Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster

2020 T’ruah Rabbinic Leadership Award 
Former Deputy Director of T’ruah

Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster is the Executive Vice President of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, working with faith and values-based investors to catalyze their assets for social change. Before joining ICCR in 2021, Rachel spent nearly fourteen years at T’ruah, most recently as Deputy Director, where she initiated campaigns against human trafficking and forced labor, including spearheading T’ruah’s critical partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, fought against mass incarceration, and worked for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. Ordained in 2008 from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she was a student activist and leader, she is a noted speaker and writer on Judaism and human rights. 

Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Herrmann

2023 Rabbinic Human Rights Hero Award Winner

Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Herrmann is the rabbi of SAJ-Judaism that Stands for All, the first Reconstructionist synagogue in America. She is passionate about bringing voices from the margins into the center in Jewish life and integrating Jewish spirituality and social justice. She is a proud alumna of JOIN, the Jewish Organizing Initiative & Network, and is actively involved with issues of racial and economic justice, including housing and homelessness, immigrant rights and reproductive justice, as well as being an advocate for LGBTQ youth and those experiencing mental illness.

Rabbi Nancy Kasten

T’ruah Board Member

Rabbi Nancy Kasten serves as Chief Relationship Officer of Faith Commons, an interfaith organization that lifts up faith voices in the public square for the common good. A Reform rabbi, educator, activist, and certified Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher, Nancy brings more than three decades of leadership to her work in Jewish, interfaith, and secular spaces. Nancy currently serves on the boards of Texas Impact, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and the U.S. Advisory Committee for Polyphony, a Nazareth-based organization that connects Israeli and Palestinian Arabs and Jews through music. She also serves on the Commission on Social Action of the Union for Reform Judaism and the core leadership team of RAC-TX. 

Rabbi Shira Stutman

2022 Rabbinic Human Rights Award Winner

Rabbi Shira Stutman is a nationally known faith-based leader and change-maker with more than twenty years of experience motivating and inspiring groups large and small. She is co-host of the top-ranked PRX podcast “Chutzpod!” in which she provides Jewish answers to life’s contemporary questions and helps listeners build lives of meaning. She also is the author of The Jewish Way to a Good Life. She is the senior rabbi of the Aspen Jewish Congregation and founder of Mixed Multitudes, a consultancy that exposes diverse groups of Jews and fellow travelers to the beauty and power of Jewish life, tradition, and conversation. She was named one of “America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis” by The Jewish Forward and a T’ruah Rabbinic Human Rights Hero, among other awards. Rabbi Shira graduated from Columbia University and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she was a Wexner Graduate Fellow.

Rabbi Esther Lederman

T’ruah Board Member

Rabbi Esther L. Lederman serves as Vice President of Leaders in Action at the Union for Reform Judaism. Prior to that role, she was the Director of Congregational Innovation & Leadership at the Union for Reform Judaism and, before that, Associate Rabbi at Temple Micah in Washington, DC. She was ordained in May 2008 from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill University in 1996. Rabbi Lederman sits on several boards in addition to T’ruah: the Habonim Dror Foundation and Ameinu, as well as the board of the Federation of Greater Washington. She lives in Arlington, VA with her husband and two children.