Brandeis Magazine

American University professor Chris Edelson wrote “Emergency Presidential Power: From the Drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror,” which received the 2014 Crader Family Book Prize in American Values. The book explores recent questions involving the scope and limits of presidential power, including whether the president can order the deaths of American citizens who are suspected terrorist leaders on his own authority and whether doctrines of state secrecy can be employed to block lawsuits claiming executive overreach. Jeremy Gruber co-edited “The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know About the Food, Corporations and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk.” The book is a comprehensive resource on genetic engineering in agriculture, covering all areas of this complex topic, from human health, environmental risks and GMO labeling, to biotech-company seed monopolies and the impact of GMOs worldwide. Jeremy is president and executive director of the Council for Responsible Genetics. Deborah Waller Meyers led a team at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that received the Secretary’s Award for its exemplary work in collaborating with counterparts in Canada to develop a bidirectional, automated information-sharing capacity on visa applications. Rabbi David Paskin, the new spiritual leader at Temple Beth David in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., was featured in a story in The Palm Beach Post. David spent 16 years at Temple Beth Abraham in Canton, Mass., before moving to Florida. “With me, what you see is what you get,” he told the newspaper. “I think of myself as an under-constructionist Jew.” Joel Rubin joined the Obama administration as the State Department’s chief liaison to the House of Representatives. He has been working in Washington since the late 1990s in a variety of positions in government and the nonprofit sector focused on the Middle East, nuclear weapons and climate-change issues. He is married, has three young daughters and lives in Chevy Chase, Md. He says Brandeis is never far from his thoughts.