Brian Bandell

Brian Bandell is the South Florida Business Journal's real estate editor who covers real estate, the business of health care providers and the business of higher education. He joined the Business Journal in 2004, and his coverage has won more than two dozen journalism awards, including a Green Eyeshade from the Society of Professional Journals in the Southeast U.S. and best business reporting from the Florida Press Club. He previously held roles at the Boca Raton News and the Associated Press. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Miami and is also a published author of science fiction and thriller novels who has spoken at the Miami Book Fair. 

Adam Bell

Veteran award-winning journalist Adam Bell is the business editor and the arts editor for The Charlotte Observer, where he has worked for the past 25 years in a variety of reporting and editing roles. Bell, who is based out of suburban Philadelphia, has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize five times. At the Observer, he oversees development and production of high-impact, exclusive content, and is an expert in using social media and analytics to engage and grow the online audience.

Yoav Ben-Horin

Yoav was born in New York City, where his father was an Israeli diplomat at the United Nations. With his foreign service family, he traveled and lived in several countries around the globe. After completing his military service as a Lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces, Yoav studied at Oxford and Harvard Universities. Before coming to California from graduate school at Harvard to join the Rand Corporation, he taught courses at Harvard on the political development of the modern Middle East and on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Over the years, Yoav has taught, lectured and spoken frequently on campuses, radio and television, on a wide range of Middle Eastern and Israeli political, social and strategic issues, as well as on American foreign policy and American-Jewish life and Diaspora-Israel relations. In July 2023 Yoav retired from de Toledo High School in Los Angeles, where he created and directed a department of Global Jewish Education at de Toledo High School. He currently resides in Connecticut.

Michael E. Bennett

Michael E. Bennett, former publisher and editor of the Cleveland Jewish News, is vice president of external affairs for the Cleveland Leadership Center. A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, he worked in newspapers for 25 years before forging a career in nonprofits. He still enjoys his print subscriptions to several newspapers much more than their digital offerings.

Lisa Brennan

Lisa Brennan is a writer in San Gabriel, Calif. She worked for over 25 years as a reporter at various American Lawyer newspapers and magazines, Bloomberg News and freelanced for news outlets and magazines. Brennan also does publicity for non-profits.

David Y. Chack

David Y. Chack is a professor in The Theatre School at DePaul University in Jewish and Holocaust Theatre/Performance. He is also producing artistic director of ShPIeL and TEATRON Festival of Jewish Theatre: Chicago, Los Angeles, Louisville, New York. He is a theatre consultant for Taube Center for Jewish Life and Learning in Warsaw as well as the Illinois Holocaust Museum. A director, producer and dramaturg throughout the United States, he was the initiator and programs curator for the 2016 Museum of the City of New York’s major exhibition “New York’s Yiddish Theatre: From Bowery To Broadway.”

He has written for American Theater Magazine, The Forward, and Howl-Round/Emerson College. His B.F.A. is from Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and Circle-in-the-Square Theatre on Broadway; and he did Masters work at Tufts University, and Ph.D. work with his mentor, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, at Boston University. He is vice president of the Alliance for Jewish Theater, an international umbrella for Jewish theatre worldwide.

Gary Cohn

Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Cohn is a longtime investigative reporter. Many of his stories have exposed wrongdoing and resulted in significant reforms. A reporter for more than three decades, Cohn has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses at USC Annenberg since 2004. In 2019, he was one of the editors who helped lead Annenberg’s groundbreaking Beacon Project, teaching and inspiring the next generation of investigative reporters.

Cohn has worked for The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, The Wall Street Journal, and for columnist Jack Anderson in Washington. He also served for two years as Atwood Professor of Journalism at the University of Alaska at Anchorage.

Cohn won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1998 and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1996 and 2001. His work has received numerous other prestigious journalism awards, including two Selden Ring Awards for investigative journalism, an Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) Medal, a George Polk Award for environmental reporting and two Overseas Press Club awards. He is currently working on a journalism project about the changing economics of college sports in a post-pandemic world.

Dawn Fallik

Dawn Fallik is an associate professor at the University of Delaware who teaches STEM students how to communicate to the public. She was a full-time reporter for 15 years, most recently for the medical and science desk at The Philadelphia Inquirer. She continues to publish with NPR, The Washington Post and Neurology Today. She has lived in 14 states including Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, California and New York.

