Shavuot at Pearlstone

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz

Rav Shmuly is the author of 24 books on Jewish ethics and his writings have appeared in outlets as diverse as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Atlantic among many other secular and religious publications. He has served as speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and a Rothschild Fellow in Cambridge, UK.

Rav Shmuly received a Masters from Harvard University, a Masters from Yeshiva University, and his Doctorate from Columbia University, and was ordained as a rabbi by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, along with 2 private ordinations in Israel. He is the President & Dean of the Valley Beit Midrash, a national Jewish pluralistic adult learning & leadership center, and the Founder & President of Uri L’Tzedek, a Jewish Social Justice organization, Shamayim, a Jewish animal advocacy movement, and YATOM, the Jewish foster and adoption network. His wife Shoshana, and their four children live in Scottsdale, Arizona. They have also served as foster parents.

Dr. Melissa Klapper 

Dr. Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rowan University.  She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 (2005); Small Strangers:  The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925 (2007); and Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace:  American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (2013), which won the National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies.  She has won numerous awards and fellowships for her scholarship and lectures frequently in academic and community settings.  Her most recent book is Ballet Class: An American History (2020). Dr. Klapper is also a 3 day Jeopardy! champion who competed in the 2024 Tournament of Champions.

Rabbi Noah Gradofsky 

Rabbi Noah Gradofsky earned a BA in Political Science/Economics Cum Laude from Columbia and a BA in Talmud with Honors and Distinction from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1998.  From there he attended law school in the evenings, earning his J.D. with honors in 2002 from Rutgers University, and rabbinical school at night, receiving ordination in 2004 from the Institute of Traditional Judaism, part of the Union for Traditional Judaism.  He has practiced law since 2002 and served as a pulpit rabbi in Long Beach, New York for six years.  In recent years Rabbi Gradofsky’s rabbinic work has focused on High Holiday pulpits and other “pinch-rabbi-ing” as well as his service as Vice President of the Union for Traditional Judaism. 

Dr. Joel Hecker 

Joel Hecker serves as Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where he has been the only orthodox faculty member since 1995. Hecker is the author of Volume 11 and (with Nathan Wolski) Volume 12 of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition; Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah; and numerous articles in the history of Jewish Mysticism. He received rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University (1990) and his PhD in Jewish Studies from New York University (1996).  

Rabbi Avram Mlotek 

Avram Mlotek is a rabbi, cantor, licensed social worker and writer. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News and nearly every major Jewish publication. A grandchild of Holocaust survivors and noted Yiddish culturalists, Mlotek is the co-creator and librettist of Amid Falling Walls, a new musical featuring Yiddish songs written during the Holocaust, which had its world premiere at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Fall 2023 and which won the 2024 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revue. A founder of Base, a new model of Jewish outreach now operating nationally in over a dozen cities, Mlotek has been acknowledged by The Forward as one of “America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis” and a “changemaker” by The New York Jewish Week. He is the author of Why Jews Do That or 30 Questions Your Rabbi Never Answered (Skyhorse Publishing) and Passover in a Pandemic (Yiddish and English – Ben Yehuda). Mlotek currently works as a rabbi in hospice care in New York and therapist for Kav Counseling, a service for artists and creative professionals. 

Joey Weisenberg  

Musician, composer, and teacher Joey Weisenberg is the founder and director of Hadar’s Rising Song Institute, which cultivates grassroots musical-spiritual creativity in Jewish community. He is the author of The Torah of Music (2017 National Jewish Book Award) and Building Singing Communities. L’eila, his eighth album of original music, is Joey’s latest release on Rising Song Records. 

Dr. Tamara Lev

Tamara Lotner Lev is the Climate Policy Director of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and is currently the Israel Institute Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Ellie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University. Tamara holds an LLB from the Hebrew University, and a PhD from Tel Aviv University School of Law. After completing her PhD Tamara joined the Israeli Department of Justice and worked under the Deputy Attorney General in environmental law and policy, offshore oil and gas regulation and related fields. Tamara has been teaching environmental law at Tel Aviv University since 2020 and served as a board member of the Israel Society for Ecology and Environmental Sciences.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor 

Rabbi Menachem Creditor serves as the Pearl and Ira Meyer Scholar in Residence at UJA-Federation New York and was the founder of Rabbis Against Gun Violence. An acclaimed author, scholar, and speaker with over 4 million views of his online videos and essays, he was named by Newsweek as one of the fifty most influential rabbis in America. His numerous books and 6 albums of original music include the global anthem “Olam Chesed Yibaneh” and the COVID-era 2-volume anthology “When We Turned Within.” He and his wife Neshama Carlebach live in New York, where they are raising their five children.