Dear Friends,

Allegedly retired, I have actually begun what Iris terms a “new chapter” in my life. Reminiscences and active continuities….

Jerome and I are constructing a new platform, Convisero, (Latin for “Unite”), as The Trebuchet's effort to create a dynamic interactive interface, among experts and alumni from my fifty years of teaching and programming, and the new people I now interact with in my Emeritus life.

What follows is a recounting of a weave of recent encounters and interactions with friends, old and new. It spans approximately two month’s activity from November 2019 to January 2020.

I could have easily chosen any such time period in my Emeritus life over the last three years, and created such a tapestry.

Alumni Networking

• I recently had lunch with two wonderful Institute alumni, Petar Todorov and Chris Ghadban, who in the context of EPIIC’s year on Global Health and Security created two derivative IGL initiatives, one an iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) competition team, and after the team’s success, a synthetic biology club. Petar is now in a PhD program in Copenhagen, and Chris is a bioinformatics scientist with AstraZeneca in Boston.

They are enthusiastic about Convisero, and will be writing profiles and mentoring. They have already begun the mentoring aspect, having cofounded a forum called GapSummit, a global intergenerational gathering of biotech experts featuring a “Voices of Tomorrow” cohort of 100 young leaders in the industry. This all began with my introducing them to Juan Enriquez, who enabled a select number of Institute students to attend the Whitehead Institute open house, which is usually only open to donors.

Having Petar and Chris aboard particularly exciting, given that they not only represent the true interdisciplinary of what I tried to create, but open up broad vistas to enable me to help students in the bio sciences that I ordinarily would not have access to.

David Walt is a close friend, and I am asking him and Juan to purposively join Convisero, not only to help students, but to help me enlarge the Pugwash model that I am working on.

At times, this helps even my direct family. I have introduced Petar and Chris to my son Nathaniel and his girlfriend Kelly. Nathaniel is advising Chris on his application to business schools, and Kelly has begun a conversation with them about her own work at Artemis, a firm developing innovative farming techniques. Chris has previously worked in this field with the Good Food Institute and Granular Farm Management.

Chris also knows the founder of a potential platform to begin connecting our community, called Lounjee, and will introduce us to see if he can create a closed network for Convisero

• Suyu Zhang, an EPIIC alum from the 2012 Global Health year, a few weeks ago sent me a curriculum he designed with peers on mental resiliency for medical students. He is currently at New York Medical College, and deeply concerned by the ability of students to cope with the immense stress and pressures of training to become a physician. I sent his project to my personal physician, whose brother is the former dean of the Harvard Medical School. I soon will share it with Professor of Psychiatry Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, the Director of the Columbia Lighthouse Project who spoke for EPIIC’s colloquium on the recommendation of her close friend, my wonderful alum and Trebuchet Secretary, Jennifer Selendy. They are the founders of the unique Speyer School.

And I had the pleasure of connecting Suyu to another EPIIC alum and Synaptic Scholar, Nnenna Okoye, who is finishing her medical residency at UC San Francisco. In time, I hope to link many of my former students now in medical school, and our recent medical school grads, to this effort. I am also sending it to Professor Stephen Soumerai, who is very interested in this topic.

• Josh Malkin, an EPIIC alum and one of my former “aides de camp,” sent me his proposal for a program helping high-achieving, but underserved, middle school students in New York to pass the SHSAT high school entrance exam. Josh who taught for Teach for America in New Orleans, is now a student at Columbia Law School.

I introduced him to Josh Laub, an EPIIC alum from 1989, and one of my most activist students, who remains deeply concerned with societal inequality. He was a high school principal in the Bronx for twelve years, and is now the Director of Youth Development in New York City’s District 88, working with youth transition from jail, back to school. They have begun to correspond. Josh L. also disrupted EPIIC’s 1988 forum on Covert Action when we brought CIA Director William Colby, and was detained by Tufts Police. I missed several hours of the symposium to talk with him, and he enrolled in our EPIIC 1989 Drug year, and it was a wonderful moment when a radical brilliant young man saw the virtue in open non-polemical environments. He has remained a very close friend.

I also introduced Josh M. to David Puth, as cares deeply about youth development in his role on the board of Robin Hood. He was my Tufts student in 1978, (yes 1978!...I was there for one semester and never expected to return ) in a political science course on Middle East politics. In true Convisero fashion, we remained very close. I once had the pleasure of being interviewed in Bloomberg news, speaking to David's integrity and intelligence. Of course I reached him to become Trebuchet’s Treasurer.

