Natan Sharansky was born in 1948 in Donetzk, Ukraine. After graduating, he became active in the human rights movement led by Andrei Sahkharov and very quickly became internationally known as the spokesperson for the Helsinki movement. In 1977, a Soviet newspaper alleged that Mr. Sharansky was collaborating with the CIA. Despite denials from every level of the U.S. Government, Mr. Sharansky was found guilty and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. After nine years of imprisonment, Mr. Sharansky was released on February 11, 1986, emigrated to Israel, and arrived in Jerusalem on that very day.

Martin Kramer is a Senior Fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies and author of the best-selling monograph, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. An authority on contemporary Islam and Arab politics, Kramer earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. Kramer is currently a fellow at the Olin Institute at Harvard University and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies and the Israel correspondent of the New Republic. Halevi is the author of Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (1995) and At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (2001).

Yagil Henkin is a military historian and associate fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center. He is the author of Either we win or we perish: Military history of the first Chechen war, 1994-1996 [Hebrew] published by the Maarachot Publishing House (2007), as well as Exodus in Reverse: the 1956 Suez Conflict and the New World Order in the Middle East [Tentative title]. Presently, he is finishing work on his PhD thesis and a new book on counterinsurgency in Rhodesia.