Jan Lebovitz:
As co-presidents of the Phoenix chapter, Linda Ullman and I would like to welcome alumni, parents, BNC members, and friends to this informative session with Paul Rockower. Thank you to BNC National, Beth Bernstein, and Alex Glomset, and Idela Ashley for partnering with our chapter. Please put your questions at the bottom. Linda Ullman is now going to introduce our guest speaker, Paul Rockower.
Linda Ullman:
Morning, everybody. I want to introduce Paul Rockower. We're very excited to have him. I'm going to read a little bit of a brief bio on him, and then I'm going to let him take it away because he's really the one that's going to tell us everything about himself. So Paul Rockower is the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix. He's formally the executive director of Levantine Public Diplomacy, an independent public diplomacy organization. He's managed the US Department of State's American Music Abroad and Next Level programs in dozens of countries around the world, including many countries in conflict. He also previously worked with Israeli foreign ministry. Paul is a Brandeis alum who graduated in 2003 with a BA in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, and he has wonderful things to say about Brandeis, and we welcome you all, and take it away Paul. Thanks.
Paul Rockower:
There's a race of men that don't fit in, a race that can't sit still. So they break the hearts of kith and kin and roam the world at will. They range the field and rove the flood. They climb the mountain's crest. Theirs is the curse of nomads blood, and they don't know how to rest. If they just went straight home, they might go far. They are strong and brave and true. But they're always tired of the things that are, and they want the strange and new. It's a poem by Robert Service. It was featured in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and really speaks to a nomadic existence. I've lived a bit of a nomadic existence doing public diplomacy, basically public diplomacy knight-errantry all over the world. I've been to almost 85 countries. I've worked in over 30 countries. I've worked with the State Department. I've worked with the Israeli Foreign Ministry. I've worked in India with Indian Ministry of External Affairs, and I've worked in Taiwan, running public diplomacy programs all over.
Paul Rockower:
To get a sense of how nomadic my life has been, before I moved to Phoenix, about 18 months ago, I had been without a fixed address for almost seven years while I was running State Department cultural diplomacy programs. During that seven years, I didn't live anywhere longer than two months. The longest I lived anywhere was in Paris for two months and in Morocco for two months. But literally, I was continent hopping. I was country hopping, running different cultural diplomacy programs for the State Department, of which I'll talk a bit about that during this discussion. Mind you, I didn't have a smartphone then. I didn't have smartphone until I moved to Phoenix 18 months ago. Actually, I have to say, I was much happier without having a smartphone traveling all about.
Paul Rockower:
But I've traveled from Beijing to Cairo writing about Jewish communities in far-flung places. I've traveled from L.A. to Panama by bus. I've truly been a nomad, and I'm going to share a bit of some of my adventures with all of you here. I'd like to thank BNC Phoenix for hosting me, for having me. I would like to point out I'm speaking in a personal capacity as a Brandeis alumni. So this is an audience I assume that's savvy enough to understand what that means.
Paul Rockower:
To get everyone on the same page with what I'm going to be discussing in terms of public diplomacy, Professor Rockower is going to give you a little bit of a background about what is public diplomacy. So first and foremost, you have to understand the difference between diplomacy and public diplomacy. Diplomacy is very high level, very secretive. It's the communication of government to government. This is how governments function and communicate directly. Public diplomacy is the antithesis of this. It is how countries or communities communicate with people, with foreign public. It's how countries or communities communicate their policies, their culture, and their values.
Paul Rockower:
Public diplomacy is really the intersection of communication and foreign policy or in a communal sense of domestic public policy. So public diplomacy really rests on five pillars. First and foremost is the notion of listening. You have to listen to your audience. You have to understand the language to speak. You have to understand how your audience texts. So first and foremost, you have to engage in listening to your audience. It deals with advocacy, strategic communication, information, how you communicate information internationally.
Paul Rockower:
Another pillar of public diplomacy is cultural exchange. I'm going to talk a bit about that today. Cultural exchange being things like study abroad, Fulbright Programs. The Rotary Foundation does a lot of cultural exchange. Might talk a little bit about a program that I did with The Rotary Foundation. Seeds of Peace is a good example of cultural exchange. I'll talk a little bit about that because I spent summer working at Seeds of Peace. What I spend most of my career doing is cultural diplomacy, and that's how you use music and food and art and dance and culture to communicate your intangibles to foreign public. So I'll talk a bit about that.
Paul Rockower:
The last aspect of public diplomacy, which I'm not going to really get into much today, is international broadcasting. So things like the BBC, Voice of America, France 24, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera. These are government-sponsored broadcast outlets. So it's a little different than commercial outlets. So you take the market out of the equation. That matters in public diplomacy. But we're not going to get into that as much. So public diplomacy, one of the main facets of public diplomacy is dealing with a concept called soft power. Soft power is the power of your influence, while hard power is how you get what you want out of force or coercion. Soft power's how you use the power of your influence, the power of your resources, your institutions, the power of the models and the attractiveness of your culture and your values to get currency, be it in a communal sense, in an international sense. But soft power is really a facet of public diplomacy of how you connect with this.