Thom Fladung

Thom Fladung is managing partner of Hennes Communications, one of the few firms in the U.S. focused exclusively on crisis communications and reputation management. Hennes, with offices in Cleveland and Akron, offers a wide range of crisis management and crisis communications services, including media training, litigation communications support, issues and crisis preparation, social media strategy and peer reviews of crisis plans. Hennes works with hundreds of corporations and manufacturers, law firms, government agencies, nonprofits, hospitals, public and private schools and more.

Thom spent 33 years in newspaper newsrooms, most recently serving as managing editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. He also was managing editor of The Akron Beacon Journal and The Detroit Free Press and editor of The St. Paul Pioneer Press, in Minnesota. Thom, a native of Canton, Ohio, is president of the board of the Press Club of Cleveland.

Martin Golan

Martin Golan was an editor and reporter at Reuters for more than 25 years, after being a reporter and feature writer at daily newspapers. He has also published novels and poetry, his most recent, “One Night With Lilith,” a novel about a man convinced his wife is the alluring but dangerous Lilith of biblical legend. Before that came another, the novel “My Wife’s Last Lover,” and a collection of short stories, “Where Things Are When You Lose Them.” A book of poetry, “A Note of Consolation for Lucia Joyce,” was published in 2022.

Roy Gutterman

Roy Gutterman is an associate professor of communications law and journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

David Hammer

David Hammer is an award-winning investigative reporter at WWL-TV, the CBS station in New Orleans. He has won five Suncoast Regional Emmy Awards in the last eight years, including three Emmys for environmental reporting, one for investigative reporting and one for religion news. Hammer also won a national Scripps Howard Award and an international beat reporting award from the Society of Environmental Journalists for uncovering the key engineering decisions that led to the BP oil disaster in 2010.

As a seventh-generation New Orleanian, Hammer’s mission is to help improve his community by holding area leaders accountable. His investigations have helped land several local politicians and businessmen in prison, including New Orleans’ mayor during Hurricane Katrina, Ray Nagin, and exposed millions of dollars wasted by government agencies in hurricane recovery programs, coastal restoration projects and the city’s outdated drainage system, to name a few.

His 17-year-old son is the first eighth-generation member of Touro Synagogue, one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the U.S.

Marcy R. Harris

Marcy R. Harris worked as a news and features reporter at a daily newspaper, as a reporter and writer at several magazines, and as a litigator, before retiring to serve as president of her synagogue. She currently serves on the boards of several Jewish organizations and is an avid reader of the Jewish press.

Deborah Hirsch

Deborah spent more than 27 years as an entertainment editor and columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. She edited daily and weekly copy, while also writing entertainment features and an arts column for the newspaper’s weekly Showtime section. In later years, as the newspaper transitioned its emphasis from print to digital, she also wrote and edited for the newspaper’s SouthFlorida.com entertainment website.

Through the years, Deborah has utilized her communications skills in volunteer work at public schools, her synagogue, Hadassah and the local Jewish Family Service.

A native Chicagoan, Deborah received her B.A. with honors from the University of Iowa in political science and journalism and attended the journalism master’s degree program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Eric Kalis

Eric Kalis, Senior Vice President, works with clients in real estate, legal, banking and other industries. With more than a decade of communications experience as a business reporter and editor, Eric has extensive industry knowledge, digital media experience and news judgment, including substantial broadcasting, business development, public speaking and social media experience to offer BoardroomPR’s clients in media relations. He is a past winner of PRSA Greater Fort Lauderdale’s “Young Professional of the Year” PR Wizard Award and has received numerous internal recognitions from BoardroomPR for new business generation, strong client retention and media relations output. 

Eric is actively involved in real estate and business organizations, such as the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and AIPAC Florida’s Real Estate Division. He served as co-chair of ULI’s Young Leaders of Broward County Marketing and Communications Committee. Before starting his public relations career at BoardroomPR, Eric was a journalist for numerous leading publications, including the Daily Business Review, Miami Today and The Real Deal. Eric graduated from the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Science degree in Communications. 

Craig S. Karpel

Craig S. Karpel is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in such publications as Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Village Voice, New York, National Review and The Wall Street Journal. He has interviewed such figures as Moshe Arens, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir, Natan Sharansky, Ariel Sharon and Moshe Ya’alon. He has interviewed such personalities as Henry Kissinger, John Lennon and Andrei Sakharov.

Karpel’s articles have been published in periodicals including Baltimore Jewish Times, Hadassah Magazine, AMIT Magazine, B’nai B’rith Magazine, The American Zionist, Sh’ma Journal: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, The Jewish Digest and Ma’ariv. He received the Boris Smolar Award for Excellence in North American Jewish Journalism for his article in B’nai B’rith Magazine entitled, “The Unseen Side of Arab-Jewish Relations.” His radio series Jerusalem Diary was broadcast on the BBC. He substituted for Ed Koch when the late former New York City mayor hosted a weekly program on 77 WABC Radio.