• I Skyped with a member of my first EPIIC class, Professor Turhan Canli. Turhan just published this piece in EuropeNow, the monthly publication of the Council for European Studies. As a member of the Development Board of CES, I had introduced Turhan to their Director, Nicole Shea, in early 2017. Together, they co-edited the issue of EuropeNow, "Forced Migration, Cultural Identity, and Trauma," in which I interviewed Mike Niconchuk about his socio-neurology work in the Za'atari refugee camp.

Turhan shared with me his newest project on "War-Trauma and Disease." I am putting him in touch with Many Stefanakis, a former Institute Advisor Board member and a friend of the Niarchos Foundation, and Alan Stoga of Tällberg, for potential funding.

Middle East Activity

I am creating a community of Israeli/Americans, American Jews and Israelis, living and studying in Boston to support existing and new progressive Israeli and Boston/Israel initiatives. We are resonating a new collective voice that will reassert itself against very intensifying conservative trends in Jewish communal life.

We also seek to effectively address the resurgence of anti-Semitism, while also confronting actions within our community that we consider antithetical to our values, such as attempts locally to stifle freedom of expression in the Newton South High School system, by Jewish activists alleging that its curriculum is biased against Israel; or as in Trump's recent regrettable executive order on Title VI that affects Universities.

Over time we hopefully will ultimately be significant enough to influence U.S policy towards Israel, and Israeli policy.

• Amitai Abouzaglo, a Harvard senior, is a member of our nascent community. I met him two years ago through my ongoing effort to support Combatants for Peace (I have joined the Academic Advisory Board of their American Friends organization). His academic major is religion. I successfully nominated him to become Harvard's first Human Rights Foundation Oslo Scholar, a new program I have embedded in the offerings of the Harvard undergraduate International Relations Council, which I advise.

I am also an advisor to Amitai's new promising NGO, Embodying Peace.

Amitai wanted Itai Kohavi, the founder of International Peace Accelerator to meet me. On November 20th, while talking with Itai at Harvard’s student center, Harvard President Larry Bacow stopped by to warmly greet me. Larry was a strong supporter of my efforts while President of Tufts until 2012, and germane to MENA region issues, he helped support the creation of NIMEP.

Witnessing this by chance, Anna del Castillo came by and reintroduced herself to me as a former IGL Synaptic Scholar. Now a Harvard Divinity School graduate student, her project, as a Harvard Presidential Fellow, centers on the potential for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, I introduced her to Itai, and Amitai, and they all expressed interest in collaborating.

Itai and I have now had several detailed conversations. I have agreed to join his Advisory Board, and I am considering his offer to direct an IPA workshop in the region. He has extraordinary links to the highest echelons of both Israeli and Palestinian political leadership and entrepreneurship. Enclosed a picture of Larry, Itai and myself; and Itai sent me a picture of himself with his Palestinian co-founder, Huda El-Jack of Ramallah and former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert.

• On November 15th I met with Daniel Sokatch, the CEO of the New Israel Fund, and Stephane Acel-Green, NIF's Deputy VP for Regional Development in Boston. Together with Harvard’s Shula Gilad, a member of our group who works closely with J-Street, we met again with Stephane, and with J Street’s Regional Director Janette Hillis-Jaffe, seeking to investigate and encourage the utility and value of leveraging integrated, common efforts between NIF and J Street. Heretofore, they have traditionally operated in differing domestic and international spheres.

I reached out to an EPIIC alumna from my 1987 West Bank and Gaza year, Brenda Needle (now Brenda Needle-Shimoni), who immigrated to Israel, and who was a long term consultant for Shatil (1992 through 2003), the NIF’s operative arm and initiative for social change. (By what I term serendipity, she is the one who hired Daniel to originally come to NIF)

Amitai had met the Israeli Policy Working Group last summer in Israel while working to grow Embodying Peace. He introduced us, as one of the original concerns I had with convening our group in the first place, is to support groups working specifically on human and civil rights in Israel. The PWG is chaired by Israeli Ambassador Alon Liel. We have begun a meaningful correspondence.

The Convisero web thickens. The Ambassador’s wife, Rachel Liel, is currently the chair of ACRI. She and Brenda had also worked closely together when Rachel was Shatil’s Director.

Understanding what we are hoping to create now, Brenda alerted me to an informal coalition of progressive Jewish organizations she had helped create in Boston in the late 1980’s with Donny Perlstein, who was then regional director of NIF for New England.

