Mel Lehman Bio

 

Mel Lehman grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  He received a BA from Eastern Mennonite University, an MA in theology from Union Theological Seminary and an MA in literature from Columbia University.  He worked for 20 years at the National Council of Churches as an editor in international humanitarian issues and during that time he made several visits to the Middle East.  He increasingly came to realize that the ordinary people he met there were very unlike the images of Middle Easterners he was seeing in the U.S. media.  In 2009 he founded an organization called Common Humanity to build better understanding about the people of the Middle East.  

 

Mel Lehman is working on a book about his experiences.  In his free time he enjoys travel and during the past two decades he has visited Dubai, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Oman, and Syria.  He enjoys listening to and occasionally performing music, reading, visiting museums, and he still doggedly continues to try to learn Arabic but so far has had only very limited success.