Bread of Life: Challah, Family Engagement, and Legacy
Speaker Biographies
Tiffany Shlain
Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards, and author of the national best-selling book 24/6: Giving up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection which recently won the Marshall McLuhan Outstanding Book Award. The Museum of Modern Art in New York premiered her one-woman “Spoken Cinema” performance Dear Human. She lectures and performs worldwide on the relationship between technology and humanity.
Shlain has received over 80 awards and distinctions for her films and work, including selection for the Albert Einstein Foundation’s initiative Genius: 100 Visions for the Future, inclusion on NPR’s list of Best Commencement Speeches, and being named by Newsweek as “one of the women shaping the 21st century. Her films include her feature documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology; The Tribe: The Unorthodox, Unauthorized History of the Barbie Doll and The American Jewish People; The Making of a Mensch; and Technology Shabbats. She has had four premieres at Sundance and the US State Department has shown her films at US embassies around the world. She serves on the Leadership Board of the Center on Media and Child Health at Harvard's Boston Children's Hospital and she is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. She and her work have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Elle, and on Jeopardy.
During the pandemic, Tiffany has been writing weekly newsletters, giving online talks, made a film for the election, and is hosting a monthly #ZoomChallahBake with special guests and people from all over the world. For information on her book, baking, films, lectures, and her newsletter Breakfast @ Tiffany’s, visit tiffanyshlain.com and follow Tiffany on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Laura Lauder
Laura Lauder is a native of Canton, Ohio, and journeyed to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Seville, Spain for her undergraduate education. In 1992, she joined her husband Gary in their venture capital partnership, Lauder Partners, specializing in Internet and media investments.
Laura now primarily focuses her efforts on strategic grantmaking through the Laura and Gary Lauder Family Venture Philanthropy Fund and in numerous leadership capacities at local and national nonprofit organizations.
Laura is a social entrepreneur and venture philanthropist. Laura focuses on Signature Initiatives that she has designed and launched with experts and other philanthropists. For example, she co-founded the Center for Media and Democracy in Israel in 2019, a nonprofit and non-partisan independent news organization that promotes democratic discourse through investigative journalism, like an Israeli ProPublica. She founded DeLeT: Day School Teaching through Leadership in 2000, a national Jewish Teach for America type program. And, she co-founded the Jewish Teen Funders Network’s Foundation Board Incubator in 2012 that develops community-based teen philanthropy programs throughout North America, Australia, and Israel. Laura and her daughter, Eliana, created the Gap Year program at Duke University in 2018, during Eliana’s senior year at Duke, that seeks to encourage young people to take a gap year between high school and college to grow, explore, and serve. Together, Laura and Gary co-founded the Socrates Program of the Aspen Institute in 1996, which has convened over 7,000 young leaders worldwide to Aspen to participate in seminars and salons on the most difficult issues of the day.
Laura also serves on numerous nonprofit boards. She is chair of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund of San Francisco, with over $2 billion in assets, under the auspices of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco. Laura serves on the Advisory Board of Service Year Alliance that creates opportunities for young adults to serve their country through a year of full-time community service. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Aspen Institute and chairs the Board’s Socrates Sub-Committee. She is on the National Constitution Center Board of Directors and chairs the Education Committee to expand and distribute the NCC’s Interactive Constitution to schools and the public. She serves on the Social Finance Board in Boston, which facilitates impact investing. She has previously served on the boards of the National Public Radio Foundation and Spark Networks — an NYSE Amex Company and parent of JDate.
Laura is active with the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO/WPO), a global leadership network, and is a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was named one of “10 Women to Watch” by Jewish Woman magazine in 2004. She has won numerous awards, including Volunteer of the Year from the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation in 2011, the Jim Brooks Achievement Award in 2004, and the San Francisco Bay Area Dinkelspiel Young Leadership Award in 1999.
Laura is an avid cyclist and won a bronze medal in the Maccabi Games in Israel in the cycling time trial in 2009. While she is a political junkie, she hopes to never run for political office but is willing to climb any mountain on a bike. She and Gary live in Silicon Valley and have two children who are young adults.
