I have been involved with Embodying Peace since its inception by Amitai Abouzaglo, a then-Harvard undergraduate, in 2018. He was one of the first Harvard students I met at the International Relations Council, which I advise. I was privileged to advise EP’s remarkable team of students as they conducted their outreach to civil society organizations in Israel/Palestine, created a partnership with the Alliance for Middle East Peace, and began developing a Fellowship and an Education Center.

Among the team members I was directly advising are Tzofiya Bookstein, who is applying the model and lessons of EP to Embodying Justice and the Jewish Movement for Uyghur Freedom; Leah Field and Mitchell Levinson on the curriculum of their EP’s Education Center on the history, theories of change, and current challenges of peacebuilding civil society in Israel and Palestine; and Anne Howard and Rachel Mitchell on a Comparative Conflict course and curriculum on the similarities and lessons that can be shared between civil society in Israel-Palestine and in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In June and July of 2020, I helped Embodying Peace to mentor their first cohort of Summer Fellows, in addition to developing their broader volunteer opportunities and network of associated organizations. In particular, I have begun advising some of the Fellows on self-determined Capstone projects that would encourage their long term involvement in Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, and nurture lasting relationships with EP and the many remarkable organizations they interned with. The exciting proposals I advised included “Infrastructure for Peace,” a nascent student-led project focusing on the water and energy gap in the West Bank and Gaza.

EP became a project under the umbrella of Amal Tikva, where Amitai became Director of International Engagement.

Embodying Justice was an effort inspired by the model of Embodying Peace that formed in the summer of 2020 to apply a similar approach to racial justice issues in the United States:

“In the past months, as the nation has experienced a mass awakening to the racial injustices of the United States, a team of college students and recent graduates have been working to bring into reality Embodying Justice: a remote volunteering platform for Racial Justice.

Embodying Justice is a group of university students and recent graduates that seek to support and strengthen the capacity of grassroots racial justice organizations in the Boston area through remote volunteering efforts.”

I was introduced by Amitai to Rebecca Thrope, a co-founder of the effort, and advised the nascent EJ effort in its educational and organizational outreach aspects. I introduced EJ to potential allies within Harvard, such as the Carr Center for Human Rights and the International Relations Council, as well as to members of The Trebuchet’s community such as Teny Oded Gross, the Executive Director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, and Professor Erin Kelly, a very good friend, who recently was honored with the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography with whom I brought the Rubin Carter Archive to Tufts.