Steve Brand

(filmmaker)

Steve Brand is an Emmy Award-winning film and television producer. He has produced newsmagazine segments and longform work for ABC, CBS and NBC News, as well as for PBS and cable.

His work includes A Search for Solid Ground: The Intifada Through Israeli Eyes, and the Emmy-winning A Time for Change, the concluding hour of a five-part series on healthcare with former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Steve received his M.F.A. from NYU Graduate Film School, where he wrote and directed about that time, a 22-minute film that won 1st Prize at the Baltimore Film Festival.

After graduating, he wrote and directed comedy skits for the children’s tv program, Big Blue Marble. He also co-produced and edited several short films for NYC Off-Broadway productions – a revival of Boy Meets Girl, directed by John Lithgow, as well as the LaMaMa Theatre production of C.O.R.F.A.X.(Don’t Ask), written and directed by Wilford Leach.

Steve worked extensively as a producer for ABC News 20/20, receiving Emmy nominations for Till Death Do Us Part, a report on widows and widowers, and for No Justice at All, an investigation into the Clarence Thomas-led Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s  decision not to prosecute age discrimination at Xerox.

At ABC’s Primetime Live, Steve produced Whose Child?, about the NYC foster care system. At CBS News’ Street Stories, he produced reports on child demonstrators in the anti-abortion movement and on a “Freedom Summer” voter registration drive in the Deep South.

At NOW on PBS, Steve produced segments on the Bush Administration’s domestic spying program and on the minimum wage as an election-year “wedge” issue.

Prior to his producing work, Steve was a film editor whose work included Emmy-Award winning newsmagazine segments on the end of the Vietnam War, the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, and on the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide.

Steve received a Guggenheim Fellowship for developing a film adaptation of A Nervous Splendor, Frederick Morton’s chronicle of fin de siècle Vienna. He was awarded three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for Kaddish.

He is the author of Al and Aggie, an original screenplay, and co-author with Robert Mottley of a screenplay adaptation of Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev.

Steve is currently working on Praying With My Legs, a documentary about the life, thought and transformative impact of religious thinker and human rights activist Abraham Joshua Heschel.

The son of Viennese Jews who escaped Nazi-annexed Austria following Kristallnacht in 1938, Steve lives in New York City with his wife, journalist Nancy Ramsey, and their son Caleb. His older son, Lee, is an attorney living in San Francisco.

Yossi Klein Halevi

(main subject)

Yossi Klein Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Maital Friedman, he co-directs the Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI).

The program invites North American Muslims to explore how Jews understand Judaism, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood in order to build relationships of understanding, respect and trust between North American Muslim and Jewish communities.

Yossi is the author of the New York Times bestseller Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (HarperCollins, 2018), a heartfelt plea for peace and new dialogue based on common ground in faith.

His previous book, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year.

 Yossi writes for the op-ed pages of leading American and Israeli newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Times of Israel.

His magazine writing includes The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Report and Tablet.

 A longtime contributor to the Village Voice, he also founded and was the editor of New Jewish Times, an alternative Jewish monthly.

Yossi’ book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, was described by novelist Cynthia Ozick as “a permanent masterwork.” The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, called it “extraordinary and heartbreaking … a book full of wonders.”

His first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, is the story of his teenage years as a follower of the militant right-wing rabbi Meir Kahane, and his subsequent disillusionment with Jewish radicalism. The New York Times called it “a book of burning importance.”

Yossi has been active in Middle East reconciliation work, and serves as chairman of Open House, an Arab Israeli-Jewish Israeli center in the town of Ramle, near Tel Aviv.

Yossi was also one of the founders of the now-defunct Israeli-Palestinian Media Forum, which brought together Israeli and Palestinian journalists.

He was a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem from 2003-2009.

In 2013 he was a visiting professor of Israel Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Illinois.

Yossi was born in Brooklyn, New York. He has a B.A. in Jewish studies from Brooklyn College and an M.S. in journalism from Northwestern University.

He moved to Israel in 1982, and lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Sarah, a landscape designer. They have three children.

