The Herzl Colloquia

A Leadership Forum for Millstone Scholars

Twice each trimester, Millstone Scholars will participate in live, in-depth conversations with great leaders from Jewish and North American life—drawn from some of the most impactful institutions in the worlds of scholarship and academia, law and public policy, business and entrepreneurship.
 
 

Elliott Abrams

Elliott Abrams is the chairman of the Tikvah Fund, as well as chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition and Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.. He served as Special Assistant to the President and NSC Senior Director for the Near East and North Africa in the first term of George W. Bush, and as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor in the second term. In the Trump administration he served in the State Department as Special Representative for Iran and for Venezuela. He is the author of Undue Process, Security and Sacrifice, and Faith or Fear, and writes widely on U.S. foreign policy with special focus on the Middle East and the issues of democracy and human rights. His most recent book is Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring.

 

Prof. Leora Batnitzky

Leora Batnitzky is Perelman Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University as well as the Director of Princeton’s Tikvah Project on Jewish Thought. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, 2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge, 2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton). Her current project focuses on the conceptual and historical relations between modern religious thought (Jewish and Christian) and modern legal theory (analytic and Continental). She received a B.A. in philosophy from Barnard College, Columbia University and a B.A. in biblical studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Her M.A. and Ph.D. are in religion from Princeton University.

 

Prof. Robert P. George

Professor George holds Princeton’s celebrated McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and is the founding director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). He has served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology, of which he continues to be a corresponding member. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis, and Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, he also received a master’s degree in theology from Harvard and a doctorate in philosophy of law from Oxford University.

 

Roger Hertog

Roger Hertog is president of the Hertog Foundation and chairman emeritus of the Tikvah Fund. One of the founding partners of the investment research and management firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., which he joined in 1968, Mr. Hertog served as the firm’s president before its merger with Alliance Capital Management in 2000. In 2006 he retired from the successor company, AllianceBernstein, and is currently vice-chairman emeritus. An alumnus of the City College of New York, Mr. Hertog was previously chairman of The New-York Historical Society and The Manhattan Institute; he has also served on the boards of the American Enterprise Institute, the New York Philharmonic, the New York Public Library, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy. In 2007 Mr. Hertog was awarded the Medal of the National Endowment for the Humanities in recognition of his philanthropic efforts. In 2010 he received the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership.

 

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on child welfare and foster care issues. Specifically, her work analyzes the role of faith-based, civic, and community organizations in changing the foster care and adoption services landscape. She also studies how socioeconomic factors affect foster care placement and services and the impact of the opioid crisis on child welfare. She is concurrently a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. Her writing and research focuses on parenting, higher education, religion, philanthropy and culture, and she has been published in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, and Washington Post, among other publications. Her latest book is No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists are Wrecking Young Lives.

 

Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik

Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik is director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Israel to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. His essays on these subjects have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, First Things, Azure, Tradition, and the Torah U-Madda Journal. In August 2012, he gave the invocation at the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. He is the son of Rabbi Eliyahu Soloveichik, grandson of the late Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, and the great-nephew of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

 

Prof. Ruth Wisse

Recently retired from her position as Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, Professor Wisse is currently Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. Her books on literary subjects include an edition of Jacob Glatstein’s two-volume fictional memoir, The Glatstein Chronicles (2010), The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture (2003), and A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988). She is also the author of two political studies, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992) and Jews and Power (2007). Her latest book, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, a volume in the Tikvah-sponsored Library of Jewish Ideas, was recently published by Princeton University Press.

 

Rabbi David Wolpe

Named one of the 500 Most Influential People in Los Angeles in 2016 and again in 2017, Most Influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek and one of the 50 Most Influential Jews in the World by The Jerusalem Post, David Wolpe is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple. Rabbi Wolpe previously taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, Hunter College, and UCLA. A columnist for Time.com, he has been published and profiled in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post’s On Faith website, The Huffington Post, and the New York Jewish Week. He has been featured on The Today Show, Face the Nation, ABC This Morning, and CBS This Morning. In addition, Rabbi Wolpe has appeared prominently in series on PBS, A&E, History Channel, and Discovery Channel. Rabbi Wolpe is the author of eight books, including the national bestseller Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times. His book David, the Divided Heart was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards, and has been optioned for a movie by Warner Bros.

 

Ofir Zigelman

Ofir Zigelman is head of expansion strategy for Europe and Israel at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing unit. Prior to AWS, he served as senior intelligence officer in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and team commander in Unit 8200, an elite Israeli intelligence technology unit. He holds a law degree from Tel Aviv University, an MBA from the Wharton School, and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School. He is currently completing a master’s in international relations at the University of Cambridge, where his dissertation explores the impact of artificial intelligence on national power. He serves on the advisory board of Tikvah and is vice president of the Harvard Club of Israel.