In the last two years, Mara Karlin has traveled to Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, India and Nepal for her work in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).
Last year, she went with an assistant secretary of defense to Jordan and met with King Abdullah. The next day they went to Lebanon and met with the prime minister, the minister of defense and the Lebanon Armed Forces commander, she said.
That’s part of the deal when you work in government. “Policy can be a very fast moving train,” she said.
Karlin is one of the many former Milwaukeeans living and working in Washington, D.C. The Chronicle recently caught up with four of them — Karlin, her husband Reuben Jacobson, Graham Hoffman and Bari Lurie — to hear about their lives and careers, their passions and their feelings about their hometown.
Three of them, Karlin, Jacobson and Hoffman, all 28, grew up together. Graduates of Milwaukee Jewish Day School and Nicolet High School, they were each attracted to the city for different reasons.
Lurie, 26 and also a Nicolet graduate, came to the capital city for reasons that may be typical — politics.
All expressed enthusiasm about their adopted home.
In addition to the usual amenities of a big city, wonderful cultural offerings, excellent job opportunities, and lots of young people, “[Washington’s] got an intimacy you don’t find in a lot of cities,” Karlin said. “You walk down the street and see people you know. There are farmers markets, and a lot of green space and the buildings are not tall.”
“Washington has a village feel,” Jacobson said. “It is manageable,” and easy to get around, with or without a car, and it’s stimulating without the “craziness of New York,” according to Lurie.
Best of all, the city draws interesting, intelligent, vibrant young people, who want to pursue their dreams and make an impact on the country and the world, the four 20-somethings interviewed for this article agreed.
“There is a constant resurgence of young people who are incredibly passionate about what they do,” said Hoffman, who first worked in New York.
Unlike New York, where people are passionate about getting ahead and making money, in Washington “they all work for something they believe in,” he said.
But the downside of this influx is that that population is transient. Because of the shifting government cycles and the multitude of short-term internships, fellowships and the like, young people are also constantly moving away.
Karlin noted that this is one of the biggest challenges her religious congregation faces. The D.C. Minyan, where she and Jacobson worship at “egalitarian Orthodox” services, is “young, energetic, warm and open when members want to do things,” Karlin said.
But, she added, “I can’t count on both hands how many friends have moved away and how many new friends we’ve made during the six years we’ve been here.”
Karlin and Jacobson have no plans to leave. The couple, who started dating during their senior year of high school, moved to the district in 2001.
“We planned to stay two years and then decide whether to move somewhere else,” Karlin said. Two years later, they were married in a Milwaukee wedding ceremony. And six years later, they feel firmly rooted.
Influencing policy
Karlin, recently promoted to special assistant to the undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, has worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) for two years.
“[This office] informs and makes recommendations to the secretary of defense and works with interagency entities like the State Department, the National Security Council and the intelligence community on a host of issues,” Karlin said.
During the Israel-Lebanon War last summer, Karlin worked to evacuate 15,000 Americans from Lebanon. She figured out such logistics as how to get the evacuees onto helicopters and ships, she said.
Part of her job is to provide security assistance to allies. Last year, she held the position of Levant director, who focuses on Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories. In that role, she participated in the U.S. government’s efforts to help the Lebanese Armed Forces rebuild and strengthen after last summer’s war.
It has been a great experience, she said.
While “[trying] to influence policy on the margins is a lot of pressure, it’s incredibly interesting.” And working with the military has been “a great learning process,” she said.
As for the future, she is fascinated by the world of policy and “would like to stay in it for a while,” she said.
This fall, Karlin will also begin co-teaching a course on crisis simulation, with a Rand Corporation employee, at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies where she earned a graduate degree in international relations and international economics with concentrations in Mideast and strategic studies.
Karlin gained her first political experience working for Wisconsin Senators Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold and then-Attorney General Jim Doyle while she was an undergraduate at Tulane University, where she majored in political science and Jewish studies.
Researching social factors
Jacobson is working to affect change through different means. “I was raised with a strong foundation in social justice and equality and [a belief that] the way to achieve that is through education,” he said in a telephone interview.
After two years teaching fifth- and sixth-grades in the Washington, D.C., public school system, Jacobson has just begun a doctoral program in education policy, with a concentration in social foundations, at the University of Maryland-College Park.
Since graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in sociology, Jacobson has moved back and forth between the academy and the field, the theoretical and the practical, in education.
What he has learned in each environment has fed his ideas about the other.
He first worked at an educational think tank, the American Institutes for Research, while simultaneously earning a master’s degree in education policy from George Washington University. Then he worked as a classroom teacher.
