Yehuda Kurtzer is President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He has written and lectured widely on Jewish history, Jewish memory, leadership in American Jewish life, and the relationship between American Jews, Israel and Zionism. He is known as a leading public intellectual in the American Jewish community. In 2012, he was named one of the "36 under 36 young educators, thinkers, social justice activists, philanthropists and artists reinventing Jewish life" by The Jewish Week.