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Hello Friend,
As we continue to mark #ArabAmericanHeritageMonth, we reflect on
our community's contributions and successes while knowing that the
future for everyone will be vastly different. Facing these challenges
will require resilience and here, too, Arab Americans are leading. As
we come through unprecedented times, we know Arab Americans will
continue to make a difference in so many ways because we've always
been an innovative and compassionate community.
In Boston, #ArabAmerican Juliette Kayyem has been readying families
for new realities throughout her career. Her care and love for others
comes in challenging them to embrace reality and prepare for the
future. We hope her story helps you embrace the challenges ahead with
resiliency and reminds you of what is best in our community and our
nation.
ARAB AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH 
Juliette Kayyem has spent the last
two decades managing complex policy initiatives and organizing
government responses to major crises in both state and federal
government. A national leader in homeland security, resiliency and
safety, she is currently the Senior Belfer Lecturer in International
Security at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she is
faculty chair of the Homeland Security and Security and Global Health
Projects. And if all of these credentials did not position her to lead
at the time of this pandemic, there is also her service as President
Obama’s Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the
Department of Homeland Security, where she played a pivotal role in
major operations in response to the H1N1 pandemic and the BP Oil Spill
response.
As the majority of our country
socially distances at home in response to the Covid-19 outbreak,
Juliette has become the face of tough-love crisis management: she will
tell us what we need to hear, not necessarily what we want to hear. In
the process, she is advising mayors, governors and CEOs, laying out a
path forward for readers of her columns in The Atlantic, informing
millions of viewers on CNN where she serves as a National Security
Analyst, and teaching her many Twitter followers about the
“preparedness paradox” and the need to understand a basic truth of
this crisis: “Reality bites, but it is all we got.”
The truth is this well-informed
guidance is similar to what the Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial
columns told us in her 2016 best-selling book, Security Mom: “In the
struggle for resiliency, there is no finish line. There is only a
plan, and a whole lot of learning, followed by a new and better plan.”
Right now, we are all desperately seeking better plans to keep our
loved ones safe and to get our country back. Even on getting our
country back to normal, Juliette reminds us regularly that our
“normal” will be a new, different one and she is getting us ready for
that too.
As a long-time public servant who
got her start as a civil rights lawyer for the Department of Justice,
Juliette has long served as an inspiration to Arab Americans. We are
proud to be sharing her with the rest of the world right now as she
fights to improve our response to this deadly pandemic.
Arab American Institute
http://www.aaiusa.org/
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