Edward S. Beck

Edward S. Beck is a Professor, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Walden University, Director of the Susquehanna Institute and President-Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Until recently before his retirement, he also with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

He holds a Bachelors and Masters Degree from New York University and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served on the faculties and student personnel staffs of The Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, New York University. He has also taught at Alvernia College, Rosemont College and Lebanon Valley College. He is the author of numerous article and book chapters and is a co-author of Mental Health Counselor Training Standards (1987)[1]

He is a Past President of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, the Pennsylvania Counseling Association, The Mental Health Association of the Capital Region (PA). He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Counseling and Development (now American Counseling Association). A Licensed Professional Counselor,he is also certified by both the National Board of Certified Counselors and Academy of Clinical Mental Health Counselors.

In his capacities as President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East,Beck told the Cleveland Jewish News that " professors have been let go or denied tenure for espousing pro-Israel or Zionist viewpoints," while "Theories put forth by Noam Chomsky and others calling Israel a colonial power have captivated academicians." [2]

Beck described the British University and Colleges Union's decision to promote a boycott of Israeli universities as a disgraceful anti-intellectual act. He said: “All of those who believe in academic freedom must speak forcefully to prevent a minority of extremists in the UCU to politicise, control and shut down the free exchange of ideas, where any group, whether based upon religion or national origin is singled out for exclusion.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights organization with over 400,000 family members.

Born in New York in 1950, Abraham Cooper has been a longtime activist for Jewish and human rights causes on five continents. His extensive involvement in Soviet Jewry included visiting refuseniks in the 1970s, helping to open the first Jewish Cultural Center in Moscow in the 1980s, and lecturing at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Sakharov Foundation in the 1990s.

In 1977, he came to Los Angeles to help Rabbi Marvin Hier found the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Rabbi Cooper had the remarkable opportunity to know and work with Simon Wiesenthal, of blessed memory, for nearly thirty years. Together with Rabbi Hier, Rabbi Cooper regularly meets with world leaders, including Pope Benedict XVI, presidents and foreign ministers to defend the rights of the Jewish people, combat terrorism and promote intergroup relations.

For three decades, Rabbi Cooper has overseen the Wiesenthal Center’s international social action agenda ranging from worldwide antisemitism and extremist groups, Nazi crimes, to Interfaith Relations and the struggle to thwart the anti-Israel Divestment campaign, to worldwide promotion of tolerance education. He is widely recognized as a pioneer and international authority on issues related to digital hate and the Internet.

In 1992, and 2003 he helped coordinate international conferences in Paris on antisemitism cosponsored by UNESCO. In 1997, he coordinated the Center’s international conference, Property and Restitution-The Moral Debt to History in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2000, he coordinated an International Conversation on Digital Hate in Berlin, which was cosponsored by the German government.

He has testified before the United Nations (where the Center is an official NGO) in New York and Geneva, presented testimony at the US Senate, the Japanese Diet, the French Parliament, the OSCE and is a founding member of Israel’s Global Forum on Antisemitism.

In an historic first, in February 2004, Rabbi Cooper traveled to Khartoum and was the first Jewish leader to meet with the leadership of Sudan including President Al Bashir to discuss human rights and terrorism- related issues. He has met with King Hussein, King Abdullah and Prince Hassan of Jordan, former Indonesian President Wahid and then Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheik Tantawi.

In 2005, Rabbi Cooper participated in an international conference on Terrorism convened in Madrid on the first anniversary of the infamous train bombings in Spain’s capital.

Rabbi Cooper’s trailblazing work in Asia has helped counter negative stereotypes about Jews and open new venues in dialogue and intergroup relations in Japan, South Korea, The People’s Republic of China, India, and Indonesia. He was a leader of the Center’s mission to China that brought the first Jewish-sponsored exhibition to the world’s most populous nation. He also arranged national prime-time broadcasts of the Center’s documentary, Genocide, on Chinese and Russian TV to estimated audiences of ½ billion and 80 million, respectively. Rabbi Cooper brought the Center’s special Anne Frank and the Holocaust to tour Japan which has been viewed by two million Japanese in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures. He brought the Center’s Courage to Remember Holocaust Exhibit to the Gandhi Cultural Center in New Delhi. He recently traveled to Jakarta, Indonesia to meet with former president Wahid and other religious leaders in the world’s most populous Moslem nation.

