Bret Stephens
The Sharon and John Loeb Lecture
The Sharon and John Loeb lecture, scheduled for 3pm Tuesday, February 17th, by Ambassador Kevin Rudd has been rescheduled. In his place, at the same hour, we will welcome Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, political commentator, and one of the leading opinion voices of his generation.
Bret Stephens is the founder and editor-in-chief of SAPIR, a quarterly devoted to issues of Jewish concern, and an opinion columnist for The New York Times.
He has previously served as editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, a position he assumed when he was 28, and as foreign-affairs columnist of the Wall Street Journal, where he was also responsible for editorial-page coverage in Europe and Asia. He is a founder, with Garry Kasparov, of the Renew Democracy Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to defending democratic institutions at home and abroad.
Bret was raised in Mexico City and educated at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. He has interviewed scores of world leaders and reported stories from the streets of Gaza to the hinterlands of Pakistan to the ice sheet of Greenland. He is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (2014).
Bret’s awards and honors include the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, the 2019 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the 2023 Teddy Kollek Award, and three honorary doctorates.
In 2022, the government of Russia barred him for life from entering that country. He lives near New York with his wife Corinna, a music critic. They have three children.
The Sharon and John Loeb Lecture
Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., a graduate of Harvard College and the Business School and a former investment banker at Loeb, Rhoades & Co., founded by his father and grandfather, was appointed by President Reagan as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark. Later, he served as a delegate to the U.N. General Assembly; having also received a C.B.E from the Queen of England and the Grand Cross of the Order of Dannebrog from the Queen of Denmark, Amb. Loeb has long exemplified a commitment to public service and philanthropy. Sharon H. Loeb, a graduate of Columbia School of Law, fluent in French, Spanish and Italian, was an international attorney/business advisor. As a philanthropist she established the Endowment for Integrative Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the name of her family, one of the founders of the medical school. She is an avid supporter of the Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and Democracy at GWU. Amb. and Mrs. Loeb are also lovers of the arts. He has the largest private collection of Danish art in the world.