Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace

U.S. foreign policy expert and highly awarded columnist Bret Stephens is renowned for his “incisive columns on American foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist.” Bret is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he served as deputy editorial page editor and wrote the “Global View” foreign affairs column – for which he was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. He is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and Coming Global Disorder and is currently working on a book about the future of the free world. Audiences value Bret’s timely insights and “breath of fresh air” delivery, and he has been in-demand with groups including the American Technion Society, the Chief Executives Organization, the Jewish Federations of Northeastern New York and Chicago, Community Advocates, Inc., and many more.

In addition to his work at The Times, Bret serves as Editor-in-Chief of Sapir – a Jewish quarterly published by the Maimonides Fund which offers ideas for a thriving Jewish future. Previously, he was Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Post. Bret is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including three honorary doctorates and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. In 2022, the government of Russia banned him for life from visiting that country. He sits on numerous academic advisory boards and was a co-Founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative – an organization dedicated to advancing democratic principles throughout the world.

Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, Omer Bartov's early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (1985), and Hitler's Army (1991). He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books Murder in Our Midst (1996), Mirrors of Destruction (2000), and Germany's War and the Holocaust (2003). Bartov's interest in representation also led to his study, The "Jew" in Cinema (2005), which examines the recycling of antisemitic stereotypes in film. His more recent work has focused on interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. His book Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), investigates the politics of memory in West Ukraine, while Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), is a microhistory of ethnic coexistence and violence. The book received the National Jewish Book Award and the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, among others, and has been translated into several languages. Bartov's Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022) explores the centuries pre-dating the Holocaust. Bartov's current interest is reflected in his new book, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023), and his forthcoming books, Israel: What Went Wong? and The Broken Promise: A Personal Political History of Israel and Palestine, expected to be published in the coming couple of years. Bartov's novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, came out in January 2023.

Dr. Rula Hardal is the Palestinian Co-Director of “A Land for All – Two States, One Homeland” (A joint Palestinian – Israeli political organization), and a research fellow at the Kogod Center for the Study of Jewish and Contemporary Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

She received her doctorate in political science from the University of Hanover in Germany, where she worked as a lecturer of Political Science and International Relations for several years. In 2015, she returned to Israel and joined Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, East Jerusalem, as an associate professor of political science until the summer of 2021. For some of her years there, she headed the Department of Social Work. She was also during the last years a visiting professor of political science at The Arab American University in Ramallah, The University of Osaka in Japan and University of Lisbon in Portugal.

She is a member of two research groups on nationalism and citizenship in Israel and peace based-partnership at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, and member of the board of directors of “Aadalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel”. Her research interests are on the field of national minorities, colonialism and post-colonialism, social movements and feminist activism in the Middle East and an expert of the Palestinian nationalism and the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.

Sarah Wildman is an op-ed page editor at the New York Times. She is the co-creator, producer, and host of Foreign Policy’s First Person podcast.

Prior to joining FP as a deputy editor, she was the global identities and borders writer at Vox, a position she originated. Sarah Wildman has lived in and reported from Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Washington, Jerusalem and Berlin. She was a Dart Center Ochberg fellow (a project of the Columbia School of Journalism) in 2015 and the 2014 Barach Non Fiction Writing Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. Wildman won the 2010 Peter R. Weitz Prize, from the German Marshall Fund, a prize awarded for "excellence and originality," in European coverage, a 2011 Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for commentary, and a 2008 Lowell Thomas Award Winner for travel writing. 

Wildman has received numerous grants and competitve fellowships including an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship in Berlin, an American Council on Germany Fellowship in Berlin, a Milena Jesenská fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism (now called the International Reporting Project).  In March 2013 she received a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant to report on the future of Jerusalem. Wildman wrote Paper Love, for Riverhead/Penguin, while a visiting scholar at the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Wildman is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Slate, and the New Yorker online. She has been on staff at The New Republic, a senior correspondent at The American Prospect and the Washington correspondent for The Advocate. Her stories have appeared in the Daily Beast, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Nation,The Washington Post, Travel and Leisure, New York, Departures, The Christian Science Monitor, Elle, Marie Claire, O the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Glamour, and Jerusalem Report, among others.  

She lives in Washington, DC with her partner and their two children.