Paul Rockower:
But what public diplomacy understands, so you don't reach people through rational information, but rather through emotional transrational connections that come through these intangibles, like music and food, art, and dance and culture, and in advocacy in terms of storytelling, telling who you are as a country, as a community. So I've been engaged in this for many years. But what you have to understand, so it was Gandhi who said, "I have nothing new to offer. Truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills."
Paul Rockower:
Well, by the same token there's nothing new about communicating your culture, your history. This is what people have been doing since time immemorial. But what's new about this in a public diplomacy sense is thinking about it in a strategic sense, how do you use this to enhance your self-power, enhance the standing of your community? There's a great professor at USC, where I got a master's in public diplomacy named Manuel Castells. He really describes public diplomacy the best, I think. What he says is, public diplomacy is the projection in the international arena of the values and the ideas of the public. The aim of the practice of public diplomacy is not to convince, but to communicate, not to declare, but to listen. Public diplomacy seeks to build a sphere in which diverse voices can be heard in spite of their various origins, distinct values and often contradictory interests.
Paul Rockower:
So I've spent my career creating spaces in which different cultures can connect, most often through music, although interestingly, I have no musical background. I can't sing. I can't dance. I can't breakdance. I would break something. But I've been working on music programs, playing my own role of basically being a public diplomacy, Sherpa, dealing with the logistics, running the programs, making sure that you get these partners connecting. I'll share a bit about this.
Paul Rockower:
To understand me a little bit, I wanted to share a little bit of my background. So I'm originally from Washington, D.C., and I'm grew up in Washington D.C. I went to a synagogue called Temple Micah, and I started studying for my bar mitzvah with the rabbi, the day of the Rodney King riots. The day that the Rodney King riots broke out was the first day I started studying for my bar mitzvah. So social action, Tikun Olam was something that was seared into my consciousness at a very young age, and it's something that I've been engaged in my whole life through these programs and projects.
Paul Rockower:
After my bar mitzvah, I kind of dropped off a bit. I thought I might end up being a Buddhist by the time I was 20. It didn't quite fully connect with me. Then when I was 16, I went on a young Judea Israel discovery trip and that just blew my mind. I mean, talk about cultural exchange. I was visiting Israel for the first time, seeing this in such a tangible connection to my history and my heritage, reading the source in the desert all around, and it completely changed my life and my perspective because my cultural background, my identity was something so real to me now with Israel and with my Jewish sense.
Paul Rockower:
So when I returned from that trip, I got involved with young Judea first on a local level, then on a regional level. I was a social action programmer for my region, and I knew immediately I wanted to go to Brandeis. Brandeis was this was... This was where I wanted to be. So after I applied and got into Brandeis and was planning on going, I said to Brandeis, "Hold on one second. I want to do a gap year. I want to do a young Judea year course." I said, "Of course, Brandeis gets it. Brandeis is a bubble, of course. Go for it."
Paul Rockower:
So I took a year between high school and college and spent a year living in Israel on young Judea year course. For me, it gave me direction and purpose. It gave me a year to kind of grow up a bit and figure out what it was that I was interested in. By the time I came to Brandeis, I knew exactly what I wanted to study. I was so interested in the Middle East. I wanted to be engaged in learning more about this. Brandeis said, "You came to the right place." I'm going to share a little bit about some of the courses I took at Brandeis and how it's kind of shaped my direction and my thinking even today.
Paul Rockower:
I mean, I graduated almost 20 years ago, and yet I still have so much that came from my Brandeis education that affects me today. I got to Brandeis my freshman year, started taking classes on the Middle East. I took a class on Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire with Professor Avigdor Levy, and it blew my mind. I mean, it was so fascinating to learn about this multiethnic, multilingual Ottoman Empire, of which the Jews found refuge there and learning of this history. It completely just changed my perspective of everything I knew. Also, the freshman year, I took a class on intro to IR with Professor Bob Art.
Paul Rockower:
You need to get the basics if you're going to understand the international system. I took this wonderful class on international systems on kind of an IR class, looking at diplomacy from medernic onwards. I mean, just things that really only Brandeis can give you in terms of just the depth of understanding. I was taking history as well. I mean, excuse me, taking Hebrew as well.
Paul Rockower:
My spring semester, I took a class, 20th century political novels with Professor Whitfield. I still have those novels behind me. I mean, we read things that just shape your understanding of the world, things like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Arthur Koestler's the Darkness at Noon, Jack London's The Iron Heel. If you want to understand what's going on in the world right now, reject London's The Iron Heel. But just one of those things that only Brandeis can give you in terms of understanding the world through political novels.
Paul Rockower:
Continuing with the Middle East focus, took a class on world of Shia Islam with Professor Yitzhak Nakash. It was fascinating just getting to understand the nuance and the different directions of the Islamic world, getting to see the real differences. I mean, Professor Nakash was a brilliant scholar on Shia Islam and learning just the differences in the... It really one of those things that only Brandeis can give you. I took another class with a visiting professor named Professor Sadiq Al-Azm, a class on Arab society and political thought. He was a visiting scholar from Damascus, just a brilliant fellow. He wrote one of the seminal works after the six-day war called self-criticism after the defeat just looking at Arab society and culture after the six-day war and just a brilliant fellow. Thankfully, he got out of Syria when the Syrian Civil War hit. But just again, understanding the Middle East in a way that only Brandeis can to teach you.
