Hi! I'm Dr. Stephen Steinlight. I'm Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, DC.  I spent an interesting (in the Chinese sense)eight years as Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee and worked for several other not-for-profits, including as Director of Education at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Vice President of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and Executive Director of the American Anti-Slavery Group.  I grew up in Sopranos country in northern New Jersey, went to James Caldwell High School in Caldwell, and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Columbia College, Columbia University, where I received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and Kellett Fellowship at graduation. This made up for the several arrests and beatings I endured during my radical days in sds when I was on the Strike Coordinating Committee when we seized the university (all too briefly) in 1968. I needed to get out of America for a time, and I did my doctorate as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Sussex in England. I then spent 17 years as a professor Victorian Studies at several places, including the School of Graduate English at NYU. I mostly loved it, but one autumn arrived, the leaves turned and Matthew Arnold and Company no longer beckoned to me. It was time to leave one non-reality for another, and that's when I entered the not-for-profit zoo. I've written lots of things, including quot;The Fractious Nation? Unity and Disunity in Contemporary American Life" (UC-Berkeley Press).  I am so bloody wonderful I was made a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I'm now an Associate Fellow of Timothy Dwight College, Yale University, which permits me to hang out with smart Yale faculty types, drink heavily and listen to good speakers and occasionally the Tokyo String Quartet. One of the most courageous men of my time, I was a member of a team of conflict resolution experts sent to Macedonia by the Soros Open Society Institute and the US Conference on Peace to help preserve the ceasefire in that country's civil war. (I never flinched at gunfire and told my colleagues, "Stand behind me: I'm bullet proof." Just remembered it was Rommel who said that. Whatever.) The best thing in my life without question are my two brilliant, kind, loving, and beautiful daughters, Emily (28), newly married and a Ph.D candidate in English at Brown, and Alexandra, a history/government major who will be graduating from Wesleyan University this year.  (I confess to paganism: I worship the ground they walk on.) Though I works for a DC-based think tank I don't like DC (too much a company town) and as the Executive Director of my outfit likes me I am very sensibily allowed to reside in NYC, going down to DC for conferences, lobbying and when I'm called as a witness at Congressional hearings. I dabble in art (I was a member of the Art Student's League where I was good enough to know I wasn't good enough) and love chamber music, swimming,the ocean, hiking, and travel, and just hanging out with good friends. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist and have been to Israel many times and speak Hebrew. I supppose it's mandatory to add that I am a lover of Tuscany and Umbria, gentle, elegantly handsome, sensual, and a womanist. I'm very funny -- relentlessly so (even humorless people manage the stray half-smile), and I find humor in just about anything --excluding enormities. I must confess to finding terminally politically correct people insufferable. My politics are difficult to describe other than to say I'm "post-ideological" and despise all "isms," group think and superficial intellectual fashionability. I remain progressive on some issues, less so on others. I take my political stands on issues rather than as a function of party loyalty. Oh -- almost forget to mention it -- I'm Jewish though not especially observent. I'd define my Jewishness largely as a matter of culture and a set of predilections and assumptions about the nature of the world, the great questions that will always vex us and people that derive significantly from a Jewish historical consciousness. I suspect this mini-bio makes me sound like a pompous ass. You'll have to trust me when I say I'm not.