Public Podcasts

Speaker Bio

Samuel Norich has distinguished himself as an analyst of American Jewry's communal structures. He is the author of "What Will Bind Us Now? A report on the institutional ties between Israel and American Jewry." He is the youngest person ever to have been elected a vice president of the World Jewish Congress, a position he held from 1975 to 1981. From 1980 to 1992, he was executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the world's pre-eminent institution devoted to the documentation and study of the modern history and culture of East European and American Jewry. During his two-decade tenure as chief executive of the Forward Association, its publications broadened their reach, raised their already acclaimed journalistic quality, and took the lead among American Jewish publications in meeting the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities of digital media. Born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany in 1947, the son of Polish Jews, Mr. Norich emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1957, and was educated at Columbia, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at the University of Wisconsin. He and his wife Deborah Ugoretz have two daughters and live in Brooklyn.

Speaker Bio

Emily Garber, an archaeologist by training, recently retired after a 30+ year career in natural resources management. She has been researching her family heritage since 2007 and in 2013 traveled to Ukraine to visit archives and family villages. She holds a certificate from Boston University's Genealogical Research program.

Speaker Bio

A life-long New Yorker with family roots in Harlem dating back more than a century, Jeffrey S. Gurock is the author or editor of eighteen books, including the recent The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community, and over 100 scholarly articles. In 2013 his Jews of Gotham won the National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council. He also received national recognition for his work, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community; Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy and American Judaism, which won the Saul Viener Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. A leader among American Jewish historians, he served for 20 years as an editor of American Jewish History. Twice the chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, he is also a Fellow of the New York Academy of History.

Speaker Bio

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