Paul Rockower:
Took another class that semester called building a new Europe with Professor Ross. This was prescient because this was at the time, where in an Austria, the rise of the Freedom Party this far-right party. I remember writing a paper about the spectra of the far-right nationalism in Europe and just tracking this early on. Sadly, none of this has surprised me that's been going on because in part, because we were looking at this at Brandeis all these years ago. I took a class, something that still sticks with me, a writing seminar, where one of the things that we read was The Minister's Black Veil by Hawthorne. So here we are living in this COVID age, and this is a great story of the minister who's wearing a black veil across his face and how society treats them differently because he's got a mask on.
Paul Rockower:
Anyway, onward to sophomore year, taking class on Islamic civilizations institutions. Again, Levy took a phenomenal class on Tolstoy with Professor Swenson, who understanding how to really pick up Tolstoy onto Hebrew and all that into the spring third-world ideology with Professor Nyangoni learning about Kwame Nkurumah, Ahmed Ben Bella, things that later on when I was working in Africa was able to talk fluently about some of these Pan-African ideologies. Dating back to Brandeis really kind of helped shape my work.
Paul Rockower:
Anyway, moving on, class like the Jerry Cohen in the '60s. Being a Brandeis, you live in the library, and this is one of the reasons why I want to talk about BNC is because I lived in the library. Onward, taking a class with Robert Reich, wealth and poverty, I mean, brilliant stuff, and writing op-eds in The Justice. This is during the Second Intifada and just beginning my chops. I took my junior year abroad in Prague, and this was during 9/11 and just getting a sense of how the world was shaking apart, getting to explore Central and Eastern Europe. Brandeis said, "You okay out there?" I said, "Absolutely, I'm fine." Kind of kicked into my wanderlust.
Paul Rockower:
After that, my spring semester, I was in Morocco, living in Morocco, began studying Arabic, living with a Moroccan Muslim family and how much that shaped my view of the world being there. Onto my senior year at Brandeis, living in with a Turkish Jew, a Colombian Jew, a Russian Jew, all in our suite, we spoke nine languages, really the quintessential Brandeis experience true Tower of Babel and socialization matters. I would later write a column for The Jerusalem Post called Tales of a Wandering Jew about Jewish community in far from places. I'll get into that a little bit. But that I would say really came from my time at Brandeis.
Paul Rockower:
Came back my senior year, as I said, and I was working with an internship at the Israeli consulate, working in the press office that would help lead on to a job with the Israeli foreign ministry. I'll get into that. But continuing with Brandeis, Jews in the world of Islam, started taking Hebrew and Arabic back-to-back, trying to study two languages at once, which is mind-blowing, speaking the wrong language in the wrong class and writing a thesis, what makes a suicide bomber tick.
Paul Rockower:
Most importantly, I took a class, global civil society, which began to understand how transnational advocacy networks connect within civil society, the communication of ideas internationally. Anyway, graduated from Brandeis with Islamic Middle Eastern studies. I had a job out of college working as the press officer for the consulate general of Israel to the Southwest. I was lucky enough to turn that consulate internship with the Israeli consulate into a job as the press officer, and so began my public diplomacy career down in Texas in a Shalom Y'all doing press and public diplomacy on behalf of the Israeli foreign ministry for a five-state region, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico.
Paul Rockower:
This was doing press and media and public diplomacy work during the Second Intifada, the Gaza disengagement, really difficult time. It's never easy times dealing with Israeli public diplomacy. But this was also getting to understand, how do you promote Israel beyond the conflict, showing signs of its democracy, its diversity, its development. Really, this is where I began working on cultural diplomacy. We would do programs like sharing Drew's poetry or Ethiopian Israeli storytellers. We had a Latino affairs officer named Sofia Perches. She was the first Latino affairs officer for the Israeli consulate. We would do outreach in Spanish to the Southwest region, doing smart programs like we did for Day of the Dead, Día de Muertos. We built an ofrenda for the first Mexican ambassador to Israel, Octavio Paz, the famous poet, and got pictures from the Israeli foreign ministry. Again, back to the idea of listening, knowing how to connect with your audience.
Paul Rockower:
So I spent about three years in Houston doing Israeli media and public diplomacy, as I mentioned during the Second Intifada, the Gaza disengagement. Towards the end of my tenure there, I happened to be reading a New York times article, and there was a piece by Dennis Ross, the great peace negotiator. He wrote this piece about how it's not quite applicable, but Israelis and Palestinians could learn... This is what he said. Israelis and Palestinians could learn from the model of South African reconciliations. The situation's not applicable, but the model of reconciliation was something that they could work on. The next day, I saw a advertisement in the Jewish Herald-Voice, the local Jewish newspaper about a Rotary Exchange in South Africa. So I wrote them an application for this Rotary Exchange thing. I work with Israelis and Palestinians, and I would love to see more of his model of reconciliation.