Donny had introduced me to his son, Ben Perlstein, when Ben was still in high school. Ben participated in our Inquiry high school program, enrolled in Tufts, and joined EPIIC and Synaptic Scholars. Now a friend, he is currently finishing his rabbinical studies at Jewish Theological Seminary.

Ben has joined our effort, and I have invited his father. Yes, we are truly intergenerational…

• We learned of an important article “Arab Thinkers Call to Abandon Boycotts and Engage With Israel” about a distinguished group of journalists, scholars, diplomats, and artists that share a view that "anti-normalization," isolating and demonizing Israel was self-defeating. We have reached out to one of their group, Dr. Mohammed Dajani, the Palestinian professor who created the Wasatia initiative.

I had brought Dr. Dajani to Tufts in 2014 for EPIIC’s Future of the Middle East and North Africa colloquium, and honored him with a Dr. Jean Mayer Award. The student BDS movement at Tufts was in opposition. He was later expelled from Al Quds University for taking his students to Auschwitz to better understand the Holocaust.

I had already introduced him to Dr. Dajani, and now we have introduced another member of our group, Amir Grinstein, and his organization 50 50 Startups, to hopefully stimulate collaboration.

Shula introduced me to Yousef Alzaeem, the Founder and CEO of the Gazan-based Everest Trading Group who is currently at Harvard HKS. I have introduced Yousef to Sara Roy, a member of our group, and they have arranged to meet. I am trying to reach another of the group to Eglal Gheita, a British-Egyptian lawyer through my friend Mona Mowafi, founder of RISE Egypt.

• I was called by Anne Josephson, a lawyer and good friend, regarding my advice on the Newton South High School controversy over an alleged anti-Semitic curriculum. Both the Newton controversy and Trump's Title VI executive order play into the right-wing Israeli narrative equating any criticism of the state of Israel, or of Judaism with hate speech.

Anne and I will be reaching out to my friend, and Tufts alumnus, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, regarding his position on the Trump executive order.

Convisero Mentors

• I have been involved with the Tällberg Foundation since participating in a Tällberg workshop on the Greek island of Lesvos in 2016. Their President, Alan Stoga, has since become a friend.

On November 26th, the Tällberg Foundation announced the recipients of their prestigious 2019 Eliasson Prize for Global Leadership. I had the pleasure of nominating one of the three winners, Dr. Anne Goldfeld, one of over fifteen hundred nominees from one hundred and fifty countries.

Anne, a good friend of several decades, is a former member of the Institute's Advisory Board. She was an exceptional mentor in our immersive education program, including taking two of our students enrolled in the 2012 EPIIC Global Health year on a research trip to Cambodia. I awarded her the Institute's Dr. Jean Mayer Award in 2013.

By serendipity, one of Anne’s Tällberg reviewers was my alum, Mike Niconchuk. He had been asked to join the Tällberg Board after meeting Alan, while accompanying me to the Lesvos workshop.

Anne and Mike are now Convisero mentors.

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• At times, the level at which Convisero works is from expert-to-expert. On December 4th, a friend, Ambassador Samantha Power delivered the Institute's inaugural lecture on “Global Moral Leadership” in memory of our extraordinary mutual friend, Ambassador Jonathan Moore. I first asked her to give this talk when we were ushers at Jonathan's Harvard memorial service in June of 2017, and she asked me to wait until she finished her book, The Education of An Idealist.

I first met Jonathan in 1980 during his tenure as the director of Harvard's Institute of Politics. I was teaching two study groups there, on covert action and U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. MENA affairs. He was in many ways my mentor, and responsible for my Institute's ability to conduct our global experiential immersive education programs, knowledgeably, safely, and responsibly. As a member of the Institute’s Advisory Board for ten years, he stimulated the creation of our Voices from the Field program.

The lecture was a wonderful inspirational moment, joining former UN Ambassadors, whose ethics and idealism permeated everything we've done at the Institute when I was director.

• Two days later, I saw Samantha speak again, this time at WBUR's CitySpace, in conversation with a wonderful alum and friend, Sasha Chanoff, the founder of RefugePoint. The forum was convened by another good friend, Ina Breuer, the Director of New England International Donors. Ina was the Executive Director of the Project of Justice in Times of Transition when it was hosted at the Institute at my invitation for six years, and we created many programs together, viz. ACCESS.

Samantha spoke for the first time at the Institute's gathering of VII Photo Agency, for Exposure in 2005. Now as part of my responsibilities on the Advisory Board of the VII Foundation, I had just edited the afterword she wrote for the forthcoming VII Foundation volume Imagine: Reflections on Peace.

