Our colleague and friend, Joe Montville (d. 2022),  was an invaluable part of the inspiration for the Goldziher Prize for Journalists. 

At the time, he was Senior Associate of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College, and the Director of the Program on Healing Historical Memory, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.  Joe was  senior Adviser on Interfaith Relations at Washington National Cathedral and founded the preventive diplomacy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1994 and directed it until 2003.

He spent 23 years as a diplomat with posts in the Middle East and North Africa and worked in the State Department’s Bureaus of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs and Intelligence and Research, where he was chief of the Near East Division and director of the Office of Global Issues. Joe held faculty appointments at the Harvard and University of Virginia Medical Schools.

He defined the concept of “Track Two,” at a moment of genius at Esalen Institute where he was Senior Advisor to what became TRACK TWO: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy.  Educated at Lehigh, Harvard, and Columbia Universities, Joe was the editor of Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (Lexington Books, 1990) and editor (with Vamik Volkan and Demetrios Julius) of The Psychodynamics of International Relationships (Lexington Books, 1990 [vol. I], 1991 [vol. II]).

He edited a collection, History as Prelude: Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean, (Lexington Books, 2011). In 2008, the International Society of Political Psychology gave Montville its Nevitt Sanford Award for “distinguished professional contribution to political psychology.”