New SPME Executive Director Reviews Achievements, Calls for Increased Support

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Dear Colleagues:

Since its birth in 2002, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) has been ably led by President (now Emeritus) Ed Beck and a phenomenally dedicated group of scholars who have served as SPME’s officers, Vice-Presidents and Executive Board members. What these men and women have done in six years is beyond remarkable. They have sacrificed their time, their effort, their money, and at times their health to promote academic freedom and scholarly integrity in discourse on the campuses.

In that time, SPME’s email list has grown to over 26,000, in the United States and many other countries. Nearly 50,000 scholars have signed our various petitions on important academic freedom and human rights issues, including calls for the release of imprisoned academics and intellectuals, and statements opposing boycotts of Israeli scholars and academic institutions. More than 30 SPME chapters have been established in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Israel, and chapters are now forming in Great Britain and Australia.

Last year, SPME, in partnership with the Jewish National Fund, Media Watch International and funded by the Legacy Heritage Foundation, created the Faculty Fellows Summer Institute in Israel program and sent 20 scholars from the US, Canada, Korea, the UK and Italy to Israel. Since the start of 2009, SPME has responded to anti-Israel boycott campaigns in Canada, the United States, and Australia and has launched a new monthly briefing teleconference program. In January, Professor Michael Oren of the Shalem Center and Georgetown conducted the first briefing, on events in Gaza; on February 8, Charles Small of Yale conducted the second briefing, on anti-Israel activism on the campuses. Professors Barry Rubin, the director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, and Boaz Ganor, the Associate Dean of the Lauder School of Government and the founder and Executive Director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), will hold briefings in March and April.

All these achievements have taken a huge amount of effort on the part of SPME leadership, with financial support from only 1.5% of our mailing list. Imagine what we could be doing with your support.

The President and the Board realized some time ago that the organization needed a full-time administrator and fund raiser who had a solid academic background and yet had the know-how to take over some of the day-to-day duties of the Board members and permit them to do what they do best-“promote research, education, and service to achieve a just peace for Israel and the Middle East.”

On February 1, I became the first Executive Director of SPME. Besides taking on the day-to-day administrative work of the organization, I am now responsible for increasing SPME’s subscribership, the contributing membership, chapters, and worldwide coverage. My most important responsibility is to increase our monetary resources so that we can support and grow this grassroots faculty-to-faculty organization.

Our Faculty Fellows Program to Israel costs nearly $200,000. Underwriting a conference on a specific topic requires an outlay of $70,000 to keep attendee costs manageable. If you wish SPME to hold an international conference where we all can meet and share ideas, it will cost another $70,000. Our chapters need money to develop programs, bring in speakers, develop curricular materials, and respond to local events and needs. We need to be able to finance a speaker’s bureau, covering expenses and honoraria for distinguished scholars to lecture at campuses around the country and abroad. We need to be able to webcast and to record and archive programs for later use. All these activities cost money.

As Executive Director, I can and will write grants and go to foundations and agencies to ask for support for our projects and programs. But frankly, SPME’s most important fiscal resource is you. If each of you gave only $50 in dues every year, we would have sufficient funds to do everything we wish to do while at the same time maintaining our independence. Currently, only a small fraction of you are contributing anything. You are all scholars, and many of you have had grants. As you know, every grant has strings attached. If we wish to maintain our independence and to be recognized as providing unbiased programming we need you to commit to us a minimum of $50 each. If you can afford to do so, please give more; then you can help subsidize a graduate student or junior or emeritus faculty from whom we will request only $25. If 27,000 of you give $50, we will have $1,335,000 per year to do your work.

The need is obvious. Boycott and divestiture campaigns and denunciations of Israel are proliferating on and off campuses around the world. Responding effectively to those campaign costs money.

To get our message out we need to take out ads in newspapers, journals, and scholarly forums. Advertising space costs money. To support excellent scholarship that addresses the real problems and barriers to peace in the Middle East will cost even more money, but that may be the best way to transform the discourse about Israel on our campuses and, in turn, to improve both media coverage of and public policy regarding the Middle East.

If you contribute, you will be able to attend conferences at members’ reduced rates and to receive our publications gratis. Our new briefing teleconferences with key scholars and leaders are open only to contributors. Our future study missions to Israel will be open to contributors at significant discounts. Our web site will soon have a contributors-only page where you can access advanced briefing materials and scholarship. But the most important benefit of contributing will be the knowledge that your support maintains SPME’s academic integrity.

In the next few months, I will travel to visit chapters around the United States. I hope to meet many of you in person and many more in our upcoming briefings. Please feel free to contact me with your questions and concerns, and please contribute!

Sincerely,

Dr. Samuel Edelman, Executive Director, SPME

https://spme.org/donation.html

New SPME Executive Director Reviews Achievements, Calls for Increased Support

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