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Dr. Adler is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Thought and Judaism and Gender at the School of Religion, University of Southern California and the Rabbinical School at the Los Angeles campus, the first joint appointment between these two institutions. Dr. Adler was one of the first theologians to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into the interpretation of Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics. She is the author of many articles that have appeared in Blackwell's Companion to Feminist Philosophy, Beginning Anew: A Woman's Companion to the High Holy Days, Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, Lifecycles, The Jewish Condition, and On Being a Jewish Feminist.

Aryeh Cohen is Chair of Rabbinic Studies and Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literature at the University of Judaism. He has taught at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and Brandeis University. Dr. Cohen is the author of Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law and the Poetics of Sugyot (Scholars Press, 1998), co-editor of Beginning/Again: Towards a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts (Seven Bridges Press, 2001). He is a board member of the Society for Textual Reasoning, Sh’ma and the Progressive Jewish Alliance. Dr. Cohen lectures widely on Rabbinics, on politics and on the contemporary Jewish scene. His writing on these topics and others has been published in The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, The Association of Jewish Studies Review, Sh’ma, Tikkun, Textual Reasoning, The Reconstructionist, Kerem, The Jewish Spectator, Hebrew Union College Annual and elsewhere.

Dr. Zierler is the Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies and Modern Jewish Literature. Prior to joining HUC-JIR she was a Research Fellow in the English Department of Hong Kong University where she lived for five and a half years while teaching at the University.

Dr. Zierler received her Ph.D. and her MA from Princeton University, and her BA from Yeshiva University, Stern College. She also studied at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Michelelet Bruria in Jerusalem. Dr. Zierler is currently working towards an MFA in Fiction Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her book, And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Hebrew Women’s Writing, is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press. At HUC-JIR she teaches courses on American Jewish Literature, Popular Culture and Theology, Modern Hebrew Literature, Holocaust Literature, The Jew and the Other, as well in addition to courses dealing with Gender and Judaism.