Jehon Grist, Executive Director of Lehrhaus Judaica, has been with the school as a faculty member and administrator since 1985. He received his doctorate in Near East Studies and a California State Teaching Credential from the University of California, Berkeley. A veteran of excavations and field research in both Israel and Egypt, Dr. Grist has published articles and presented papers on a variety of topics, from research identifying an obscure Egyptian queen, to the conflict between Egypt, Israel and the Philistines at the beginning of Biblical history. He has also written three online courses for the Lehrhaus website. Before taking his position at Lehrhaus, Dr. Grist was an Assistant Professor of Ancient History at Fresno State University, and instructor in Egyptology at UC Berkeley. He lives in Rodeo with his wife Jennifer and has four children.

Niki Whiting, Director of Administration and Human Resources of Lehrhaus Judaica, was born in Fairbanks, Alaska and grew up in Juneau. She has an MA in religious studies from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley where her emphasis was on systematic theology and the Virgin Mary. Her background in education includes two years as an instructional aide to special needs students and the vocal director of 42nd Street and The King and I at Juneau Douglas High School. She loves to cook.

Lee Kaplan, Director of Programming and Development for Lehrhaus Judaica, is responsible for defining, coordinating and facilitating Lehrhaus' special programs, courses and initiatives, as well as for donor development and relations. Lee grew up in Berkeley and spent much of her adolescence and young adulthood in Israel. Before joining us at Lehrhaus, she worked as a civil rights lawyer and development professional, and taught literature, creative writing and writing for performance to youth, college students and adult learners, most recently, at Brooklyn College in NYC. She holds a BA in History from UC Berkeley, a law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College.

Adam Blodgett is Publicity and Outreach Coordinator for Lehrhaus Judaica. He received his BA in English from the University of California, Irvine in 2002. He is a writer and designer who lives in Oakland.

Fred Rosenbaum is the Founding Director of Lehrhaus Judaica, currently in its thirty-first year. He received his B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis summa cum laude and holds a Master’s Degree in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Specializing in modern and contemporary Jewish history he has also been a faculty member at the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,
where for five years in the mid-1990’s he taught a semester-long course on the Holocaust to Christian seminarians.

Rosenbaum has written three books and numerous articles on modern Jewish history, including an essay on the early life of the California-born Zionist leader Judah Magnes, published in “Like All the Nations?” (Moses Rischin and William M. Brinner, eds., SUNY Press, 1987). His most recent work, Visions of Reform, a full-length study of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El (Magnes Museum, 2000), was acclaimed in the “Forward” (April 14, 2000) as "a sign of a new spirit of candor in American Judaism." He is currently completing a volume on the life of Joseph Pell (formerly Yosel Epelbaum), a Jewish partisan who fought in the forests of the Ukraine during World War II.

As a journalist, he reported on the collapse of communism in Prague, Berlin, Budapest, and Warsaw, and has been a scholar-in-residence both in Prague and St. Petersburg. In the early 1990’s he spent a sabbatical year in Italy researching the role of Pope Pius XII in the Shoah.

For his work as a writer, teacher and institution builder, he has received the S.Y. Agnon Gold Medal for Intellectual Excellence from the Scopus Society of the American Friends of the Hebrew University (an institution he attended in the early 1980’s), and the Award for Exceptional Jewish Educators from the Covenant Foundation in New York. He has also held Ford, Fulbright, and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships.
He currently divides his time between Berkeley and Manhattan.