Paul Rockower:
So I moved on from my work with the Israeli consulate, and I had this Rotary Exchange in South Africa. This is really where I got to see cultural exchange, first and foremost. I was traveling through the Eastern Cape, the Free State and Lesotho staying with Rotarian families, getting to see parts of the country that you don't usually go to. Everyone goes to Cape Town and Joburg. This was getting to see a different sense of it. This is when I started writing columns for The Jerusalem Post because I began looking at the Jewish community in the hinterlands of South Africa. We know about the Jewish community in Cape town. This was writing a column about what had been what's called a smouse. This was a 1900 merchant peddler who was the lifeblood of the hinterlands of South Africa, doing all of the trading and really bringing all of the wares from place to place.
Paul Rockower:
So that began my career as a journalist writing about Jewish communities in far-flung places. After that, I worked at a camp called Seeds of Peace, as I mentioned, this campo conflict, where you get Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Indian, and Pakistani teenagers, you get them together for the summer. The first night, Israeli's can't sleep because there's Palestinian in their bunk. Palestinians can't sleep because there's Israelis in their bunk, same with the Indian, the Pakistanis, and you get them together, breaking down barriers by living together, playing sports together, having dialogue, really getting to connect.
Paul Rockower:
They don't always end up being best friends. But the people that they thought were monsters, they learned are no different than they are. This is the power of cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy and something that I've always taken with me. As I mentioned, I was a journalist. I continued on traveling from Beijing to Cairo writing about Jewish communities in far-flung places. Something that came out of my work at Brandeis is understanding that the Jewish community worldwide is something so vast and profound, and there's so many stories to tell. So writing about communities growing leaps and bounds like the Jewish community of Beijing or Jewish community of Shanghai, writing about communities that are in the twilight of their days in Indian Cochin.
Paul Rockower:
I was the first Jerusalem Post columnist to write about being a Jew in Pakistan. That would later turn into some projects that I worked on, on what it was called, the Pakistan-Israel Peace Forum, connecting Pakistanis and Israelis and their diasporas through dialogue, again, connecting people through public diplomacy. Anyway, onward to some more work on the Pakistan-Israel forum with Professor Moss, who I'd worked with at Brandeis on the behind-the-scenes Pakistan-Israel connection. There's actually a long history of relations between Pakistan and Israel, but behind the scenes, it's not official, but it's a longer story. I don't have time to get into all of that.
Paul Rockower:
Anyway, I continued my peripateticness. I was living in Buenos Aires. I had a fellowship in Uruguay called the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship for young Jewish leadership from all around the world, young Jewish leadership from Israel, India, Argentina, France, again, connecting the Jewish world in dialogue. After my time there, I went to USC to get a master's in public diplomacy and really took a deeper dive into public diplomacy, looking at things like gastrodiplomacy, how countries communicate their culture through their food, the cultural diplomacy stuff.
Paul Rockower:
I mentioned I worked in Taiwan and India with their foreign ministries looking in Taiwan about how Taiwan uses public diplomacy to get around these diplomatic difficulties, looking at how India can communicate ideas of nonviolence. But really continuing to build a space in which different cultures can connect. So this all leads me up to what has been the last seven years where I was working on State Department cultural diplomacy programs. I ended up, once I got back from India, working for an organization called American Voices. I was the communications director. American Voices does two things. It runs performing arts academies in countries in conflict. So I ran a performing arts Academy in Iraq, teaching jazz and break dance and symphony and theater, teaching music composition program. So this academy in Iraq was for the youth orchestras of Kurdistan, the youth orchestra of Iraq, teaching the next generation of cultural leadership in pedagogy and in musical skills, really just helping to build the next generation of cultural leadership.
Paul Rockower:
We had this fascinating music composition program, where they were taking theories of Western musical composition and applying it to Kurdish and Arabic music. These music students were writing their own symphonies, the Baghdad Waltz and all sorts of wonderful things. That was performed by these youth orchestras. Being a Jew in Iraq, I got to be an ambassador. I mean, literally, there's not a lot of Jews who end up in Iraq these days, and I never hid my identity. One time, my Jewish star fell out, and this girl looks at it and says, "You are Jewish?" I said, "[arabic]." I speak some Arabic. She starts counting to 10 in Hebrew, "[hebrew]." I start counting with her in Arabic, and we get to 10 and she says, "Mashallah."
Paul Rockower:
I wrote a column called a Fiddler on the Roof in Kurdistan, which is a fun story, but there's a little anecdote from that of this guy, Omar, I met. When he found out I was Jewish, he says, "Wait a minute. I thought all you Jews were named Stein Stein Stein. So being a Jew in foreign places, you get to also be an ambassador. Anyway, the other thing that I'm American Voices does is it runs the American Music Abroad program. So the American Music Abroad program is the evolution of the Jazz Ambassadors program. Jazz Ambassadors was the state department program that sent Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck all around the world to be cultural ambassadors.
Paul Rockower:
One of the secrets is that the US won the Cold War with jazz. There's a great book on it called Satchmo Blows Up the World. But jazz was really the currency of cultural diplomacy for many, many years. This program was the evolution of that. It was open to blues and bluegrass and Hawaiian music and hip hop and rock and roll. I would take trios of quartets, quintets, what have you, and would show a side of American culture that's not always known. So I took a five-girl bluegrass band named Della Mae to Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, bluegrass on the Silk Road. Just this amazing part of the world that one, there's not a lot of bluegrass that goes there.
