Marie Brenner

She is Writer at Large for Vanity Fair and the author of five books including the bestselling Great Dames: What I learned from Older Women (Crown, 2000). Ms. Brenner is considered a sharp observer on anti-Semitism in France and Europe and how it affects America. Her 2003 investigation of the rise of anti-Semitism in France ("France's Scarlet Letter") made international news and won her 6th Front Page Award. It has been recently republished in Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of anti-Semitism, edited by Ron Ronsebaum (Random House) along with essays of other distinguished writers from Cynthia Ozick to Frank Rich. She has recently returned to France to survey recent developments in the Jewish community of Paris and to investigate the complicated lives of French Muslim women- "Daughters of France, Daughters of Allah, published in Vanity Fair, April 2004.Ms. Brenner has spoken on anti-Semitism at the 2004 San Antonio Lion of Judah fundraising dinner and was recently featured at the International Lion of Judah Conference in Washington. She has lectured on women's issues at major colleges, including Brown University and was a featured speaker at empowerment conferences sponsored by Proctor and Gamble and United Health of Iowa.

At the lecture podium: Ms. Brenner brings an audience deep inside the lives of the leading women of the era such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Claire Boothe Luce and Judge Constance Baker Motley, who helped rewrite civil rights law. She has recently returned from Afghanistan where she is researching the lives of Muslim women after the Taliban, for a new book. She has a particular interest in women in peril around the world.

Her investigation into the Enron scandals made national news when Senator Peter Fitzgerald used it to question witnesses testifying before a senate committee. The 1999 Michael Mann film The Insider, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe was based on her work. The movie was nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture. Ms. Brenner was one of the first writers to report on the phenomenon of stalking and her story "Erotomania" was the basis of Obsessed which aired on Lifetime in September of 2002. She is also the author of the bestseller House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville (Random House 1989) which received a Kappa Tau Alpha and Frank Luther Mott award as the best book on a journalism subject.