Rebecca Heller is an American lawyer specializing in human rights. She is known for her opposition to the Trump travel ban,[1][2][3] and for her work providing legal assistance to refugees through the International Refugee Assistance Project, which she co-founded and directs.[4][5]

Education and career

Heller is the daughter of a physician and a teacher and she grew up in Piedmont, California. She was a rebellious high school student, often skipping classes, competing for a different school's debate team, and graduating late because of a missed physical education requirement.[1] She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2005[6] and became a Fulbright Scholar in Malawi, working there on issues of food policy.[1] She earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2010 and has worked as a visiting lecturer at Yale Law since 2010.[6] Heller has a daughter.[7]

Refugee assistance

Heller founded the International Refugee Assistance Project in 2008 as the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project,[6][8] after encountering Iraqi refugees on a side trip to Jordan during a summer internship in Israel, and learning of their need for legal assistance in obtaining resettlement.[1][4][5] She calls herself "an intensely neurotic and self-critical Jew", and has likened the recent treatment of refugees from the Middle East to the treatment received by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.[4]

Recognition

While a student at Dartmouth, Heller won the Howard R. Swearer Student Humanitarian Award of Campus Compact for her work connecting a Vermont homeless shelter with leftover food supplies from local farms.[5]

Heller is a 2010 Echoing Green Fellow. In 2016, Heller won the 2016 Charles Bronfman Prize for distinguished humanitarian work by young Jews, for her work with the International Refugee Assistance Project.[4] She was named Foreign Policy Citizen Diplomat of the Year in 2017,[2] and in the same year won the David Carliner Public Interest Award of the American Constitution Society.[9] In 2018, she was given a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.[3][6] Heller has also been named one of the Christian Science Monitor's "30 under 30" change makers, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[10]

References

  1. ^ a b c d Jordan, Miriam (May 7, 2017), "A Travel Ban's Foe: A Young Firebrand and Her Pro Bono Brigade", The New York Times
  2. ^ a b Bostedt, Shelbie (November 13, 2017), "Citizen Diplomat of the Year Becca Heller Recalls Fight Against Travel Ban", Foreign Policy
  3. ^ a b Levenson, Eric (October 4, 2018), MacArthur 'genius grants' go to a lawyer who fought Trump's travel ban and the 'Moral Mondays' pastor, CNN
  4. ^ a b c d Silow-Caroll, Andrew (April 6, 2016), "Meet the 'intensely neurotic' Jew saving the world's refugees", The Times of Israel
  5. ^ a b c Chisholm, Lauren Zeranski (March–April 2012), "Legal Ease: Lawyer Becca Heller '05 guides Iraqi refugees through a bureaucratic maze as they seek asylum in new countries", Dartmouth Alumni Magazine
  6. ^ a b c d 2018 MacArthur Fellow: Becca Heller, Human Rights Lawyer, MacArthur Foundation, retrieved 2018-10-04
  7. ^ "I'm Human Rights Lawyer Becca Heller, and This Is How I Work". Lifehacker. 5 June 2019. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  8. ^ "Lost in Translation: The War on Terror's Forgotten Interpreters". Pritzker Military Museum & Library.
  9. ^ Becca Heller '10 Honored by the American Constitution Society, Yale Law School, June 7, 2017
  10. ^ "Becca Heller". Concordia. Retrieved 2020-04-17.

External links

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