Paul Rockower:
This is the point of cultural diplomacy is it takes the market out of the equation. The reason why you can send a Hawaiian music to Brazil or bluegrass to Uzbekistan is because these are in educational endeavors. So you don't have the government supporting this. I mean, you don't have the market supporting this. So the government is able to use it as a cultural, showing different side of American culture. If you've ever seen the movie, The Descendants, most of that music was done by Hawaiians slack-key guitar legend named Philip Emur... Wife, who's a kumu hula master hula protege. I took them to Brazil. I can tell you that one of the most beautiful things in the world is teaching Brazilians to hula dance, teaching people who dance the waves to dance like the waves. It's truly a beautiful thing.
Paul Rockower:
After a couple of years of working with American Voices, I went off on my own and started my own public diplomacy business called Levantine Public Diplomacy, where I was working with alumni from the State Department programs, connecting them with new embassies, with different embassies. So I took that five-girl bluegrass band, Della Mae, took them to the Brazil for the World Cup, sharing bluegrass, and I sent a rock and blues band to the North of Brazil, where they were connecting with a roots and rock and reggae with the Northern Brazilian, Afro-Brazilian music.
Paul Rockower:
I took that Hawaiian slack-key guitar group to Zimbabwe. We're connecting the spirit of Aloha, with the spirit of Ubuntu. I mean, really just showing different sides of American culture all over. That became about a third of my work. Then two-thirds of my work. I was running the State Department's hip hop diplomacy program through the State Department and the University North Carolina's Music Department. Hip hop diplomacy is the evolution of jazz diplomacy. I mean, there's a difference between the cultural diplomacy that I was doing with the blues and the bluegrass and then with hip hop because we were working with local hip hop communities, where you had to this epistemic just dialogue between hip hop artists from the US, hip hop artists from Bangladesh, from Tunisia, Algeria, what have you. We would take teams of MCs, DJs, beat makers, and break dancers to run hip hop academies all over the world using hip hop as a tool for social empowerment.
Paul Rockower:
We weren't working with beginning artists, not the most established artist, but kind of up and coming artists and building them a platform to get that music out further. How do you use your music for entrepreneurship, social activism, conflict resolution? What you have to understand is hip hop is modern poetry. It's called street journalism. It's a form of verbal and nonverbal communication that really is a way that connects. These were hip hop communities communicating with each other. So building that space. One of the things that we did in these programs is that we would also mix hip hop with traditional music wherever we were working. So in Algeria, mixing hip hop with Canali music. We're in El Salvador, mixing hip hop with Cumbia and just pushing the boundaries of what is hip hop.
Paul Rockower:
The beauty of hip hop is that I worked in some of the worst areas of gang violence in El Salvador, working with some really tough people. If you would ask them to talk about their experience, you wouldn't get a word out of them, but you give people a microphone and a beat, and they can come alive and share what they've been dealing with and what they engage in ways that you don't get. So that was the other two-thirds of my work, traveling all over, running these hip hop academies, doing hip hop diplomacy work. Everything was going smashingly well. I was traveling the world. I was running these fascinating programs, and then there was a little election in 2016, and I woke up to headlines... I was in Germany at the time. I woke to headlines in German of an unexpected outcome.
Paul Rockower:
The day after the election, I was in Nuremberg, walking through the parade grounds that I'm sure many people won't recognize. The day after that, I was in Weimar, the home of Goethe and Schiller of German culture and the Weimar Republic, and just outside of Weimar, there's the Buchenwald concentration camp. It's just this juxtaposition. From Weimar onto Leipzig, where the people of Leipzig helped bring down the East German communist state using music and culture to protest against the East German communist state and on my way back to Prague where I'd been studying during 9/11.
Paul Rockower:
I knew then that I wasn't going to continue my cultural diplomacy work with the State Department. I told all my clients I was discontinuing my work, and I was finishing out my final programs in Algeria and Tunisia, and I went off into exile in Morocco. It was a public diplomacy run in, if you will. I took a little sabbatical, was thinking about teaching public diplomacy. I was in Chefchaouen in this beautiful city of all blue, where Jews had fled the inquisition and had ended up there and painted their houses blue, and over the years, the whole city painted itself blue. During that period was when we had Charlottesville and seeing Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville.
Paul Rockower:
It said something off of me. I said, "I got to go back. Lamont was on fire. I can't stay out in here while my own home country, my own home community is being threatened." So I worked my way back to the States all about trying to figure out how I can get best involved. I found a job with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix. I had known the work of the JCRCs when I worked for the Israeli foreign ministry, when I worked at the consulate in Houston. My best partners in the field where the JCRCs. I would get an Ethiopian Israeli speaker, I'd send them to the JCRC in New Orleans. He would go set them up with a Baptist Church. So I knew that this was the kind of practitioner public diplomacy work that I loved.
Paul Rockower:
So that's what brought me to Phoenix 18 months ago, and I've been here since. What we do here internally within the Jewish community, we try and work to make a more cohesive, collaborative, Jewish community. We do the crisis communications for the Jewish community, rapid response. We're kind of the press office for the Jewish community here in Phoenix. Externally, we do advocacy, interfaith outreach, and community bridge building on behalf of the Jewish community. We help communicate the issues that keep the Jewish community up at night to other communities around us, and we help the Jewish community understand, "What are the issues that keep other communities up at night."