His hands-on teaching experience in impoverished city neighborhoods led Jacobson to focus on the social context his students were living in and to an interest in examining the impact of social factors on students’ quality of learning.
He also developed an interest in the concept of community schools, a progressive vision of a school as both a place and a set of partnerships between the school and other community resources.
He anticipates that his doctoral program will take about four years to complete and then he would like to become a university professor.
That would offer the opportunity to do “both the theoretical work and also the practical side of affecting policy.”
Affecting Jewish
continuity
Graham Hoffman is also focused on education, but through his work at the Hillel Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, his focus is enhancing Jewish life and engaging students in their Jewish identities.
Director of innovation and implementation, and senior advisor to the president at the Schusterman International Center, the world headquarters of Hillel, Graham said that this is “an incredibly enthusiastic time” in his career.
When he spoke with The Chronicle, Hoffman had just finished hosting a one-week training session for interns and faculty for a new Hillel and Taglit-birthright israel project called Campus Entrepreneurs Initiative.
The project, now beginning its second year, is designed to enhance Jewish life on campus by employing 12 students with broad social networks, on each of 11 college campuses, to build relationships with some 7,700 uninvolved Jewish students, over the course of a year.
The training, which also included Jewish Campus Service Corps fellows and Grinspoon Israel advocacy interns, focused on relationship-based engagement, Hoffman said.
As a business student at Washington University, Hoffman wasn’t very involved with Hillel. He had once gone to the organization’s director, Rob Goldberg, to express disappointment with the organization and Goldberg told him that he could either complain or he could do something about it.
“So I did a few things for Hillel,” including securing money from the student government and restructuring the operation of the Jewish student leadership, he said.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in marketing and human research management, Hoffman moved to New York to work at Accenture, a global consulting firm.
But Goldberg was apparently impressed with Hoffman’s student contribution to Hillel because he worked to lure the recent graduate to the organization’s international office.
Hoffman was initially hesitant to consider Hillel. He said he had been working in a high-powered, cutting-edge environment where he was constantly challenged, and when he thought of Jewish organizations he said he envisioned “a 1970s-style office building.”
But when Goldberg persuaded him to spend a day at Hillel’s Schusterman International Center, Hoffman said, “I was impressed.
[They have] a beautiful building, they wear ties to work every day, are incredibly passionate and dedicated and take the work seriously.”
By the end of his first year, Hoffman was hooked on Hillel. The organization was just getting into “the most comprehensive strategic planning process in its history” which would result in a five-year plan designed to double its reach on campus.
Hoffman is now charged with “overseeing and coordinating [the plan’s] implementation across the international center and in partnership with local Hillels in the field.”
Set to leave for Jerusalem next week for a three-week professional development course at the Pardes Institute, Hoffman reflected on his work.
“We are connecting with so many intelligent, passionate, creative Jewish students and faculty,” Hoffman said. “I’m not worried about the Jewish future because I have the opportunity to work with them and they’re impressive.”
Politics and business
This week, Bari Lurie made the transition from Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) to baseball. After more than seven years working for Clinton, she is the new director of ballpark enterprises of the Washington Nationals baseball team.
Lurie had most recently been working as chief of staff to Clinton’s presidential campaign manager, but began working on Clinton’s senatorial campaign as an undergraduate.
“I was political assistant to the executive director of two organizations: Friends of Hillary, Clinton’s senatorial campaign, and HillPac 2006, which was Clinton’s political action committee,” Lurie said.
Lurie’s involvement with national politics began when, as a Nicolet High School junior, she spent a semester in Washington, D.C., working as a Senate page for Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.).
“I went to page school early in the morning and then worked in the Senate chamber all day,” Lurie said.
Lurie worked as a White House intern during her freshman year in college and by junior year she was working for Clinton full-time.
Lurie left the Clinton campaign on good terms (“I firmly believe that she’ll be the next president of the United States”) but wanting to get into the business world.
This is an exciting time to be with the Nationals, she said. Now playing their third season after being brought to Washington from Montreal, the team is building a new stadium, slated to open in April 2008.
Though Lurie values her experience in political Washington, she “is looking forward to the business world, where, I hear, a 12-hour day is not the norm.”
Still, she said, “No job can provide you with the kinds of experiences that a political campaign can, especially Hillary Clinton’s political campaign.”
When asked what, if anything, she missed about Milwaukee, Lurie said, “Oh my gosh, it’s home. It’s everything. I miss the familiarity.”
In the craziness of Washington, it’s good to remember where you are from and [Milwaukee] is a great place to be from,” Lurie said.
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