Exploring Honor with Brady Kiesling

Host Rabbi Rami talks with historian and author Brady Kiesling about democracy, the government and his story "Being Honorable" published in the May/June issue of Spirituality & Health magazine.

Brady Kiesling is a historian, archaeologist, and diplomat, educated at Swarthmore College, the University of California at Berkeley, and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. He joined the U.S. State Department in 1983, and served in Israel, Morocco, Greece, Armenia, and Washington. In February 2003, he resigned his position, chief of the Political Section of the U.S. Embassy in Athens, to protest the impending war with Iraq. His resignation letter was published by the New York Times and widely republished. After teaching at Princeton University, and taking part with other dissident diplomats in efforts to challenge the foreign policy mistakes of the Bush administration, he returned to Greece, where he is a writer, editor, and archaeologist.

He is the author of Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower, which discusses the bureaucratic and political habits that led to disaster in Iraq. His second book, Greek Urban Warriors, untangles the history of far-left political violence in Greece since the 1967 dictatorship. His latest project is ToposText, a free mobile application organizing classical texts around a detailed map of the ancient Greek world.