Paul Rockower:
So helping them understand the antisemitism that we're facing, the dealing with these issues and using the soft power of the Jewish community, the resources and institutions to help strengthen civil society. We deal with insecurity here and helping other communities through our resources and institutions to become more secure as well. We work on issues of asylum, the asylum issues here in Arizona. We work on issues of criminal justice reform. Arizona has got a tremendous problem with criminal justice reform. We we help fight Islamophobia. We help fight antisemitism and bigotry. What we do is we take some of this communal public diplomacy down to the local level.
Paul Rockower:
So we hosted a concert where we had Jewish spiritual and gospel music. We had a thousand people at a church, half Jewish, half African-American listening to gospel and Jewish spiritual music, bringing these communities together through these intangibles. One of the things we've been working on here during COVID is helping stand up to some of the bigotry that the Chinese community has been facing, really getting out in front and standing with them and putting our foot down, saying, "We support the Chinese community." But things like this come back to us. Because of our work helping to support the Chinese community, when we were looking for PPE equipment, Chinese community said, "We've got all the source for this. We can help you."
Paul Rockower:
So this is the type of public diplomacy that really comes around and helps protect and safeguard the Jewish community. So I'm getting to the end of my time here. I'm going to end with something that a very astute Israeli ambassador impressed upon me, and that is, always have a clear message for your audience to take away. What I would say is this. Support institutions like Brandeis and BNC that are helping educate the next generation of communal leadership, Jewish communal leadership, of community leadership. This stuff's important. The door of the door.
Paul Rockower:
If more people in the world had a Brandeis education, the world would be a better place. Davka. Support those who are doing community relations and communal public diplomacy in your communities, those who are on the front lines doing Tikun Olam every day, and that's across the field. I mean, there are a lot of people working in the trenches right now, trying to make this community, make this world a better place. With that, I'll end with something that has stuck with me in all of my travels. [hebrew]. Whole world is a narrow bridge, and when you travel to 85 countries, you noticed. But you mustn't be afraid to cross it. So thank you. I'm open to any questions, and I will take some questions from there. Thank you.
Alex Glomset:
Thank you. Thank you, Paul. So while we wait for a couple more people to write in some questions, I can start us off with one here. Do you believe that the reputation and perception of the United States in recent years will affect the ability of students and young adults of the next generation to connect through cultural exchange?
Paul Rockower:
That's a very good question. It depends. It depends on a few things moving forward, like what happens in November, if this is seen as... The reputation of the US was a bit low after the Bush years, and Obama really changed that, and the soft power of the US was on the rise again, and then it kind of fell off the table a bit in these last few years. I think if America is more engaged in the world again, then that will help all parties. I mean, I can remember when traveling during the Bush years and people say, "Oh, American, Bush." But when traveling during the Obama years, especially when he was first elected, people say, "Oh, Obama."
Paul Rockower:
I think things change. It just depends on our engagement with the world. If we can be good cultural ambassadors, good cultural citizens, show that we can listen, show that we understand that. It's a good question. It really depends on our behavior, and if we can be more engaged, I mean, every American needs to go abroad and see a little bit more of how the world is. The more you're engaged, the more a cultural exchange takes place, the better off we all are. But that's a good question. Thank you.
Alex Glomset:
Here's another one. Could you share with us how ideology intertwines with public diplomacy strategies. Any imposed moment of/pitfalls of your values, traditions, ways of life to other cultures?
Paul Rockower:
It's a good question. So especially with the work with the hip hop diplomacy, we made a very good point of telling the artists we worked with, you represent your community, but you're not going to these countries saying we're from America, we're from the birthplace of hip hop. You're going to share who you are and learn who they are. Again, it's about the listening involved in this. I mean, I think that's one of the beauties of artists. Artists are better listeners in some ways because they're dealing with music. The question of ideology, with all of the public diplomacy programs that I ran with the cultural diplomacy, we kept the politics out of it. This was about creating a space for people to connect through culture. So really very rarely did we ever deal with any of the political issues directly.
Paul Rockower:
So we really kept ideology out of. I think in some ways, it's easier having partners who run this. So that I was working for University North Carolina's Music Department. That made us a bit different than if we were working directly with the State Department. We were managing the program. We could kind of fence off the program a bit and make it really about the people-to-people connections. So you work hard in public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy to keep the politics out of it and really connect on that intangible level through the arts themselves.
Alex Glomset:
So here's a good question. I'm going to combine two here. So the first question that came in was, what advice do you have for an incoming freshmen to Brandeis for someone whose daughter is going to be attending this fall? Then there was another comment about, do you have any advice for recent 2020 graduates, particularly those navigating towards work and public diplomacy?
Paul Rockower:
Two very good questions. I'll start with the freshmen coming in. Make sure you dig a junior year abroad, I would say. That'll open up your mind in ways that you can't even imagine. It depends on what you're interested in. If you're interested in, if you're going to Brandeis, not just Islamic and Middle Eastern studies are phenomenal. There's so much to learn there, and you start that way. For those who've just graduated, it's a tough time. I am sorry for you graduates. I can't imagine. I mean, it's never easy to graduate, but the world is so topsy-turvy right now. It's hard to say. What I would say is that there are... In years past, I would have said, look at the Peace Corps. Look at NGOs and nonprofits working in spaces. Look at teaching English. Rotary Foundation has a lot of programs.