Rabbi Cooper is the editor-in-chief of Response magazine. His editorials appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Globe and Mail, National Post, Le Monde, the Japan Times, The Straits Times and Midstream magazine. He supervises the Center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project, supervised the Center’s entry into the digital age through www.wiesenthal.com., and created the Center’s innovative AskMusa.com, a multilingual website designed to familiarize Moslems around the world to the values of the Jewish people, its history and Faith.

As associate dean, he supervised the research and production of the Interactive Learning Center on the Holocaust and World War II for the Center’s renowned Museum of Tolerance, which has been utilized by over 4 million visitors. He has also Rabbi Cooper has authored exhibitions ranging from Simon Wiesenthal to Jackie Robinson. He has written the World Book Encyclopedia’s entry on Raoul Wallenberg and edited two major works on this Holocaust hero.

Rabbi Cooper has his BA and MS from Yeshiva University and a Ph.D. from the Jewish University of America. He is a recipient of Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Community Service Leadership Memorial Award and of the Orthodox Union’s National Leadership Award.

In 2003, Rabbi Cooper served on the transition team for Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 2007, Rabbi Cooper was listed by Newsweek among the top most influential Rabbis in the United States.

Irwin Cotler

Irwin Cotler is presently a Canadian Member of Parliament first elected in a by-election in November 1999 with 92% of the votes. On December 12, 2003, the Prime Minister appointed him Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. He was reappointed following the General Election of June 2004 and served in that office until the general election of January 2006, when the Liberal government was defeated. He is currently serving as Special Counsel on Human Rights & International Justice, is a member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Human Rights, and Chair of the All-Party Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition. A leading public advocate in and out of Parliament for the Human Rights Agenda, he headed the Canadian Delegation to the Stockholm International Forum on the Prevention of Genocide.

Mr. Cotler is currently on leave as a Professor of Law at McGill University, where he is Director of its Human Rights Programme, and Chair of InterAmicus, the McGill-based International Human Rights Advocacy Centre. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Yale Law School, and is the recipient of nine Honourary Doctorates, including from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose various citations refer to him as “a scholar and advocate of international stature.”

An international human rights lawyer, Professor Cotler served as Counsel to former prisoners of conscience in the former Soviet Union (Andrei Sakharov & Nathan Sharansky), South Africa (Nelson Mandela), Latin America (Jacobo Timmerman), and Asia (Trade Union Leader Muchtar Pakpahan). He later served as international legal counsel to imprisoned Russian environmentalist Aleksandr Nikitin; Nigerian playwright and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka; the Chilean-Canadian group Vérité et justice in the Pinochet case; Chinese-Canadian political prisoner, Professor KunLun Zhang. More recently, he served as Counsel to the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world, Professor Saad Edin Ibrahim; and, as International Legal Council to Shoaib Choudhury, a Muslim Bangladesh journalist presently charged with sedition, treason, and blasphemy for advocating nothing other than inter-faith dialogue and peace with Israel.

A noted peace activist, he has been a leader in the movement for arms control, and helped develop “Peace Law” as an area of both academic inquiry and legal advocacy. As well, Professor Cotler has been engaged –both as scholar and participant observer– in the search for peace in the Middle East. He has lectured in both Arab countries and Israel for over thirty years, and has been an active participant in rapprochement dialogues between Israelis and Palestinians. He was the first Canadian Government Minister to visit the Middle East – promoting a common justice agenda in the region– and secured agreement among the Justice Ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority to participate in the first-ever joint Justice Forum.

