Berkley Center

David Elcott is Henry and Marilyn Taub Professor of Practice in Public Service and Leadership and the director of the advocacy and political action specialization at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. His work has focused on civic obligation, community building, and interfaith and ethnic activism. He is the author of Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy (2021).

Thomas F. Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, an NGO committed to achieving worldwide acceptance of religious liberty. Farr is also a senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. From 2006 to 2018 he was an associate professor of the practice of religion and world affairs at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at the Berkley Center; during 2017 and 2018 he was director of the Religious Freedom Research Project and from 2011 to 2016 director of the Religious Freedom Project, both at the Berkley Center. After a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service—which included teaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy, serving as an advisor during U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and leading an interagency task force on verification provisions for the START II Treaty—Farr served as the first director of the U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2003.

Rabbi Michael Melchior is the founder and president of the Mosaica, an organization in Israel that works to cultivate a culture of conflict resolution, dialogue, and consensus building. Rabbi Melchior is also an activist who has helped to establish several other civil society organizations in Israel, a former Knesset member, the honorary chief rabbi of Norway, and the rabbi of a synagogue in south Jerusalem.

Rabbi Avi Shafran serves as Agudath Israel of America's director of public affairs. Before assuming his current position, Rabbi Shafran served as a Jewish studies teacher in secondary schools for nearly 20 years. He studied in Israel and at Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore, Maryland, receiving his rabbinical ordination from the latter institution.