Hosts and Contributors

A note to our listeners:

For 15 years, Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark and Esther Kaplan co-hosted Beyond the Pale week in and week out. In August 2010, Beyond the Pale launched a new rotating system of hosts. Marilyn and Esther will continue to host two shows a month; Kiera Feldman with Marissa Brostoff; and Lizzy Ratner with Alex Kane will co-host one show a month; and Eve Sicular and Jenny Romaine will take turns hosting a monthly Jewish music show. We hope you enjoy the fresh talent and new perspectives — while Esther and Marilyn get an occasional weekend off!

Hosts/Executive Producers

MARILYN KLEINBERG NEIMARK was a founder and longtime board member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and has been active in the Palestine/Israel peace movement since her involvement with the International Jewish Peace Union in the 1980s. She is the author of The Hidden Dimensions of Annual Reports: Sixty Years of Social Conflict at General Motors (Markus Wiener) and of numerous articles on higher education, business ethics, and critical accounting. She is a Professor Emerita at Baruch College-The City University of New York and was the co-host of Econonews on WBAI during the early 1990s.

ESTHER KAPLAN is editor of The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and produces the Communiqué, a weekly program on WNYE radio that covers labor issues. She is the author of With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right (New Press) and has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, American Prospect, Poz, and other publications. She is a former director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and has been active in the AIDS, reproductive rights, antiwar, labor, and Israel/Palestine peace movements.

Occasional Hosts

MARISSA BROSTOFF is a doctoral student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has covered American Jewish culture and politics as a reporter at Tablet Magazine and at the Forward newspaper.

KIERA FELDMAN is a Brooklyn-based reporter. She has worked as a producer on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show and has reported for The Nation, Mother Jones, n+1, PRI's The World, Killing the Buddha, and elsewhere. 
 

ALEX KANE is the World section editor at AlterNet and an assistant editor for the news website Mondoweiss, which covers the Israel/Palestine conflict. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Daily Beast's Open Zion blog, Vice, BBC Persian, +972 Magazine, the Electronic Intifada, Extra! and Common Dreams. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane. 

LIZZY RATNER is a New York-based journalist. She is a contributing writer for The Nation, where she has written about everything from food stamps to Israel/Palestine, and has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker (OK, The New Yorker online, but still...), and The New York Observer, where she worked as a staff reporter for several years. She is a co-editor of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.

JENNY ROMAINE is a puppeteer, performer and director and a founding member of the Great Small Works collective. She was music director of Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok for many years and is now maestra of an intergenerational mob of Yiddish spectacle performers who seek to keep politically engaged theater at the heart of social life. Romaine was a sound archivist at the YIVO institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and is part of the ice cream social crew for Milk not Jails.

EVE SICULAR is a drummer & bandleader for both Metropolitan Klezmer and Isle of Klezbos, producing the bands' five wide-ranging, award-winning CDs.  A film historian with a Harvard degree in Russian History & Literature, and an archival staff alumna of both the YIVO Institute and Warhol Foundation, she is also creator and presenter of the “Yiddish Celluloid Closet” lecture project. Among her other work is the musical documentary theater piece “J. EDGAR KLEZMER: Songs from My Grandmother’s FBI Files.”

 Contributors

HENRY FONER retired in 1988 as president of the Fur, Leather & Machine Workers' Union, a position he held for 27 years. Since then, he has taught classes in labor history at the Harry Van Arsdale School of Labor Studies, the City College Center for Worker Education, and the Brooklyn College Institute for Retirees Pursuing Education. He is president of the Paul Robeson Foundation, president of the Congress of Senior Citizens, a member of the editorial board of Jewish Currents magazine, and co-historian of the web site laborarts.org.

MELANIE KAYE/KANTROWITZ is author of several books including The Color of Jews and The Issue Is Power. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and has taught writing, literature, women's studies and Jewish studies all over the United States. A long time activist, she was the first director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and was a co-founder of Beyond the Pale.

ALAN LEVINE is a long-time civil rights lawyer who currently serves as special counsel to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

JOSH NATHAN-KAZIS is the politics editor of The Faster Times. He was the editor of New Voices magazine from 2007-2009, and is a regular contributor to WBAI’s Beyond the Pale. He has written on Israel/Palestine and the decline of the American fraternal order, among other issues.

NAN RUBIN has been a community radio producer and activist for more than 20 years. She built two community radio stations (WAIF in Cincinnati and KUVO in Denver) and is a founding member of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters. Her national radio productions include Living Voices, profiles of Native Americans produced for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the popular series The Hidden Jews of New Mexico.

ALISA SOLOMON is a journalist, theater critic/scholar, and director of the Arts and Culture major in the MA program at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She has written for The Village Voice, The Nation, Forward, New York Times , nextbook.com, and other publications. She is the co-editor with Tony Kushner of Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish Responses to the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict (Grove) and the author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge).