Dr. Joseph Gerson is the Director of Programs and the Director of the Peace and Economic Security Program of the American Friends Service Committee in New England. An international authority of U.S. foreign and military policy with considerable experience in the Middle East, he is helping to shape responses to the terrorist attacks of this week locally and nationally. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East, Europe and East Asia. In early September, he initiated the formation of United for Justice With Peace, a Boston area peace coaliton, has spoken widely on the current catastrophe, and was the principle organizer of the Dec. 7 & 8 New England Regional conference held at Tufts University "After September 11: Paths to Peace, Justice & Security."
In the past year he has spoken on U.S. foreign and military policy issues across New England and the United States and in Goteborg, Sweden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, Seoul, Korea. His article "The Politics and Geopolitics of Missile Defenses" appeared in the July/August edition of Z Magazine. His books include: With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination; The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, and The Sun Never Sets...Confronting the Network of U.S. Foreign Military Bases.
Joseph Gerson was a student activist at Georgetown University, where he engaged with the civil rights and peace movements. He became a draft resister and participated in the 1967 March on the Pentagon, protests around the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention, directed Arizonans for Peace (1969-73), served on the staff of Clergy & Laity Concerned About Vietnam (1970-73), and as Staff Coordinator of the War Resisters International in London & Brussels (1973-75.)