Jane Eisner

Jane Eisner is an accomplished journalist, educator, nonprofit 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. She was also an adjunct professor at the J School and continues to mentor graduates.

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. 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 news, editorial, and executive 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 in Philadelphia. She has taught at Wesleyan University as the first Koeppel Fellow and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a senior affiliate at Penn’s Program for Research and Religion in Urban Civil Society.

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.