Rabbi Alan Lew has become one of the leaders of the burgeoning Jewish Meditation movement. He was one of the featured speakers at each of the first three International Conferences on Jewish Meditation in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 1997-99. His book, One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi (1999), chronicles his years as a serious student of Zen Buddhism during which he served as director of the Berkeley Zen Center (and eventually resided at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a Zen monastery in the Los Padres mountains near Carmel Valley), and his current work in exploring the use of Zen meditation in enhancing Jewish spirituality. His work in this area has been the subject of reports on ABC News, The McNeil-Lehrer Report, the PBS news magazine Religion and Ethics and the film, Jews and Buddhism: Belief Amended, Faith Revealed (1999), produced and directed by Bill Chayes and Isaac Solotaroff, and narrated by Sharon Stone. His work has also been widely reported in the print media and at some length in the books, Meditation From The Heart Of Judaism, by Avram Davis; Generation J, by Lisa Schiffman; Jerusalem Moonlight, by Norman Fischer; and Torah and Dharma, by Judith Linzer. Alan Lew was ordained as a rabbi in 1988 at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York where he won more than a dozen major academic awards including awards for the best student in both the Masters and Rabbinical degree programs. He received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965, and a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1970. Before entering rabbinical school in 1982, Lew pursued a career as a writer, publishing stories, articles and poems in Life Magazine, The National Reporter, The Naropa Journal of Poetry, and various other periodicals. He also wrote three books of poetry, including Eight Monologues which was published by Open Books of Berkeley, California, in 1978. In August 2003, Rabbi Lew’s newest book, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, was published by Little Brown.