Forum Network

After a bone-marrow transplant and months of recovery, Marjorie Clapprood is returning to a sense of normalcy in her life, and is back in a familiar spot: behind the microphone at WRKO radio.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning syndicated columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. Before she moved to the U.S. in 2000, Ms Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, including in Cairo and Jerusalem as a correspondent for *Reuters* and she reported from the region for *The Guardian and U.S. News* and *World Report*. She is one of a few writers whose essays appear regularly in both the western and Arab press. Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in the* International Herald Tribune*, *The Washington Post*, the p*an-Arab Asharq al-Awsat* newspaper and *Qatar's Al-Arab*. In 2006, the Next Century Foundation awarded Ms Eltahawy its Cutting Edge Prize for distinguished contribution to the coverage of the Middle East and in recognition of her continuing efforts to sustain standards of journalism that would help reduce levels of misunderstanding. She has reported for various media from Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China. Ms Eltahawy was the first Egyptian journalist to live and to work for a western news agency in Israel. She reported on the terrorist campaign in Egypt in the 1990s and is familiar with the groups and ideology behind the attacks of September 11, 2001 and others since then. In November 2006, she was named Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo (AUC), her alma mater.

Benjamin Hirsch was born in September, 1932, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, just 5 months before Hitler came to power. He was the fifth of seven children of Dr. Hermann Hirsch, a dentist, and Mathilda Auerbach Hirsch. The mistreatment of Jews in Germany started long before Ben was born. He was still an infant when Hitler's first anti-Jewish laws went into effect in April, 1933, and was barely 3 years old when the Nuremberg Laws took away all the civil rights of German Jews. As a young boy, he felt the effects of this state-sponsored antisemitism. In fact, before he escaped Europe in 1941, he had never experienced life without prejudice and discrimination.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Ali S. Asani is Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures at Harvard University. After completing his high school education in Kenya, he attended Harvard College, with a concentration in the Comparative Study of Religion, graduating summa cum laude in 1977. He received his Ph.D. in 1984. Prof. Asani holds a joint appointment between NELC and the Study of Religion. He has taught at Harvard since 1983, offering instruction in a variety of languages such as Urdu/Hindi, Sindhi, Gujarati and Swahili as well as courses on various aspects of the Islamic tradition. His books include The Bujh Niranjan: An Ismaili Mystical Poem, The Harvard Collection of Ismaili Literature in Indic Literatures: A Descriptive Catalog and Finding Aid, Celebrating Muhammad: Images of the Prophet in Muslim Devotional Poetry (co-author), Al-Ummah: A Handbook for an Identity Development Program for North American Muslim Youth, Ecstasy and Enlightenment: The Ismaili Devotional Literature of South Asia, and Let's Study Urdu: An Introduction to the Urdu Script and Let's Study Urdu.

Ambassador John Kelly is President of John Kelly Consulting, Inc., an international consulting firm that has assisted international firms with overseas marketing strategies and partnering arrangements since 1994. He is also Ambassador-in-Residence at the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Kelly was Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and South Asia from 1989 to 1991, during the Gulf War and up to the Madrid Middle East Peace Conference. He was American Ambassador in Beirut from 1986 to 1988 during the war years and was U.S. Ambassador in Helsinki, Finland from 1991 to 1994. A career diplomat, John Kelly was four times a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, including service as Principal Deputy for European and Canadian Affairs, as Principal Deputy for Policy Planning, as Senior Deputy for Public Affairs and Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department of State. He is a graduate of Emory University, the Armed Forces Staff College, and received a certificate in advanced international studies from the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. He speaks French and Thai fluently and Turkish, Spanish and Finnish with less command.

Patricia Campbell Warner was born and educated in Toronto, Canada, receiving her B.A. in Art and Archaeology at the University of Toronto. Her M.A. and Ph.D. in design and the history of design were completed at the University of Minnesota almost thirty years later. She retired in June 2007 after being a historian of dress at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1988, latterly as Professor in the Theater Department, where she neither designed, draped nor built. She has published widely in various scholarly journals and books on various aspects of the history of dress, including jewelry, slave clothing and the movies, but her major focus has been the subject of her book, *When the Girls Came Out to Play* (2006), on women's clothing for sports and the birth of American sportswear. She is a Fellow of the Costume Society of America.

Gary Radke is professor of Fine Arts at Syracuse University. A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he has received fellowship support from the Mellon Foundation, Kress Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, among others. His publications include Viterbo: Profile of a Thirteenth Century Papal Palaceand Art in Renaissance Italy, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Italian Renaissance architecture and sculpture. Radke is past president of the Italian Art Society and guest curator for exhibitions of Italian art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Charles Bahne is a historian living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of *The Complete Guide to Boston's Freedom Trail*. Bahne regularly teaches Elderhostel programs about Boston's role in the early years of the American Revolution.