Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

John Summers is a writer, historian, and the editor of Lingua Franca Media, Inc., an independent research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Katha Pollitt is a poet and essayist, and the author most recently of Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

James Wolcott is a journalist and author. He first gained national prominence as a columnist for The Village Voice in the the 1970s and later became Vanity Fair's cultural critic, while also contributing to The New Yorker. He is the author of several books, including the memoir Lucking Out and Critical Mass, a collection of essays and reviews. Wolcott lives in New York with his wife, the dance and art critic Laura Jacobs.

MAURICE ISSERMAN, PhD, is the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History at Hamilton College, where he teaches US history, including the history of mountaineering. A former Fulbright grant winner, his prize-winning books include Fallen Giants (co-authored with Stewart Weaver), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Banff Mountain Book Festival prize for best mountaineering history, the National Outdoor Book Award for best history, and the Andrew Eiseman Writers Award; The Other America, recipient of a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award; and Cronkite’s War (co-authored with Walter Cronkite IV). He has written for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor,Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the American Historical Review,as well as for numerous academic journals and contributed volumes. He lives in Clinton, New York.

Len Gutkin is Editor at the Chronicle Review.

Yehuda Halevi was one of the great Hebrew poets and philosophers in medieval Spain.

Elena Kagan is a public defender and writer in Richmond, Virginia.

Dan Alter has published poems widely in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and Zyzzyva. He has been a fellow of the Arad Arts Project, and a finalist for the Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. He is a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and daughter, and makes his living as an electrician.