Brandeis Magazine

New Delhi resident Somasundar Burra, P’00, who formerly worked with an NGO focused on urban poverty, writes that he is now part of a small group of retired civil servants trying to uphold liberal and secular constitutional values in an increasingly polarized India. Leonard Jason is the senior editor of “Introduction to Community Psychology: Becoming an Agent of Change,” an online, free, open-source textbook available to undergraduates around the world. Earlier this year, Richard Liskov taught the first completely online course in U.S. insurance regulation, part of the Graduate Program in Financial Services Compliance at the Boston University School of Law. A new book by Ian Lustick, “Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality,” will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press this year. Ian is a political science professor at Penn. David Maeir-Epstein reports that IsraelGrants, the Jerusalem-based company he founded 15 years ago to provide resource development for Israeli nonprofits, has been acquired by Atlas Social Investments. He will head up the company’s professional and resource development division through the end of 2020, and will then have the option of full or partial retirement. In the meantime, David makes weekly trips to the company’s Beersheva headquarters, which give him even more opportunities to see his grandchildren who live in that city. Jason Sommer writes, “Allison and I are nearly fully occupied with raising Gabriel, who successfully completed kindergarten and is head of his class in many things — above all, reading. I write full time now and wonder why I didn’t pack in the teaching sooner. I just won the 2019 Hanks Memorial Prize for the best poem by a Missouri writer who has published in Missouri literary magazines. My fifth book of poems is under consideration (keep your fingers crossed).”