Jeffrey Mark Goldberg (born September 1965) is an American journalist. He is an author and a staff writer for The Atlantic, having previously worked for The New Yorker. Goldberg writes principally on foreign affairs, with a focus on the Middle East and Africa.Michael Massing, an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, called Goldberg "the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel".

Goldberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Malverne, New York. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian. While at Penn he worked at the Hillel kitchen serving lunch to students. He left college to move to Israel, where he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a prison guard during the First Intifada. He later returned to the United States to continue his journalism career, and now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and three children.

Goldberg began his career at The Washington Post, where he was a police reporter. While in Israel, he worked as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, and upon his return to the US served as the New York bureau chief of The Forward, a contributing editor at New York magazine, and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of several of Britain's best-known novels, including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He was the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Stanley Tucci (born November 11, 1960) is an American actor, writer, film producer and film director. He has been nominated for several notable film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his critically acclaimed performance in The Lovely Bones (2009). He also has won an Emmy for his performance in Winchell, and has been nominated for a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for Children – "The One And Only Shrek".

Tucci, an Italian American, was born in Peekskill, New York, the son of Joan (née Tropiano), a secretary and writer, and Stanley Tucci, Sr., an art teacher at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York. His sister is actress Christine Tucci, and his cousin is the screenwriter and retired history teacher Joseph Tropiano. He grew up in Katonah, New York, and attended John Jay High School. Tucci played on the John Jay soccer team and baseball teams; his main interest lay in the school's drama club, where he and fellow actor and high school buddy, Campbell Scott, son of actor George C. Scott, gave well-received performances at many of John Jay's drama club productions. Tucci attended SUNY Purchase, and completed his B.F.A. degree after four years in the school's Conservatory of Theatre Arts.

Michael B. Oren (Hebrew: מיכאל אורן; born Michael Scott Bornstein; 1955) is an American-born Israeli historian, author, and the Israeli ambassador to the United States. He has written books, articles, and essays on Middle Eastern history, and is the author of the best-selling Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present and Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a contributing editor to The New Republic and the Shalem Center's quarterly journal, Azure.

Oren was born Michael Scott Bornstein in upstate New York, the son of Marilyn (née Goldstein), a marriage and family therapist, and Lester Milton Bornstein, a hospital director. His father was an officer in the U.S. Army who took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944 and fought in the Korean War. Oren grew up in West Orange, New Jersey in a Conservative Jewish household. As the only Jewish boy in a heavily Catholic neighborhood, he says he experienced antisemitism on a daily basis. In his youth, he was an activist in Zionist and Jewish youth groups such as USY and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabiah Games. At age 15, he made his first trip to Israel with youth movement Habonim Dror, working on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.