Eboo Patel
The Impact of Interfaith Youth Service
A Rhodes scholar, accomplished author and public speaker, Eboo Patel is the founder and director of the Interfaith Youth Core. Since 1998, this interfaith youth service program has reached more than 36,000 people on five continents with its unique and highly effective approach to community service and engagement. Patel received his doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship.
Robert Satloff
The Arab-Israeli Peace Process
Widely considered an expert on Arab and Islamic politics as well as U.S. Middle East policy, Robert Satloff has written and spoken widely on the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Islamist challenge to the growth of democracy in the region, and the need for bold and innovative public diplomacy to Arabs and Muslims. His latest book, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories of the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (PublicAffairs 2006), offers simple stories from a lost chapter of the Arab-Jewish experience during the Holocaust and details discoveries that helped convince the German government to award compensation to Jewish survivors of labor camps in North Africa. Having earlier been the recipient of the Daniel Pearl Award from the Anti-Defamation League and the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Herbert Katzki Award for outstanding historical writing, Satloff was recently awarded the prestigious Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Sandra Brand Memorial Book Award and the Touro Synagogue’s annual Judge Alexander Teitz Award.
Marjorie Hill
HIV/AIDS, 25 Years Later
Twenty-five years after the emergence of HIV/AIDS, what does the landscape look like? Who is the most vulnerable and why? What is the reality of AIDS? Marjorie Hill, a pioneer in dealing with HIV/AIDS, will candidly respond to these questions and evaluate the progress that has been made in combating this epidemic. As a licensed clinical psychologist and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the nation’s oldest AIDS service organization, Hill has consulted and lectured on issues of cultural diversity, HIV/AIDS in communities of color, and homophobia.
Tracy Kidder
By documenting the lives of outstanding humanitarians, this Pulitzer Prize-winning author helps us see how we can make a difference in our own environments. Kidder is the author of the 2007 Shared Reading selection and the CNY Reads 2008 selection, Mountains Beyond Mountains (Random House). His appearance in Syracuse is co-sponsored by the Syracuse Public Library—Friends of the Central Library (Gifford Lecture Series).
Judy Wicks and Alice Waters
By applying entrepreneurial energy and imagination, Wicks (in Philadelphia) and Waters (in Los Angeles) have found sustainable ways to nourish the hungry in our cities. Their lecture will take the form of a discussion moderated by geography professor Don Mitchell. Wicks is founder and owner of the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia. Waters owns the restaurant Chez Panisse in Los Angeles and is the founder and director of The Edible Schoolyard, an innovative nutrition program at the Dr. Martin Luther King School in Los Angeles.
Carl Schramm
As president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, Schramm is an outspoken proponent of entrepreneurialism. He also is a leader in health care finance, regulation, and insurance and founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Care Finance and Management, the first such research center in the nation. Trained both as an economist and lawyer, Schramm is the author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative (HarperCollins) and Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism (Yale).