Paul Rockower:
But if you want to get out in the world and be involved in public diplomacy, you got to be... I think it helps to start as a practitioner, and to do that, you have to get some experience in this and experience the world, be it teaching English abroad, be it volunteering for an NGO, somewhere. But you got to start somewhere. You got to get some experience behind you in the world and being engaged in that and understanding how the world works. We'll see when we can travel again. I mean, that's kind of the X factor in all of this. But whoever the person that asked about public diplomacy, I'd say let's connect offline, and I'll give you. So I'm happy to chat more about careers in public diplomacy. That's what kind of a longer conversation. I'm glad to speak with anybody who's interested in that.
Paul Rockower:
But to the freshmen start thinking about your junior year abroad now and where you want to go and think about languages and look at... I mean, there's something called the FLASH Scholarship, which is a critical language scholarship, and it's a tremendous scholarship if you want to be focused on languages. I would say, work on your languages. The more languages you speak, the better off you are. As I said, I speak varying degrees, about nine languages now. I'm using my time in quarantine to learn Portuguese. Yeah. It's just something I'm doing now. But the more languages you speak, the more the world opens up to you, and I'd say that for the recent grads and for the people who were just starting out in college.
Alex Glomset:
I have a couple of questions that I'll combine again about the US State Department. One was more about, how has your work involved you with US State Department, and how do you see the department changing? Then a more detailed question that says, as we've seen more recently, general American diplomacy and the role of the state department has been severely undermined through this administration. Have you seen public diplomacy undermined to the same extent, or do you think it's played a much bigger role than ever before?
Paul Rockower:
Okay. Good question. So we're going to take the first one about where public diplomacy is at now. Well, during COVID, nothing is going on right now. People are still trying to figure out how to do public and cultural diplomacy online. I'm working with some of the artists who are not working with them now, but reading proposals for how you can engage in cultural diplomacy. The embassies are still trying to do it. Even I left in 2016 with my work with the state department. The budgets were being cut. The programs that I've worked on still exist, and they're still going on, and they're trying to figure out how to deal with it in a COVID reality. But a lot of the direct funding that embassy's had for programs was beginning to diminish.
Paul Rockower:
Public diplomacy, it mattered. I will say it depends on the government in place. The Bush administration actually got public diplomacy well, and they did a lot to support public diplomacy, which sounds kind of strange here. But they, they understood that. The Obama administration did a lot of public diplomacy as well. The public diplomacy is kind of a bit away from the side of diplomacy. So it can still function and work and still engage with people. In ways, it's even more necessary right now. We're talking about kind of pre-COVID. But more necessary, as political relations are diminished, trying to maintain the people-to-people context is even more important. Remind me the first part of the question.
Alex Glomset:
The first part of the question, sorry, I'm just pulling it up, have you seen public diplomacy undermined to the same extent?
Paul Rockower:
Yeah. As I mentioned, the public diplomacy budgets were still there, but not as much as it had been. You had some undersecretaries for public diplomacy who I don't think really ever understood public diplomacy. Yeah. All of diplomacy, including public diplomacy has been undermined the last few years. That's the reality, and it's unfortunate. We'll see if things change. Things can rebound. So we'll see how that goes.
Alex Glomset:
Here's another one. Do you think that the current administration has permanently damaged relations with other countries? If not, what changes would future US presidents need to implement to repair these relationships?
Paul Rockower:
So I don't think there have been permanent damage quite yet, but it depends. If we have another four years of this, then yeah, you will probably see some permanent damage. Again, the relations weren't always great during the Bush years, weren't as bad as they are now. But during the Obama years, things rebounded quite a bit. I think a new administration that is listening and is more engaged with the world will change things. So yeah. I don't think anything is permanent. But we were at a real crossroads, and depending on which way we go will affect our reputation, our soft power, our ability to engage with the world for years to come. That's the reality that we're dealing with. So I don't think there's been a permanent rupture, but we're going to have to do a lot of public diplomacy work moving forward to kind of fix the damage that's been done. There's been some real damage done.
Alex Glomset:
I have another one. How has public diplomacy work shifted and adjusted, given the pandemic?
Paul Rockower:
Well, I mean, you don't have people-to-people engagement. You don't have cultural diplomacy programs taking place. I mean, public diplomacy is about the last three feet. That's what the doyen of public diplomacy, Edward R. Murrow said is it's really about the last three feet of connecting people. That's what I spend years doing is building these spaces in which people can connect personally. You can't do that in COVID because I'm here talking to all of you rather than just because we're stuck inside. I mean, we're on Zoom. You can't connect the same way. You can't carry out the same public diplomacy. I mean, there's parts of public diplomacy, the advocacy that's still going on. The international broadcasting is still going on. But the real bread and butter of public diplomacy is cultural diplomacy and cultural exchange, and that's not taking place right now, and we'll have to see where that goes in the future when we can actually get out again and be connecting. But it's going to be a while I think before that stuff really comes back.
Paul Rockower:
Although, as I said, I'm starting to see some of the artists that I worked with putting together proposals for, how do you do cultural diplomacy online? How do you use Zoom diplomacy, I guess will probably be a thing soon. So it'll shift, but that's kind of where we're at.