Karpel was privileged to count among his friends Louis H. Rapoport (1942-1991), the distinguished journalist, author, and senior editor of The Jerusalem Post in whose memory the Louis Rapoport Awards for Excellence in Commentary are awarded annually in the Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism. He is a graduate of Columbia University, New York.

Tom Mashberg

Tom Mashberg is a longtime newspaper reporter and editor, former investigative editor and Sunday editor at the Boston Herald, and frequent contributor to The New York Times and the Boston Globe.

Hugo H. Ottolenghi

Hugo H. Ottolenghi teaches undergraduate and graduate communications courses at Florida International University in Miami. He brings the knowledge and experience gained as a senior editor at two national news companies and as an online communications writer and editor to the classroom. Hugo sits on the board of Florida Bulldog, an independent, nonprofit news organization that produces in-depth and investigative stories on government, business and the environment.

Abraham (Avri) Ravid

Professor of Business/Finance, Yeshiva University

Neil Reisner

Neil Reisner is a journalism professor at Florida International University in Miami. In four decades as a newspaper reporter and editor, he covered corrupt officials, complicated public policies and hardball politics for the Miami Herald and other newspapers. He currently freelances for The New York Times for which he’s covered the Marjory Stoneman Douglas mass shooting, the Surfside building collapse, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and other major stories. He was a pioneer in database journalism, which he taught to hundreds of journalists around the country, Canada, the UK and Mexico. He taught at Rutgers and Columbia universities before coming to FIU. Reisner is currently working on a book, “Pythons in Paradise – How Burmese Pythons Have Ravaged the Everglades.” He started his career in Jewish journalism.

Bob Rosenbaum

Bob Rosenbaum is principal of The Market-Farm, a strategic communications firm that helps non-profits and smaller businesses create and engage their own audiences. He also is project chair of the Heights Observer, a non-profit hyperlocal community newspaper serving Cleveland Heights and University Heights, Ohio, since 2008.

A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, he has more than 35 years of experience in journalism as a reporter, editor, publisher, consultant and adjunct professor. He’s a past president and current board member of the Press Club of Cleveland, and is passionate about the important role of journalism in democracy.

He has three grown children and lives in Cleveland Heights with his wife and a dog.

Ellen Roteman

Ellen Roteman began her professional career as a journalist at the Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh. She later served in a wide range of writing and marketing capacities, most recently as director of marketing for the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. Her work has encompassed writing and managing projects ranging from annual reports and brochures, to speeches and scripts, to newspaper and magazine features. She received numerous awards for her writing and for marketing campaigns she developed, and recognition by the International Association of Business Communicators, Women in Communications and the Jewish Community Centers Association.

Since “retiring,” she has authored five books for children, published by Menucha Publishers.

Michael Roteman

Michael Roteman has done extensive research on Jewish athletes and frequently writes and speaks on this subject. His series of 21 articles about the Greatest Jewish Athletes of the Twentieth Century was published in four different Jewish newspapers.

Mr. Roteman has also been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, and is the author of three baseball novels, “Phenom,” “Warning Track Power” and “Hometown Hero.”

A Pittsburgh native and a graduate of Duquesne University (BSBA & MBA), Mr. Roteman spent many years in Harrisburg, Pa., where he was a senior executive for the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and where he also edited the agency’s in-house newspaper, From the Vine. In addition to his work for the government, Mr. Roteman also worked as a freelance television and radio announcer, and as a freelance sports writer. His play-by-play experience includes the Pittsburgh Pirates Class AA affiliate, the Harrisburg Senators, the Harrisburg Horizon minor league basketball team, the Harrisburg Patriots minor league football team, and hundreds of high school football and basketball games.

Mr. Roteman resides in both Lakewood Ranch, Fla., and Pittsburgh with his wife Ellen. He currently writes a weekly blog for his synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Daniel Rubin

Dan Rubin has been a reporter, columnist and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer since 1988, except from 2000 to 2003 when he was the European Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder newspapers. Dan taught urban journalism for 10 years at The University of Pennsylvania. He was a degree in American Studies from Northwestern as well as an MSJ from the university’s Medill school.  

Lauren R. Rublin

Lauren R. Rublin is the senior managing editor at Barron’s. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, Joel, and is active in her local Jewish community.

