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Jewish Students Wield Influence in Washington at Spitzer Forum
March 13, 2006Comments (0) | Add | E-mail this to a friend
Three hundred Jewish students hobnobbed with some of the biggest names in Washington, D.C., recently at the 2006 Charlotte B. and Jack J. Spitzer B'nai B'rith Hillel Forum on Public Policy. The annual event, held in conjunction with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs plenum, attracts students from all over North America who are interested in social justice and public policy by offering access to Washington's top political leaders and institutions, such as Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, Republican National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman and visits to Capitol Hill, the White House and Pentagon.
Among a busy schedule of skills workshops and seminars, where participants discussed everything from hunger and homelessness to reproductive rights to environmental protection, students learned from the experiences of the leading activists in their fields, including:
- Ruth Messinger, the president of American Jewish World Service, who has been leading the Jewish community's efforts to raise awareness on the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
- Karen Austrian, who graduated from Columbia University just three years ago but is already making a huge difference in the lives of teenage girls in Kenya with the Binti Pamoja Center, a reproductive health and women's rights center in Nairobi that she co-founded.
- Manar Fawakhry, the Slifka coexistence scholar at Brandeis University, whose work with the Center for Humanistic Education is helping brige the gap between Jews and Arabs.
- David Eisner, the chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service, who came to administer the popular Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America programs after a distinguished career on Capitol Hill and AOL Time Warner.
- Ross Born, the co-chief executive officer of Just Born, Inc., whose family-owned candy company takes community service so seriously that it grants every associate up to 24 paid hours a year to volunteer.
Students appreciated the opportunity to network with the guests, their congressional representatives, whom they met on a lobbying trip to Capitol Hill, and one another, and they left Washington eager to jump-start the social-action programs on their own campuses.
"I felt the conference was very informative, fun, interesting and quite powerful. I took some very important and necessary resources back to Davis with me," said Jaclyn Fromer, a student at the University of California, Davis.
"I am planning on meeting with our social-action club at Hillel in the coming week to discuss what I learned at Spitzer and how we can mobilize the students at Arizona to work for a certain cause," added Erin Searle from the University of Arizona.
Students interested in journalism took advantage of a special track designed for their needs, made possibly by the Darmstaedter Estate through the UJA-Federation of New York. Hillel partnered with the American Jewish Press Association to introduce the students to seasoned journalists, who offered advice on career planning and skill building, and bring them to the White House and Pentagon, where they met with public-affairs officers and the president's liaison to the Jewish community.
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