Sasha first interacted with the Institute when together we created the “Game of Nations” in 1998, creating a community soccer team to play the Tufts soccer team, comprised entirely of Boston-area refugees from across the globe seeking asylum in the US. I helped him create Mapendo International, the precursor to RefugePoint, and then had the honor of successfully nominating him in 2010 for the Bronfman Prize for his humanitarian achievements. I currently serve a Strategic Advisor to RefugePoint.

Jerome and I went to CitySpace with another good friend and former Institute INSPIRE Fellow, Dan Holmberg. He has recently returned from the field as Regional Advisor for Disaster Assistance for USAID in Nairobi. He had spoken for Voices from the Field with Sasha in 2012, during the EPIIC Global Health year. Knowing Dan is now looking to remain stateside, we went together to reconnect him with Sasha, and intentionally to meet Sam. I also introduced Dan to Ina, for whom he will now become a resource person for her international donors.

Samantha, Ina, Sasha and Dan are now also all integral to Convisero. Attached is Dan’s letter to us.

• Many of you know that I have a golden doodle pup named Remi, who continually delights me. A couple of weeks ago, on a late evening walk, she began to surprisingly bark at a silhouette neither of us recognized. It turned out to be a young woman vigorously jumping rope, as a boxer might, in Coolidge Park across from my home. And so we met Anna Savolainen, a young Finnish political scientist living in Boston for the year with her husband, who is doing a postdoc in nanotechnology at The Broad Institute.

We had a delightful conversation, and soon met again at my home over tea and scones. I asked her the question I am fond of posing when people seek advice from me, "If you close your eyes and imagine your immediate future right now, what is your ideal outcome?" In this case, Anna, who completed her masters in Upsala on peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, expressed her interest in pursuing that course of study, and doing a PhD on transatlantic security cooperation.

She went on to tell me she continued to have a sustained interest in peacekeeping, and also of an ideal PhD position she was interested in applying for, at the University of Leiden. Immediately, I was able to volunteer to put her in touch with another friend, and "Voice from the Field," Nick Birnback, a veteran field peacekeeper, now in charge of public relations for UN Peacekeeping Operations in New York. Then, I was able to aim a laser beam at her specific objective, when I realized that the supervisor for the PhD position she desires is none other than my friend Professor Joachim “Joe” Koops.

Joe and I had several meetings with his faculty in Belgium where he offered me the position of Distinguished Professor of Ethical Global Leadership at the Vesalius Institute in Brussels he directed; and an offer to create and direct a potential new center with the felicitous acronym, VITAL (Vesalius Institute for Transatlantic Leadership). I really wanted to remain stateside, and ultimately it came to naught when he took the new position of Chair of Security Studies and Scientific Director of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University’s campus in The Hague. (in any case, Iris has done a brilliant job of keeping me on a “short leash” by agreeing to the aforementioned Remi!)

Even though Finland is hardly on this side of the Atlantic, if it works, I will consider it a "vital" success.

• One of my very close friends, Jason Clay - I was the best man at his wedding - wrote to tell me of this Markets Institute newsletter on food trends. I sent it on to my son's girlfriend Kelly Ward, who is an Enterprise Account Executive at Artemis, and to my good friend Boaz Wachtel, the founder of the Green Leaf Party in Israel, now a developer of innovative agriculture with Roots. They are in contact now.

Criminal Justice Concerns

• I attended a benefit concert to endow student scholarships for Roxbury Community College, organized by a close friend, the jazz impresario, Ted Kurland. The evening was in honor of the legendary drummer and Roxbury resident, Roy Haynes, now in his nineties, who was in the audience. His grandson Marcus Gilmore is already a force. The incomparable Pat Methany was the featured artist. Ted is their agent, as he was, and is, for many other jazz greats, from Nina Simone to Wynton Marsalis.

There, I met the president of Roxbury Community College, Valerie Roberson. We briefly discussed my intent to link her College's criminal justice program to the Innocence International archive of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. I had brought him to Tufts to speak and we became friends in the last years of his life. At my intervention he agreed to house his archive at Tufts' Tisch Library.

A wonderful 2010 EPIIC alumna, Taarika Sridhar, who just passed the Massachusetts Bar and is joining the prestigious Boston law firm, Ropes and Gray, will be doing her pro bono work with the Innocence Project, and she has agreed to take on students from Roxbury's criminal justice program as interns.

At the concert, I also met a former TA of mine from Emerson College days! 1984! Lisa Zopatti. She remembered me immediately when she saw me, and in conversation asked me to get engaged with Year Up. We have pledged to meet.