Background Briefing - Sunday September 26, 2010

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Avraham Burg is the son of holocaust survivors and has been active in politics as a leader in the Israeli Labor Party and the One Israel party. He was Speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003. Several of his books have been best-sellers in Hebrew, and he is the author of the English-language book, The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes.

Thomas Barfield is a professor of Anthropology at Boston University where he directs the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations. He is also President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. Dr. Barfield conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in northern Afghanistan in the mid-1970s as well as shorter periods of research in Xinjiang, China, and post-Soviet Uzbekistan. He is author of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, and is co-author of Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture. His book, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, came out earlier this year, and he has just returned from Afghanistan.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California where he specializes in international communication management and digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Mean Streets. He went on to produce television documentaries, including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS, and twelve feature films including The Last Waltz, Under Fire, To Die For. Taplin was a founder, Chairman, and CEO of Intertainer, the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets, and he holds two patents for video on demand technologies. He blogs at Jontaplin.com. Call: 212-759-4100 rm 1101