Daniel Charles Kurtzer (born June 1949) is an American former diplomat. He served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt during the term of President Bill Clinton, and was the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005 during the term of President George W Bush.

Biography

Daniel Charles Kurtzer was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to Nathan and Sylvia Kurtzer. He received his PhD from Columbia University, and served as the dean of his alma mater, Yeshiva College.

Family

Daniel Kurtzer is married to Sheila Kurtzer and has three children and eight grandchildren. One of his sons is the American Jewish public intellectual

Yehuda Kurtzer Yehuda Kurtzer is President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He has written and lectured widely on Jewish history, Jewish memory, leadership in American Jewish life, and the relationship between American Jews, Israel and Zionism. ...

Publications

Kurtzer is the co-author of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the middle east; co-author of The Peace Puzzle: America's quest for Arab Israeli peace, 1989–2011; and editor of Pathways To Peace: America and The Arab-Israeli Conflict. He is also a frequent contributor of academic articles and opinion pieces.

Diplomatic career

Kurtzer joined the United States Department of State and was serving as a junior officer at the American Embassy in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981. He served in Israel between the years of 1982 and 1986, then became Deputy Director of the State Department's Egypt desk in Washington, D.C. He later served on the Policy Planning Staff, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. When asked why he was drawn to the Middle East, he later replied: "The work never seems to be finished in this region. It is not a place where tuxedos and cocktail parties characterize diplomacy." Kurtzer joined the staff of Secretary of State James Baker. He helped write Baker's noteworthy speech to

American Israel Public Affairs Committee The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC ) is a lobbying group that advocates pro-Israel policies to the legislative and executive branches of the United States. One of several pro-Israel lobbying organizations in the United Stat ...

in May 1989. The speech was originally drafted by

Harvey Sicherman Harvey Sicherman (1945–2010 was an American writer and foreign policy expert. He served as the President and Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, located in Philadelphia, from 1993 until 2010. His interests lay in the analysis of U ...

, who used uncontroversial pro-Israel language in his text. Kurtzer's revisions included an attention-getting line that encouraged Israel and its supporters to abandon the Greater Israel idea. According to

Aaron David Miller Aaron David Miller is an American Middle East analyst, author, and negotiator. He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy. He previously was vice president for new initiatives at the W ...

, he and Kurtzer wrote short memos for Baker on issues at hand, rather than longer, strategic papers. Kurtzer was also part of the Clinton administration's team of advisers on the Arab–Israeli peace process. According to Miller, Kurtzer left in 1994 because he "felt shut out by" the Special Middle East Envoy, Dennis Ross. In 2006, he retired from the State Department and the U.S. Foreign Service with the rank of Career-Minister and assumed a chair in Middle East policy studies at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He co-chaired, with Scott Lasensky, the Study Group on Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, a project supported by the United States Institute of Peace. They published their recommendations in a 2008 book. In 2007, Kurtzer served as the commissioner of the

Israel Baseball League The Israel Baseball League (IBL; Hebrew: ליגת הבייסבול הישראלית, ''Ligat ha-Beisbol ha-Israelit'') was a six-team professional baseball league in Israel. The first game was played on June 24, 2007. League structure The six ...

, a league discontinued after a single season. He endorsed then-Senator Barack Obama's successful candidacy for the presidency. Kurtzer,

James Steinberg James Braidy Steinberg (born May 7, 1953) is an American academic and political advisor, and former United States Deputy Secretary of State. He has served as the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns H ...

, and Dennis Ross were among the principal authors of Barack Obama's address on the Middle East to AIPAC in June 2008, which was viewed as the Democratic nominee's most expansive on international affairs.Jay Solomon
"Obama's Mideast Experts Emphasize Talks"
''Wall Street Journal'', June 16, 2008; Page A7

References

External links