhood in Karuk Country near the Oregon border, where he became interested in the relationship between colonizers and indigenous peoples. He earned a Ph.D. in History at Yale University and writes about American Indians as well as colonization in Africa, Australia, and Europe. His first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, and the Heyday Books History Award among many others.

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985.  His books include Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), recently republished in a 20th anniversary edition; 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), Contested Will (2010), the anthology Shakespeare in America (2014), and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (2015). He has also co-authored and presented two BBC documentaries: Shakespeare: The King’s Man and The Mysterious Mr. Webster. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library is Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at New York’s Public Theater, and has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lisa Wolpe is an actress, director, teacher & playwright, and is the Artistic Director of Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, which she founded in 1993. Honors include the Shakespeare Theater Association’s “Sidney Berger Award”, “Sustained Excellence” awards from the L.A. Drama Critic and from Playwrights Arena, the Key to Harlem, a Congressional Certificate of Merit; NBC News’ “Local Hero”, Jacob Bronowski Award for Theater Excellence, Whittier College’s Distinguished Artist Award, Colorado Shakespeare “First Scholar” and UC Boulder’s “Roe Green Distinguished Scholar”. Acting credits include Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, and San Diego Repertory Theater.

Saul Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli historian and currently a professor of history at UCLA. He was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews, grew up in France, and experienced the German Occupation of 1940-1944. His historical works have received great praise and recognition, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

Steven J. Ross is a Professor of History at the University of Southern California and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of American Jewish Life. His book Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America received the prestigious Theater Library Association Book Award in 1999. It was also named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the "Best Books of 1998" and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History. Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics received a Pulitzer Prize nomination and a Film Scholars Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The New York Times Book Review selected Hollywood Left and Right as a “Recommended Summer Readings” for 2012. Ross’ Op-Ed pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, International Herald-Tribune, Newark Star Ledger, Washington Independent, HuffingtonPost, and Politico. The son of two Holocaust survivors, Ross’s latest book, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews and Their Spies Foiled Nazi and Fascist Plots Against Hollywood and America, will be published by Bloomsbury Press.

In 1966, David Harris, then Stanford’s “radical” student body President, announced he would no longer cooperate with the Selective Service System overseeing military conscription, would refuse any orders Selective Service issued him, and urged everyone else to do the same. He then helped found The Resistance and organized civil disobedience against the draft in the West and nationally for the next three years. Ordered to report for military service in 1968, he refused and was convicted of “failure to obey a lawful order of military induction” and sentenced to three years in Federal prison. Harris was incarcerated between 1969 and 1971, mostly in the Federal Correctional Institution at La Tuna, Texas. After his release, he continued to organize against the war until Peace Agreements were signed in 1973. Since then, he has pursued a forty-year career as a journalist and writer and is the author of eleven books.

Winter Karen Dellenbach was born at the birth of the Atomic age in Pomona, California. While attending UCLA, the Vietnam War began to rage, as did the student body. Her political activism ignited and was fed by her peace church upbringing that instilled non-violence. She was a founder and organizer for Los Angeles Resistance. She lived communally for 23 years, was a public interest law attorney, and remains an advocate for low-income people and a political activist. She lives in Palo Alto with her husband.

Bob Zaugh was in The Resistance, a loose group of men and women who refused to cooperate with the draft and war in Vietnam. He left UCLA grad school, turned in his draft cards, refused to take a physical, and refused induction. Defended himself in Federal Court. He headed up Peace Press for twenty years and has been involved in issues such as opposing Diablo Canyon and Nuclear testing. Recently he has been a key person in the reentry work for the Amnesty case Gary Tyler.

Clara Bingham is the author of Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law (with Laura Leedy Gansler) and Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress. She is a former Newsweek White House correspondent, and her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Talk, The Washington Monthly, Ms., and other publications. Bingham produced the 2011 documentary The Last Mountain. She lives in Manhattan and Brooklyn with her husband, three children, and three stepchildren.