Dale Singer

Dale Singer began his career in professional journalism in 1969, while still a student at Washington University, by talking his way into a summer vacation replacement job at the now-defunct United Press International bureau in St. Louis; he later joined UPI full-time in 1972. Eight years later, he moved to the Post-Dispatch, where for the next 28-plus years he was a business reporter and editor, a Metro reporter specializing in education, assistant editor of the Editorial Page for 10 years and finally news editor of the newspaper’s website. In September 2008, he joined the staff of the online startup St. Louis Beacon, where he reported primarily on education; when the Beacon merged with St. Louis Public Radio in 2013, he joined the combined staff and covered education until his retirement in 2017. In addition to practicing journalism, Dale has been an adjunct instructor at University College at Washington U. He and his wife live in west St. Louis County. They have two adult daughters, who have followed them into the word business as a communications manager and a website editor, and three grandchildren.

Emily Soloff

Emily Soloff holds a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia University where she served as an adjunct professor in broadcasting. She also taught reporting and writing at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She subsequently worked in print journalism for 25 years. During that time she won several Rockower Awards. Starting in 1997 she joined the staff of the American Jewish Committee specializing in interreligious relations. She writes book reviews for various publications while enjoying retirement from 40++ hour work weeks. 

Jeffrey Spitz Cohan

Jeffrey Spitz Cohan worked for 18 years in print and broadcast journalism, most recently as a staff writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

For 11 years, he was the executive director of Jewish Veg, a national nonprofit organization. He writes occasional articles for the Times of Israel Blogs and Medium.

Jeffrey lives in Pittsburgh, with his wife Kathryn, dog Maizie and cat Nala.

Andrea Stone

Andrea Stone is a nationally known journalist whose four-decade-long career started in the Bronx on her high school and college newspapers and eventually took her to 47 states and more than two dozen countries as a reporter for one of the largest news organizations in the country.

Stone has a B.A. from Herbert H. Lehman College (CUNY) and an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She spent the first seven years of her career working at trade publications and covering local news as a freelancer for newspapers and magazines in New York, Florida and Illinois, including the Gainesville Sun (Fla.), Newsweek and the Chicago Sun-Times. (Ill.). As a staffer, she was a newspaper reporter at The Riverdale Press (Bronx, N.Y.), the Daily Journal (Wheaton, Ill.) and the Lake Forester (Lake Forest, Ill.).

After working as a full-time freelancer at outlets such as National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine and teaching journalism at American University in Washington, Stone moved back to New York to return to her alma mater as career director at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York.

Stone retired in 2019 and remains active as a freelancer, journalism contest judge and high school journalism mentor. She also volunteers at Ellis Island and the Museum of the City of New York.

Shira Vickar-Fox

Shira Vickar-Fox worked for decades in Jewish media. She was managing editor of New Jersey Jewish News, editor of Fresh Ink for Teens, and contributor to the New York Jewish Week (some at the same time!). She is a creative storyteller/writer at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Hamantashen are her favorite Jewish dessert and she loves shutting down her phone every Shabbat eve.

Dick Weiss

Dick Weiss is an award-winning writer and editor with more than three decades of experience at American newspapers. In 2003, Richard started WeissWriteLLC, a writing, editing and coaching service for anyone with a story to tell.  

In 2008, Richard was one of the founders of the St. Louis Beacon, an online non-profit news source, which later merged with the NPR affiliate, St. Louis Public Radio. 

Richard also worked for the PBS affiliate, Nine Network, as a researcher for a public affairs program called Stay Tuned. More recently he served as a story catalyst for Forward Through Ferguson, an organization addressing issues around racial equity in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown three years ago. 

In 2014, the Missouri History Museum published a biography that Richard co-authored with Charlies E/ Claggett about Max Starkloff, the disability rights pioneer. Max Starkloff and the Fight for Disability Rights won a 2015 bronze IPPY Award from the Independent Publisher association in the national biography category. Among other books Richard has written, is a history of the Matthews-Dickey Boys & Girls Club, an organization that over the span of more than a half-century has provided a springboard to learning and success for disadvantaged children. 

Richard serves as a consultant to Washington University’s Office of Technology Management, an organization that facilitates the licensing of the university’s research, and Washington University’s Office of Medical Public Affairs.  

Richard is currently at work with a team of reporters on a series of stories chronicling the lives of urban families as they struggled to get a quality education and their purchase on the American Dream. The tales are unique in that they trace the journey of individual families across generations dating back to the 19^th century.