Alex Glomset:
Another one asking, have you done any work with Musicians Without Borders, which is-
Paul Rockower:
I have not. But I'm familiar with that program, and that's great work. Yeah. No. There's a lot of good stuff with that. There's a lot of good ways of connecting musicians around the world. The State Department stuff is what I love to do, and I haven't been involved with kind of the NGO side of things in that regard. But yeah. Musicians Without Borders is phenomenal. Yo-Yo Ma does a lot of cultural diplomacy work. There's a lot still out there, and we'll see where it goes.
Alex Glomset:
Here's a question about the era of globalization and whether or not you think this era is somewhat ended or deteriorated in the last decade or two. Do you see a resurgence of globalization in a post COVID world?
Paul Rockower:
Good question. I think so. I hope so. I mean, look, there was the Spanish flu in 1918, 1919, and yet after that was done, you saw it the world kind of globalizing again in fits and starts because you had World War II. But once we have COVID under control, God-willing, Inshallah [hebrew] then we can begin to engage again. But I don't think globalization will go away. I'm hopeful that code will not be permanent, that we will find a way of getting some handle on this someday. I'm not a doctor. I can't speak to that. But I'm optimistic that the world will open itself back up and reconnect further. It's who we are. That's how we engage, and there's too much that we need from each other in this world. I mean, to see a state... I mean, we don't like being isolated. Nobody likes being isolated. Nobody likes being home all the time on Zoom. You want to be connecting with people. I'd love to go back to a concert. We can't do that now.
Paul Rockower:
But I'm optimistic that globalization, once we're able to, we'll continue. I don't think you can stop globalization. I think there are administrations that would like to, but you can't do that. You can't shut yourself off from the world. So I'm optimistic that when this too shall pass, we will be able to reconnect with the world. The world will reconnect itself.
Alex Glomset:
I'll give you one final question here that's been submitted. How do you have a personal home life while traveling all over the world?
Paul Rockower:
I didn't. I lived out of a backpack. I had a day pack, and that was my home, and I had a backpack with my computer and my scanner. Literally, I didn't have a fixed address for seven years. I would spend two months studying French and tour Nice and then I'd go run a program in Bangladesh, and then I'd come back, and I'd go run a program in... Some years I was in, I was running programs in Central and South America. Some years it was across Africa. But my home life was the road, and I lived on the road, and I really enjoyed that life of picking up all the time.
Paul Rockower:
Now I'm settled. I'm here working, doing this kind of communal public diplomacy. I've really enjoyed taking these ideas of public diplomacy and distilling them down to a communal level and figuring out, knowing that these skills that I've had over the years in an international context, work in domestic context as well. So this was my first real stint in a long time at having some kind of home life. But as you can imagine, I'm not married. I do not have any kids. That made my travels much easier. So be it. It's the choices you make. I enjoyed being itinerant for many, many, many years. I mean, literally bouncing, common hopping, country hopping. I mean, again, some years I was in 25 countries, and yet this year, I've been to one country.
Paul Rockower:
I went to Mexico for my birthday in January, and I don't think I'm going to get out of this country again. That, for me, is strange, but that's where we are in the world these days. So you figure out how to take the... I have a spice cabinet full of spices from Zanzibar and Indian. So these days I travel through my cooking. I travel through the record collection. I got all sorts of fun music that I picked up around the world. So that's how I engage with the world these days is through the music that I have and the food that I have. But I look forward to getting back into the world.
Alex Glomset:
Well, thank you, Paul. I think Linda's going to jump on and say a few closing words.
Linda Ullman:
Hi. Paul, that was fantastic. I'm exhausted from your travels, and it was, it was fantastic. Really, it's an amazing life you've lived, and it doesn't work for everybody. It's been an incredible opportunity that you've had between countries and languages and just opportunities to meet so many different people from all of the world. That's fantastic. I thank you very, very much for being a part of it, and I thank everybody here that's joined us. We appreciate all your questions and you joining us. I want to thank Alex and Idela and Brandeis and Beth Bernstein for offering us this opportunity. Please, I'm requested that you give everybody your email. We've been asked by a few people, can you please-
Paul Rockower:
I'll type it in the... Let's see. I'm going to put my personal email in the chat, and please feel free to reach out. I'm happy to give advice on public diplomacy, public diplomacy careers. One thing we couldn't do on this was to share some of the videos and the music. We couldn't quite get the tech working. But I've got a lot of fun videos of hip hop, freestyles and shona and Annalivia and Bengali and music from around the world of Della Mae, this five-girl bluegrass band singing in Ordu. So please feel free to connect, and I'm happy to share some of these examples of the work. But thank you.
Linda Ullman:
Thank you so, so much. Really, as I said, what an amazing opportunity to have this experience, and thank you Brandeis for your beginning, right?
Paul Rockower:
No, thank you. Again, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the Brandeis education I received. I wouldn't have had such an open view of the world if it wasn't for the socialization of Brandeis and understanding how vast and varied the Jewish world is. So I thank Brandeis and I thank you for having me, and I appreciate the opportunity to share this. So thank you all.
Linda Ullman:
Thank you. Thank you, and have a very nice day, everybody.