Claudia Reed is a Conservative Jew, the mother of a son who was formerly on his way to becoming an Orthodox rabbi, the granddaughter of a not-so-religious woman who fled the pogroms of the Russian Empire, the great niece of a Russian Jewish author and journalist who wrote in Hebrew in an attempt to revive the language for secular use and was arrested and executed during the 1905 uprising against the Tzar, and a likely relative of Lithuanian Jews who died in the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, she is a student of modern Jewish history. She has enjoyed a 17-year career as a news reporter, winning an award for investigative journalism.