Professor Cotler’s efforts have resulted in his chairing, or being a member of, a number of governmental and citizens' Commissions of Inquiry –including being Chair of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg; Chair of the Commission on Economic Coercion and Discrimination; and member of the Commission of Inquiry on the Crime of Apartheid. Most recently, he has spoken at the human-rights meeting preceding the anti-Israel Durban II UN Conference.

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is an internationally renowned environmental expert and business consultant and has extensive background in Jewish public affairs.

He was born in Vienna, grew up in Amsterdam and moved to Israel with his family in 1968 from Paris. He is a chemist and economist by training, holds a Ph.D. in environmental studies and has a teacher training degree in Judaism from the Dutch Jewish Seminary.

In the past thirty-five years he has been an international consultant specializing in business strategy. He has worked in twenty countries and his clients have included the boards of several of the world’s largest multinational companies as well as governments. Dr Gerstenfeld was a Board Member of the Israel Corporation, one of Israel’s largest investment companies, and several other Israeli public companies.

Dr. Gerstenfeld has been a non-executive board member of the Israel Corporation (an investment company) and other Israeli companies. He is editor of the The Jewish Political Studies Review, co-publisher of the Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints, Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism and Changing Jewish Communities and a member of the council of the Foundation for Research of Dutch Jewry, of which he was formerly the vice-chairman.

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is a leading expert on Judaism and the environment. He lectures and publishes extensively on the subject, internationally and in Israel.
By the beginning of 2008, he had published 12 books in five languages, among which are the best-selling Rivalutare l'Italia (jointly with Lorenzo Necci); The New Clothes of European Anti-Semitism (co-edited with Shmuel Trigano); Academics against Israel and the Jews; and, Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The Nordic Countries, Israel, and the Jews.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld

Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Professor of English and Jewish Studies and Director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington, received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1967 and has taught at Indiana University since 1968.

The editor of William Blake: Essays (1969) and the Collected Poetry of John Wheelwright (1972), he is also the author of numerous scholarly and critical articles on American poetry, Jewish writers, and the literature of the Holocaust. Indiana University Press published his Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel (co-edited with Irving Greenberg) in 1979 and, in 1980, published his A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (the book has since appeared in German and Polish translations). With his wife, Erna Rosenfeld, he translated Gunther Schwarberg's The Murders at Bullenhuser Damm, a book on Nazi medical atrocities published by the Indiana University Press in 1984. His Imagining Hitler was published by Indiana University Press in 1985 (available also in a Japanese translation). He edited Thinking About the Holocaust: After Half a Century (Indiana University Press, 1997), a collection of articles by 13 scholars, which includes his essay, The Americanization of the Holocaust. His The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature has just appeared with Indiana University Press. In recent years, he has also been writing about contemporary anti-Semitism, and some of his articles on this subject have evoked intense debate. He is also editor of a series of books on Jewish Literature and Culture published by Indiana University Press.

Professor Rosenfeld has served as an editorial board member of various scholarly journals, including Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as well as a board member and scholarly consultant to various Jewish institutions and organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Lilly Endowment, the Wexner Heritage Foundation, and the Koret Foundation. He held a 5-year Presidential appointment on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council (2002-2007) and presently serves on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum=s Executive Committee. He is Chair of the Academic Committee of the Museums Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Professor Rosenfeld was awarded the Doctor of Humane Letters degree, honoris causa, by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in May, 2007.

Charles A. Small

Dr. Charles Asher Small, originally from Montreal, is the Founding Director of the Yale University Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. He is also the Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. Charles received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, McGill University, Montreal; a M.Sc. in Urban Development Planning in Economics, Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London; and a Doctorate of Philosophy (D.Phil), St. Antony's College, Oxford University. Charles Small completed post-doctorate research at the Groupement de recherche ethnicité et société, Université de Montréal. He was the VATAT Research Fellow at Ben Gurion University, Beersheva, and taught in departments of sociology and geography at Goldsmith College, University of London, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv and the Institute of Urban Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He was also an Associate Professor and the Director of Urban Studies at SCSU, Connecticut. He worked as a consultant and policy advisor in North America, Europe, Southern Africa and the Middle East; and lectured internationally. Charles specializes social and cultural theory, globalization and national identity, socio-cultural policy, racism(s) - including Antisemitism. He is also the President and Founder of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

Robert S. Wistrich is Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Head of the International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. His new book is A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.

