Jonathan Samen Hot Buttons, Cool Conversations Discussion Series

Omar is a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, where he focuses on Palestine, Middle East geopolitics, and American foreign policy in the region. He is the Editor of Afkār, the Council’s online publication providing insights and analysis on current events in the region. Rahman was previously a non-resident fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, where he researched and wrote about Palestine-Israel, the Arab Gulf, and the intersection between the two. Prior to this, Rahman was a research analyst at the Arab Gulf States Institute, where he focused on the political economy of the Gulf states. Rahman established his career as a journalist based in the U.S. and the Middle East, including three years in Palestine where he was a columnist for +972 Magazine. 

Natan is the director of the Center for Middle East Policy and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings. He has taught as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Government and its Security Studies Program. Prior to joining Brookings, Sachs was a Fulbright fellow in Indonesia, a visiting fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies, and a Hewlett fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Sachs is an expert on Israeli foreign policy, its domestic politics, and on U.S. policy toward the Middle East. His forthcoming book describes the aftermath of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the dangers of both a one-state agenda and “anti-solutionism,” and recommends policy for promoting a more peaceful and just relationship among Israelis and Palestinians.

Masua Sagiv is a Scholar in Residence of the Shalom Hartman Institute and the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at the Helen Diller Institute, U.C. Berkeley. Masua’s scholarly work focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel, as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Previously, Masua was the Academic Director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at Bar-Ilan University. 

Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy. He has written five books, including The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam, 2008). He previously served at the State Department as an historian, analyst, negotiator, and advisor to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the senior advisor for Arab-Israeli negotiations.

Robert Waldinger is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever done. The Study tracked the lives of 724 men for over 85 years and now studies their children to understand how childhood experience reaches across decades to affect health and wellbeing in adulthood.  He directs a teaching program in psychotherapy at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and he writes about what science can teach us about healthy human development.   He is also a Zen master (roshi) and teaches meditation both in the US and internationally. His TED talk on lessons from the longest study of happiness has had over 47 million views and is one of the 10 most viewed TED talks of all time.