Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University and Research Associate at the Institute for Culture, Religion and World Affairs there. He has lived and taught at universities in the United States, in Israel and in Hungary where he was a Fulbright Fellow from 1990-1992. He lived close to twenty years in Israel where he was a member of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the early 1970s. His books include The Idea of Civil Society (Free Press, 1992), Inner-worldly Individualism (Transaction Press, 1994), The Problem of Trust (Princeton University Press, 1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (Princeton University Press, 2000) with Mark Lichbach Market and Community (Penn State University Press, 2000), Modest Claims: Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition (Notre Dame University Press, 2004) and with Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford University Press, 2008). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.

Montgomery received his PhD in Religion and Society and his dissertation—The Transmission of Religious and Cultural Knowledge and Potentiality in Practice: An Anthropology of Social Navigation in the Kyrgyz Republic—focused on how the transmission of religious and cultural knowledge influences the practice of religion and culture. He is a post-doctoral fellow in the Initiative in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding at Emory University and a past Rockefeller Visiting Fellow in the Program on Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. In addition, he has been a research fellow at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs and the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology and Policy, both at Boston University; has worked as a Legislative Assistant for the U.S. House of Representatives; and has served as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer. He has conducted long-term anthropological field research in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan as an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Scholar and in Albania as an American Councils Title VIII-grant recipient, and holds graduate degrees in medical ethics from Michigan State University and in international relations from Boston University. His publications include writings on the diversity of everyday religious life in Central Asia and his current research on the social aspects of religious change in Central Asia and the Balkans.

Wasserfall is the newly appointed Director of Evaluation and Liaison to Schools of The Center for the Advancement of Hebrew Teaching and Learning Inc. She is leaving her position as a Senior Research Associate with Education Matters Inc. She is an anthropologist with a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has wide experience in three different continents. For many years her work focused on gender and ethnic studies in Israel, and in the Jewish world. She taught gender studies and qualitative methodology classes at the Hebrew University, Duke University, Chapel Hill (NC), University of Colorado, Boulder and Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. She has been a Fulbright fellow as well as a beneficiary of Ford Foundation grants. She has widely published in the area of gender and is the editor of Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law (UPNE, 1999). With her move to Boston, Wasserfall shifted her interest to Jewish education. She was the Special Coordinator at JCDS (Boston Jewish Community Day School) in which capacity she directed the AISNE accreditation process. She also co-authored (with Susan Sevitz) a study on Jewish pluralism in a local Day School. She has wide experience in qualitative evaluation and is the yearly evaluator of the ISSRPL. At Education Matters, Wasserfall co-led the Special Education Initiative and contributed to the Peerless Initiative and other projects. In her newly appointed position she will focus on internal evaluation and be part of the senior leadership at the Center for the Advancement of Hebrew teaching and Learning, Inc. She is also a committed yoga practitioner and teacher, having completed teacher training in the Iyengar tradition.

Schapiro is an attorney practicing in Boston, Massachusetts and presently serves as the corporate attorney for the ISSRPL. His legal interests are in issues that relate to the public interest and the public sphere as well as in Jewish education. He has served as a Board Member for twenty years and President for seven years of Camp Ramah of New England. Camp Ramah is a Hebrew speaking overnight summer camp for Jewish youth that is operated under the educational supervision of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (the rabbinical seminary for the Conservative Movement.) Most recently, in his law practice, he successfully defended the decision of the Boston Redevelopment Authority to convey a parcel of land to the Islamic Society of Boston for the construction of a Mosque and Community Center against a challenge that the conveyance violated the principle of separation of church and state.