The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East

On Sunday, March 14, author Joshua Muravchik discusses The Next Founders, which brings to light the stories of seven remarkable people, six Arabs and an Iranian. Five are men; two, women. Four are Sunnis, two are Shiites, and the seventh is mixed. Their lives revolve around a sense of mission, and while the angles from which they attack it are varied, this mission is the same for all seven–to make their countries more free and democratic.

Joshua Muravchik was National Chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) from 1968 to 1973. Today he has been recognized by The Wall Street Journal as “maybe the most cogent and careful of the neoconservative writers on foreign policy.” A prolific writer, he has published more than 300 articles on politics and international affairs, appearing in, among others, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times Magazine, Commentary, The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard.  He has also published eight books, including Heaven on Earth (2002), about the rise and fall of socialism that served as the basis for a 3-part PBS documentary of the same title.

Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies and formerly a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researched Middle East politics, democracy, and the history of socialism. He has also been an adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy since 1986 and an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics since 1992. He is an editorial board member of World Affairs and Journal of Democracy. He formerly served as a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, the Commission on Broadcasting to the People’s Republic of China, and the Maryland Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

This Menorah program is part of MoVeRs and is co-sponsored by Stand By Israel. At the Boulder JCC, 3800 Kalmia. $8; free for students with ID. RSVP at www.Boulderjcc.org or call kathryn at 303-998-1021