Who We Are

Jerome M. Segal is the Director of the Peace Consultancy, and he is the founder and President of The Jewish Peace Lobby, with 4000 members, including 400 Rabbis.

Dr. Segal holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan (1975) and a MPA from the Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Univ. of Minnesota (1979).

In 1975 Dr. Segal worked as an aide to Congressman Donald M. Fraser when the Congressman was part of the US Delegation to the United Nations. He then served the Administrator of a House Budget Committee Task Force. Subsequently he worked for the US Agency for International Development, first as Coordinator for the Near East and then as Senior Advisor for Agency Planning. In 1988 he left government work to return to the academic world.

In 1987, Dr. Segal was a member of the first American-Jewish delegation to meet with the PLO leadership in Tunis. In 1988 his writings in Al-Quds and other publications played a catalytic role in promoting the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, issued in Algiers in November 1988. He also played a role in back-channel contacts that led to the opening of the US-PLO dialogue in December 1988.

Dr. Segal is the author of Creating the Palestinian State (1989) and Negotiating Jerusalem (2000) as well as over 100 articles and op-ed pieces on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. He writes frequently for the Israeli press and for the Palestinian paper, al-Quds.

In 2018 he challenged Senator Ben Cardin in the Maryland Democratic primary.

Dr. Segal is widely considered an “out of the box” policy innovator.

Dr. Leonard Grob is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, New Jersey. . He currently serves as Assistant Director of the Peace Consultancy, headed by Dr. Jerome M. Segal.

Dr. Grob has published extensively in the areas of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and Holocaust Studies. In 2006 he co-edited, with Dr. Mahmoud Watad, a book of interviews with thirty-four Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, entitled Teen Voices From the Holy Land: Who Am I To You? and published by Prometheus Books. During the last two decades, Dr. Grob has presented papers and has published works on the relationship between memory of the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2008 he co-edited an anthology entitled Anguished Hope: Holocaust Scholars Confront the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. His latest co-edited book is entitled Encountering the Stranger: A Jewish-Christian-Muslim Trialogue, published by the University of Washington Press. Dr. Grob also serves as Vice President of Partners for Progressive Israel (formerly MeretzUSA), an organization devoted to educating American Jews to advocate for a just peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.