Alexander Fromm Lurie
Alexander is the 2020 recipient of the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Young Leadership. Born in San Francisco and raised in Marin County, Alexander Fromm Lurie is a real estate advisor ranked among the top 1% of San Francisco agents. Founder of The Lurie Group at Compass, Alexander's team is included in the top 100 Bay Area teams with more than $500 million in San Francisco home sales. Additionally, Alexander and his team have created a niche service they call Real Estate Matchmaking, in which they introduce buyers and sellers outside of San Francisco to the best-fit real estate agents throughout North America. Before real estate, Alexander founded and sold a Chicago-based marketing company YouSwoop as well as an online publication TheChiGuide. Previous to these startups, he was a management consultant with Oliver Wyman.
Lurie cares deeply for the Jewish community, currently serving on the Board of Directors for the Federation and chairs the Regional Leadership Council for the Birthright Israel Foundation. Previously, Alexander served on the Board of Directors for the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and is a graduate of the Federation's Fed Fellows program, Slingshot Fund Bay Area, and the Federation's Young Adult Impact Grant Initiative.
Son of Rabbi Brian Lurie and Caroline Fromm Lurie and the grandson of Alfred and Hanna Fromm, z”l, the stage was set early on for Alexander’s drive toward community service. Brother to Sonia, Daniel, and Ari Lurie, Alexander is a proud five-time uncle. Passionate about live music and a lover of nature, Lurie is an avid cyclist and seeker of outdoor adventure. He is a graduate of Northwestern University where he double-majored in Communications and Political Science.
Roselyne C. Swig
Roselyne C. Swig served as president of the Federation from 1992 to 1994 is one of its most beloved leaders.
Roselyne was born in Chicago in 1930 and moved to the Bay Area in 1948 to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Since then, she dedicated her life to her family and an extraordinary array of causes, serving dozens of nonprofit, civic and cultural organizations, including the JCF, AIPAC, Jewish Vocational Services, International Women's Forum, United Jewish Appeal, National Public Radio Foundation, Mills College, Partners Ending Domestic Abuse, and KQED.
In addition, Roselyne was a passionate patron of the arts. She was a past president of the SF Arts Commission and served on the boards of the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum of San Francisco, the SF Museum of Modern Art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum of SF.
Though she was close to Presidents and served on several international commissions, Roselyne’s outreach was most intimately felt here in the Bay Area. As former Mayor Willie Brown said, she had the “…rare quality of being of assistance to almost everybody without letting them know it and without asking anything in return."
Ms. Swig is the founder & president of ComCon International and founder, Roselyne C. Swig Artsource. Appointed Director of the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program by President William J. Clinton, Ms. Swig devoted decades to philanthropic and community service efforts, at a local, national, and global level with a focus on women’s empowerment, social welfare, fine art, political advocacy, and education. She is the founder of the advocacy group, Partners Ending Domestic Abuse, and the Bayview Alliance Group. Her numerous board memberships include Vital Voices Global Partnership; KQED; NPR Foundation; Mills College, Shalom Hartman Institute. Lifetime Trustee; SF Art Institute, past president & Trustee Emeritus; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives, past president; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, past chair; AIPAC, National V.P.; American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; and the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund past president. She is the National Gallery of Art’s past co-chair of the Collector’s Committee and on United Religions Initiative’s President’s Council and member of SF Haifa Sister City Committee.
Ms. Swig attended the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles as an undergraduate and has been awarded Honorary Degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of San Francisco, Mills College, and Santa Clara University. Cissie was married to her late husband, Richard Swig, former chairman of the Fairmont Hotel Management Company, for 47 years. Her brother in law, Melvin Swig (1917-1973), also served as president of the Federation. Roselyne has a son Rick Swig, daughter and son-in-law Susan and Richard Watkins, daughter Marjorie Swig, and daughter and son-in-law Carol and George Sedlack.
If you're interested in attending additional cooking events, register for the Michael Solomonov: Virtual Passover Cooking Demonstration on March 16.
