E. Randol Schoenberg, the attorney who won the first major case restoring Nazi-looted artworks to Jewish families, and Gregory Zuckerman, Special Writer and three-time Loeb Award winner for the Wall Street Journal, will be keynote speakers at the JSPA’s Fourth Annual Conference and Shabbaton, to be held Jan. 5 – 7 in Los Angeles.

Mr. Schoenberg, who will speak Thursday evening, took the case of Maria Altmann’s family’s painting by Gustav Klimt all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and later donated some of the proceeds from his work on the case to rebuilding the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH).  The legal case was dramatized in the 2015 movie, Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren as Mrs. Altmann and Ryan Reynolds as Mr. Schoenberg.

More recently, Mr. Schoenberg used the Freedom of Information Act to successfully sue for access to the deliberations of FBI Director James Comey in the agency’s search for  Hillary Clinton’s emails on Anthony Wiener’s computer during the final week of the recent presidential campaign.

He is on the faculty of USC’s Gould School of Law and is also an avid genealogist, managing over 145,000 profiles on geni.com and authoring the the Beginner’s Guide to Austrian-Jewish Genealogy.  He is a graduate of Princeton University and the USC  School of Law.

Mr. Zuckerman, who will speak Friday night, writes about big financial firms, personalities and trades, hedge funds, the energy revolution and other investing and business topics. Previously, he was the lead writer of the paper’s widely read “Heard on the Street” column and covered the credit markets, among other beats.

Mr. Zuckerman is also the author of two bestselling books, including The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters (2014), which describes how a few unlikely individuals created an American energy resurgence that brought OPEC to its knees;  and The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History (2010),  which has been translated into 10 languages.

In 2015, won he Loeb Award — the highest award in business journalism — for a series of stories revealing discord between Bill Gross, founder of bond powerhouse Pimco, and others at the firm,  leading to Mr. Gross’s surprise departure from the company. Mr. Zuckerman won the same award in 2007 and 2003, and was a finalist in 2008 for his coverage of the mortgage meltdown and in 2011 for coverage of insider trading.

Last year, he and his two sons published Rising Above: How 11 Athletes Overcame Challenges in their Youth to Become Stars, a book for young readers that describes the stories of how various stars overcame setbacks in their youth.

Mr. Zuckerman appears regularly on CNBC, Fox Business, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg Television and various television networks, as well as National Public Radio, BBC, ABC Radio, Bloomberg Radio and radio stations around the globe.

Other speakers at this year’s conference include:

~ Jennifer Medina, National Correspondent, the New York Times, who will speak on criticism of news media and the unique challenges of covering the recent presidential election.

~ Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of Bnai David-Judea Congregation, who will reprise his ground-breaking analysis of journalism and the laws of lashon harah (gossip)…

~ David Nimmer, leading intellectual property attorney and editor of Nimmer on Copyright…

~ Joseph Lipner, leading intellectual property attorney, who will speak on press freedom in religious high schools along with Supreme Court cases, FERPA and FOIA…

~ Eric Nusbaum, Deputy Sports Editor of Vice Media, who will speak about new media forms and 21st-century sports reporting…

~ Rob Eshman, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, who will discuss covering the conflict between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…

~ Kathleen Neumeyer, Emeritus Head of Upper School Communications, Harvard-Westlake School, who will give workshops on page design and on avoiding conflict of interest …

… and many more.

The JSPA works to improve Jewish high school papers and websites, enhance journalism education in Jewish schools, add Jewish content and sensibility to publications, and promote these goals in a way that respects the Jewish calendar — in particular, using Shabbat to create a journalistic cohort for our students while creating a space to consider news gathering in a Jewish way.

Attendance is open to anyone who is interested in these principles, whatever high school he or she attends. JSPA’s goal is to help students become educated, top-flight journalists who can one day lead college and professional publications, adhering to the highest standards of objectivity and thoroughness while employing Jewish values.

Co-sponsors of the conference are the American Jewish Press Association, Tribe Media, and Shalhevet High School. For more information, please contact Joelle Keene at [email protected]. The deadline for registration is Jan. 4, 2017.

To register for the conference, please click here.