Good evening, everyone.

One of the great privileges of working at Tikva are some of the people that you get to spend time with, get to know, and really learn from.

And at the very top of that list for me is Elliot Abrams.

As someone that I've long admired, his intellectual work, his important role in American political life,

and in the last couple years as a teacher.

So, L.A., it's just as always great to have you here

and to engage in a more freewheeling conversation,

reflecting on your work and career, but through this lens of Jews in politics. So why don't we start where you began in politics?

What got you in the political life in America? Was it a person? Was it a cause? Was it a set of

ambitions? How did you begin your career in American political life?

Well, it was sort of interest and fun, I guess we'd have to say.

I mean, I thought these were very interesting subjects.

I was at Harvard, I was what you might call a Democratic hawk, the right-hand side of the Democratic Party.

So in 1968, when President Johnson stepped down,

there was a big fight as he would follow him,

his vice president, Hubert Humphrey,

was the kind of regular candidate.

And then there were people on the left,

Bobby Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy.

And I was not for them.

I was, for the harder line candidates.

And I just got involved on the Harvard campus.

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