He is the author and editor of numerous books, several of which have won international awards. These include Socialism and the Jews (Oxford University Press, 1982), The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (OUP, 1989) which won the Austrian State Prize for Danubian History and Antisemitism, the Longest Hatred (Pantheon, 1992) which received the H.H. Wingate Prize for non-fiction in the UK. It was also the basis for the PBS film documentary which Professor Wistrich scripted and co-edited. His most recent books are: Hitler and the Holocaust (Random House, 2001) and the edited volume Nietzsche. Godfather of Fascism? (Princeton, 2002). Between 1999 and 2001 Professor Wistrich was one of six scholars who were appointed to an international Catholic-Jewish historical commission to examine the wartime record of Pope Pius the XII. In June 2003, he initiated and acted as Chief Historical Advisor for a BBC film documentary on contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism, entitled “Blaming the Jews”.

Judith Woodsworth

Judith Woodsworth became President of Concordia University on Aug. 1, 2008. She returns to the institution where she began her teaching and administrative career in 1980. Prior to her return to Concordia, Judith Woodsworth was President of Laurentian University from 2002 until 2008. Before that, she was Vice-President (Academic) at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, for five years.

Born in Paris, France, Dr. Woodsworth grew up in Winnipeg and won a scholarship to McGill University, where she received a B.A. in French and Philosophy. She earned a Licence ès Lettres from the Université de Strasbourg in France, and a Ph.D. in French Literature from McGill.

Her early professional career mixed teaching and working as a translator, including two years in the federal Department of National Defence. Her full-time academic career began in 1980 when she joined the Département d’études françaises at Concordia University. Over the next 17 years, she held various administrative positions, including program director, assistant dean in the Humanities Division, department chair and vice-dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science.

Dr. Woodsworth’s academic work includes numerous conference presentations and publications in the fields of French literature and translation studies. She was co-editor of Translators Through History / Les Traducteurs dans l’histoire, a history of translation that has gained an international reputation and has been translated into several languages. In 1997, she published Still Lives, an English translation of a novel by award-winning Québec author Pierre Nepveu.

She is a certified translator and member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada. She was founding president of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies and has served the translation profession in a number of other ways nationally and internationally. At Laurentian, she also holds the position of Full Professor in the Department of French Studies and Translation. In 1999, she was inducted as an Officer in the Ordre de la Pléiade, Ordre de la Francophonie et du dialogue des cultures for her work in promoting the French language and intercultural relations. From 2001 to 2004, she was president and national chair of French for the Future/Le français pour l’avenir.

Dr. Woodsworth is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, a partnership between Laurentian University and Lakehead University. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation at Laurentian, and was recently elected Chair of its founding Board of Directors. She has served on committees of the Council of Ontario Universities, and is currently a member of two provincial task forces on French Language Education. At the national level, she was a Governor of the Canadian Unity Council and served as Chair of the Board of Directors of World University Service of Canada. She is a member of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada’s Standing Advisory Committee on Educational Issues and Funding, and the Comité de direction of the Association des universités de la Francophonie canadienne.

She has also served the wider community. In Halifax, she sat on the board of directors of Symphony Nova Scotia and Pier 21, Canada’s immigration museum. She was Co-chair of the 2003 United Way Campaign of Greater Sudbury, has served on the board of the Sudbury Theatre Centre, and is currently a board member of the Sudbury Food Bank and the distance education network “Contact North.” She is a member of the “Healthy Community Cabinet” of the City of Greater Sudbury.

Judith Woodsworth is married to former Journalism professor Lindsay Crysler, and is a proud mom and grandmother.