Foreign Policy Research Institute A Nation Must Think Before it Acts Award-Winning Columnist Trudy Rubin to join Kanan Makiya in conversation at FPRI’s 2016 Annual Dinner
Award-Winning Columnist Trudy Rubin to join Kanan Makiya in conversation at FPRI’s 2016 Annual Dinner

Award-Winning Columnist Trudy Rubin to join Kanan Makiya in conversation at FPRI’s 2016 Annual Dinner

  • September 28, 2016

Award-Winning Columnist Trudy Rubin to join Kanan Makiya in conversation at FPRI’s 2016 Annual Dinner

  • September 28, 2016

Trudy Rubin

Trudy Rubin

PHILADELPHIA – The Foreign Policy Research Institute is pleased to announce that the Philadelphia Inquirer’s award-winning columnist Trudy Rubin will join us at our 2016 Annual Dinner to interview critically acclaimed author Kanan Makiya on the occasion of the publication of his new novel, The Rope. Makiya will be presented the 12th Annual Benjamin Franklin Award at the dinner.

In their conversation,  Beyond Dysfunction and Devastation, Rubin and Makiya will explore what went wrong in Iraq, in the Arab Spring, and what the lessons are for all of us today.

The Rope is both a murder mystery and a poignant story of a militia man, his closest friends, and family – all working at cross-purposes after the invasion of Iraq. The book illuminates what went wrong in a way that nonfiction is ill-equipped to do.

The Rope

The Rope

In a previous conversation, after the publication of his latest novel in a May 2016 interview Makiya told Rubin, “The U.S. did everything wrong it could possibly do, but this book is about what the Iraqis did wrong. You can point the finger at the Americans but this is our failure; we own it.”

The Annual Dinner, co-chaired by Marina Kats, Ronald J. Naples, and the Hon. Dov S. Zakheim, will take place on Thursday, November 17 at the Union League of Philadelphia. Guests at the Dinner will receive a complimentary copy of the book.

Makiya founded the Iraq Memory Foundation, an NGO based in Baghdad and the US, which has collected and digitized nearly 10 million pages of Ba’th era documents. Makiya’s many essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and many more. His books have been translated in many languages including Arabic, French, Turkish and Spanish. Makiya is currently the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University.

Rubin is an award-winning foreign affairs columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and a member of The Inquirer’s editorial board. Prior to joining The Inquirer in 1983, she was Middle East correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, covering Israel and the Arab world, and lived in Jerusalem and Beirut.

FPRI’s Samuel Helfont reviewed The Rope along with two of Makiya’s other books, Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence. You can read his review here

Seats at the Annual Dinner are guaranteed to Partners of FPRI. Individual seats are available for purchase for $300 each. For more information about availability or corporate sponsorship opportunities, please contact Eli Gilman at egilman@fpri.org or at (215) 732-3774 x. 103.

ABOUT THE FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
The Foreign Policy Research Institute is dedicated to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the foreign policy and national security challenges facing the United States. It seeks to educate the public, teach teachers, train students, and offer ideas to advance U.S. national interests based on a nonpartisan, geopolitical perspective that illuminates contemporary international affairs through the lens of history, geography, and culture.