Jane Eisner is an accomplished journalist, educator, non-profit leader, consultant, and public speaker. She recently completed a multi-year appointment as director of academic affairs at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, overseeing the Master of Arts program.

For more than a decade, she was the Forward’s editor-in-chief, the first woman to hold the position at America’s foremost national Jewish news organization.

Since Eisner joined the Forward in 2008, the publication dramatically expanded its digital reach, becoming the authoritative source of news, opinion, arts and culture in the Jewish world. The publication won numerous regional and national awards, and her editorials were repeatedly honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and other media organizations. She is known for her interviews of such notable figures as President Barack Obama, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Reuven Rivlin and many others.

Prior to her work at the Forward, Eisner held executive editorial and news positions at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years, including stints as editorial page editor, syndicated columnist, City Hall bureau chief and foreign correspondent. From 2006 to 2008, she served as vice president of the National Constitution Center, She has taught at Wesleyan University as the first Koeppel Fellow and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a senior fellow at Penn’s Program for Research and Religion in Urban Civil Society.

Eisner is the author of “Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in Our Democracy,” published in 2004 by Beacon Press, and is working on a book about Carole King for Yale University Press. She is a regular contributor to The Washington Post’s Book World, and has written for Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, AARP Magazine, The Boston Globe, Zocalo Public Square, Religion & Politics, The Los Angeles Times, TIME, NPR, The Jewish Chronicle, and other major news outlets. She also lends her expertise as a consultant to newsrooms, most recently working with Shtetl, a new digital website devoted to independent news about the Haredi community. She has also recently published a major report on youth voting supported by the A-Mark Foundation.

She is a past chair of the board of the Student Press Law Center and currently serves on the board of the Hebrew Free Loan Society and the leadership team of Minyan M’at at Ansche Chesed. She is a member of the Wesleyan Binswanger Prize Committee and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality Advisory Council. She is also a judge for the Sami Rohr nonfiction book prize and a member of the Women Writing Women’s Lives seminar.

Eisner is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia Journalism School. She was a fellow of the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center at Bryn Mawr College in its inaugural year and participated in the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program in 2009. She is a frequent public speaker and moderator.

She lives in New York with her husband, Dr. Mark Berger, and has three adult daughters.