BOARD OF DIRECTORS
RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST
Board of Directors and Officers
The Board of Directors is still in formation. The founding board members and officers are:
Michael Lame
Michael Lame, the President and founder of Re-Think the Middle East, was previously the founder and executive director of The Foundation for Mideast Communication, a Washington-DC based group active in the 1980s and early 1990s which promoted communication between Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East and between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the United States and Canada.
As a management consultant and organizational trainer, he works with clients in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. He served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Business School, where he taught leadership courses in the Executive MBA program. He also taught at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management and has lectured on management topics to corporate executives at retreats and conferences worldwide. Michael has worked and traveled extensively in the Middle East.
He received his BA with honors in history from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. A member of the State Bar of California since 1978, Michael now lives in Washington, DC.
Anisa Mehdi
Anisa Mehdi, Vice President of RTME, is a journalist and filmmaker specializing in religion and the arts and was named a 2009-2010 Fulbright Scholar. She recently returned from spending the academic year in Amman, working with Jordanian media and communications students and professionals.
Anisa has reported news from and made documentary films in Algeria, Egypt, France, Iran, Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States. She produced and directed the National Geographic special about the Hajj, Inside Mecca. Her PBS Frontline film Muslims shows the cultural, economic, social and political diversity of Muslims around the world. For ABC News Nightline Mehdi produced a series of programs on Muslim views about faith and non-Muslim cultures and on stereotyping in popular media. She is the winner of two Emmys, a CINE Golden Eagle, and numerous prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists. She also teaches documentary film at Seton Hall University and serves as a Trustee of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Anisa is a speaker specialist for the US Department of State’s International Information Programs. She leads inter-religious discussions and workshops at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and she lectures around the country on Islam and the media, Muslim women, Islam in America, and Middle East conflict resolution.
Anisa holds a Masters Degree in Journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. cum laude in Spanish Language and Literature from Wellesley College. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two daughters.
Charles Asher Small
Charles Asher Small, RTME’s Secretary, is the Director, President and Founder of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. He also directs the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), the first North American university-based center for study of the subject. He is a Research Affiliate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), Yale University.
Charles has worked as a consultant and policy advisor in North America, Europe, Southern Africa and the Middle East. He specializes in social and cultural theory, globalization and national identity, socio-cultural policy, and racisms – including Antisemitism.
He received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, McGill University, Montreal; a M.Sc. in Urban Development Planning in Economics, Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London; and a Doctorate of Philosophy (D.Phil), Oxford University. Charles completed post-doctorate research at GRES, Université de Montreal. He taught in departments of sociology and geography at Goldsmith College, University of London, Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Tel Aviv University, and the Institute of Urban Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He was also an Associate Professor and the Director of Urban Studies at SCSU, Connecticut. Charles lives in New Haven, Connecticut.