Robert Achs, z"l

(Director of Photography)

Over his 20-year career, Bob Achs was cinematographer on more than 50 documentaries including the award-winning Taxi Cab Confessions for HBO, Surviving AIDS, No Maps on My Taps and Kaddish.

His cinematography credits include Eyes on the Prize, American Experience, Frontline, Independent Lens, NOVA, 48 Hours, America Undercover, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, The 2nd Voyage of the Mimi, Centralia Fire (which he also produced), and a short documentary on Rose Kennedy.

Later in his life Bob became an editor, cutting four episodes of the television series Art in the 21st Century.

Bob loved bluegrass music and played regularly with a group in Sag Harbor.

An avid sailor on his boat Eclipse, Bob was also an inventor, writer, and long-distance runner.

The Brooklyn native graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, graduated magna cum laude from Yale, and received his MFA from NYU’s Graduate Institute of Film & TV.

Bob died of cancer in 2005 at the age of 54. He is survived by his wife, Jackie Leopold, a former teacher and television producer, and their daughter, Rachel, who is now completing her doctoral dissertation in philosophy at Harvard.

Andy Statman

(music)

Exploring the roots of klezmer and American bluegrass with improvised jazz, Andy Statman is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s most brilliant klezmer musicians. As an accomplished clarinetist and mandolin player, he has recorded numerous albums, from traditional klezmer and bluegrass to improvisations on niggunim, mystical melodies associated with Hasidic Judaism.

In the words of the New Yorker, "Andy Statman, clarinet and mandolin virtuoso, is an American visionary." His music expands the boundaries of traditional and improvisational forms.

Born in 1950 into a long line of cantors, composers, and both classical and vaudeville musicians, Andy grew up in Queens, New York. His early musical influences included klezmer records played at family gatherings, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway show tunes, his rabbi in Hebrew school singing Hasidic songs, rock and roll, big band jazz, and classical music.

When his older brother started bringing home bluegrass records, Andy took up the guitar and banjo, eventually switching to mandolin under the tutelage of David Grisman. He was soon performing with local bands at multiple venues and on Sunday afternoons in Washington Square Park.

At age 17 – after hearing Albert Ayler – Andy began to study saxophone, which he played in free jazz, funk, rock, and Chicago blues bands while expanding his mandolin playing in similar directions. In 1970 he joined experimental groups Country Cooking and Breakfast Special.

Still broadening his horizons, Andy took up the clarinet and studied Greek, Albanian, and Azerbaijani music.

In 1975, he sought out the legendary klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras and became his protégé. Wanting Andy to carry on his legacy, Tarras bequeathed four of his clarinets to the younger virtuoso.

In the late 1970s, Andy recorded Jewish Klezmer Music, a recording that became a touchstone for the 1970s klezmer revival; and Flatbush Waltz, a mandolin masterpiece of post-bebop jazz improvisations and ethnically inspired original compositions.

As a clarinetist, Andy began to zero in on the sublimely ecstatic, centuries-old Hasidic melodies that lie at the heart of klezmer music – melodies that were embedded in the religious path he had come to follow. This led to his galvanizing klezmer music with the spiritually oriented jazz of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler and other forms of music he had explored.

Andy has appeared on more than 100 recordings, including more than thirty under his own name. He has recorded and/or toured with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Ricky Skaggs, Béla Fleck, David Grisman, Itzhak Perlman, Vassar Clements, Stéphane Grappelli, Paul Shaffer, and Kenny Werner.

A Grammy nominee, Andy has been the subject of dozens of feature articles, from The New York Times to Rolling Stone. In 2012, he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

The Andy Statman Trio, which includes bassist Jim Whitney and percussionist Larry Eagle, plays regularly at Darech Amuno Synagogue in Greenwich Village and tours nationally as schedules allow.

A baal teshuvah, Andy is married to the former Barbara Soloway, an artist and teacher. They have 4 children and 14 grandchildren.

(sources: CTMD.org, arts.gov, Wikipedia)