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Biographies
Yael Bromberg is a constitutional rights attorney with over twenty years of experience in community organizing, advocacy, and campaigns. She counsels and represents individuals, organizations, and unions in state and federal courts across the country. Her docket includes election law, voting rights, free speech, ethics, civil rights, and labor cases and projects.
A nationally leading legal scholar of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Bromberg developed her scholarship while teaching and supervising litigation in the Georgetown University Law Center Civil Rights Clinic and Voting Rights Institute, where she received an LLM in Advocacy with distinction. Her resulting article, Youth Voting Rights and the Unfulfilled Promise of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, is widely cited and has been dubbed a “groundbreaking study” and a “legal and organizing call for arms.” She is an architect of the Youth Voting Rights Act, comprehensive legislation to enforce the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.
At Rutgers Law, Bromberg teaches Election Law & The Political Process, and served as faculty advisor for Rutgers University Law Review’s 2022 symposium, Voting Rights Reform: The 26th Amendment, Youth Power, and the Potential for a Third Reconstruction – the first-ever legal volume dedicated to the Amendment since its ratification over half a century ago. She authored the Introduction to the volume, entitled The Future Is Unwritten: Reclaiming the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.
A Rutgers Law School graduate and former Kinoy/Stavis Fellow of the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, Bromberg returned to the Rutgers Law Clinic to supervise students on voting rights and election law cases and projects in the International Human Rights Clinic. Her academic collaborations include engagements with The Harvard Kennedy School William Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice and a Mellon Foundation-supported applied learning research curricular project premised on her Twenty-Sixth Amendment scholarship, engaging Bard College and HBCUs Prairie View Texas A&M University, North Carolina A&T University, and Tuskegee University. She is also a Visiting Associate with the Eagleton Institute of Politics.
Bromberg is Principal of Bromberg Law LLC where she primarily practices democracy law, and serves as special counsel and strategic advisor for The Andrew Goodman Foundation, a national organization in over 25 states across 85 campuses dedicated to making youth votes and voices a powerful force in democracy. Bromberg also serves as of counsel to NJ labor law firm Weissman & Mintz LLC, and she litigates for equal pay and supports union members in labor arbitration. She sits on the national cross-partisan advisory board of American Promise, which seeks to ratify a new constitutional amendment to restore the rights of Americans to regulate election money, protect free speech and representation, and combat systemic corruption.
Bromberg previously worked in the Washington, D.C. headquarters of good government watchdog Common Cause, and clerked for nearly three years with The Honorable Dickinson R. Debevoise in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.
A double-Rutgers alumna, Bromberg graduated from Douglass College where she double-majored in Applied Environmental Sciences and Political Science. She then joined the Rutgers School of Management & Labor Relations as the principal researcher on a study of the working lives and employment conditions of New Jersey port truckers, funded by the National Science Foundation and the NJ Department of Labor. Upon graduation from Rutgers Law School, Bromberg received the Eli Jarmel Memorial Award for greatest interest and proficiency in public interest law. In 2015, she received the Eric Neisser Public Service Alumni Award, of which she is the youngest recipient.
Bromberg is a regular commentator and contributor on democracy issues, and has been featured on CSPAN, Washington Post, The Hill, Slate, NPR, The Guardian, WBAI, CBS News, The National Constitution Center’s We The People podcast, Inside Higher Ed, and other publications and news outlets.
Mike advises multiple Fortune 500 companies, trade associations, sports teams, corporations and non-profits in the areas of public relations, crisis management, grassroots organization, survey research, strategic planning and marketing. Mike understands how the nexus of public opinion, government and journalism can impact business outcomes, and what influences those factors.
A graduate of Rutgers University, Mike now serves on the university’s board of trustees and is an adjunct professor at his alma mater’s renowned Eagleton Institute of Politics. Mike has spoken on politics and public affairs at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, NYU, UCLA, Georgetown, and the University of Chicago, among many other colleges and universities. Mike was awarded the prestigious “Rutgers 250 Fellowship” recognizing him as one of just 80 of the university’s most distinguished living alumni, out of more than 500,000.
Mike is a sought-after guest on both television and radio offering his political and public policy perspectives on shows and networks including Good Morning America, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX Business, BBC, CBC in Canada and many more. In print, he has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and scores of other state and regional publications.
Mike is the president of the non-profit Cranford Hockey Club, and he serves on the Hackensack Meridian Carrier Behavioral Health Board of Trustees. He is also a youth hockey coach and has coached numerous other youth sports. He was also a four-year skater on the Rutgers Ice Hockey team where he served as a captain for championship teams his junior and senior seasons.
Mike lives in Westfield, NJ with his wife, Dore, and their three sons.
Dr. Sadaf Jaffer is a scholar & policy expert with 15+ years of public engagement, higher education, & governmental expertise.
Jaffer is Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University where she teaches courses on South Asian, Islamic, and Asian American Studies. Her research focuses on secular, feminist, and activist movements in South Asian Muslim and diasporic contexts with particular attention to the arts, literature, and popular culture. She has published with the Star-Ledger, the Hill, the Journal of Women’s History, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Huffington Post, Altmuslimah, and American Kahani.
She is passionate about mobilizing diverse stakeholders to address the needs of women, minorities, & economically under-resourced communities. Jaffer previously served in New Jersey’s state legislature where she represented the 16th Legislative District. Assemblywoman Jaffer advocated for the best interests of NJ's 9.2 million residents with special attention to her district’s 230,000 constituents. She championed increased funding for 9-1-1 call centers, teen suicide prevention programming, & translation services. Her legislative priorities included laws on election integrity, transportation, reproductive healthcare, & gun safety. She bolstered representation for women and minorities in politics as the first Asian American woman (with Ellen Park and Shama Haider) and the first Muslim American (with Shama Haider) to serve in the New Jersey Legislature.
Prior to joining the NJ legislature, Jaffer served two terms as mayor of Montgomery Township. In January of 2019, she shattered glass ceilings as the first South Asian American woman to serve as mayor in NJ and the first Muslim woman mayor of a municipality in the US. Her signature initiatives included creating and implementing a crisis communications plan to help Montgomery maintain some of the lowest COVID-19 infection and fatality rates in the state, leading the design and construction of a new municipal center and library, building trust and understanding by coordinating meetings for Black community members with the Township’s police leadership, and inaugurating a Youth Leadership Council.
Jaffer serves on numerous boards and commissions including for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, Oxfam America, and the Princeton University Art Museum. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and obtained her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations with a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Harvard University.
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