After suffering tragedies in her own life, Naomi Levy used her skills as a rabbi and writer to give others the tools to move on. Levy graduated from Cornell before joining the first class of women admitted to the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1984. After ordination, she became the first female Conservative rabbi on the West Coast when she led Congregation Mishkon Tephilo in Venice, California from 1989 to 1996. Her bestselling first book, To Begin Again (1998), drew on her memories of her father’s murder when she was fifteen to offer insights into resilience and faith. In 2004 she founded Nashuva, an experimental outreach synagogue for unaffiliated and previously disengaged Jews. Regularly named to both the Forward 50 and Newsweek’s 50 most influential rabbis, Levy teaches both laypeople and rabbis to craft personal prayer at Nashuva as well as the Academy of Jewish Religion in Los Angeles. In 2010 Levy’s third book, Hope Will Find You, she described her rejection of her daughter’s potentially fatal diagnosis and her decision to live in the now. She wrote her fourth book, Einstein and the Rabbi: Searching for the Soul, in 2017. As of 2024, she works on the faculty of the Wexner Heritage Foundation and the Academy of Jewish Religion.