Lee is the rabbi at Congregation Beth Shalom in Napa and a
Senior Moderator at the Aspen Institute. He has devoted his life to
a variety of social justice issues as a teacher, humanitarian and
community leader. For fifteen years he was Dean of the Hebrew Union
College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, where he was
also Assistant Professor of Leadership and Applied Theology and
served as the Smither Visiting Professor of World Religions at the
Claremont School of Theology.
Lee graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a
B.A. in Philosophy, received rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew
Union College, and earned a doctorate from the Claremont School of
Theology. Lee has made several humanitarian trips to East Africa
including five trips to Darfur, Chad, and South Sudan where he
visited refugee and IDP camps. He has also made numerous trips to
Kenya, Haiti and Ethiopia where he helped to address a variety of
humanitarian issues related to poverty and disease. In April of
2006 he was in Rwanda for the 12th commemoration of their genocide.
In 1988 he was a guest of the German government to observe how the
Holocaust was being taught.
Lee writes often for the Huffington Post on a variety of social
issues. He also founded CedarStreet Leadership, which works with
leaders and organizations in the area of creative and strategic
leadership. He serves on the Board of 3 Generation, a non-profit
organization dedicated to helping survivors of genocide tell their
stories to the world using film.
