Walter Reich

Dr. Walter Reich is a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, working closely with the Center for Middle East Policy as well as on a project on emerging threats to liberal democracies. With regard to these threats, Dr. Reich has special interests in the rise of nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism; limitations on speech; the degradation of democratic institutions; and self-serving revisions of national historical narratives, especially in Eastern Europe. He is also an expert on the Holocaust, Holocaust memory, and anti-Semitism around the world; the origins of terrorism; human rights; and the psychological and ethical dimensions of human behavior in governmental leadership and in international affairs.

A former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dr. Reich is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University. He is also a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University; a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences; and co-chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists. In addition, he serves as a speaker in the Hertog Political Studies Program; is on the executive committee of the international board of academic advisors of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy; is a member of the honorary board of consultants of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale; serves on the academic advisory board of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law; is an associate fellow of Davenport College, Yale; and is an advisory editor of Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes.

Dr. Reich is the author of “A Stranger in My House: Jews and Arabs in the West Bank” (Holt, 1985); co-author of “State of the Struggle: Report on the Battle Against Global Terrorism” (Brookings, 2007); the editor of “Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind” (Cambridge University Press, Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, latest edition 1998); and editor of “Escape from the Holocaust: The Fate of Jews in Finland During World War II” (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2013, with Mircea Munteanu).

Dr. Reich’s awards include the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Human Rights Award of the American Psychiatric Association, which has also named him a Distinguished Life Fellow.

Dr. Reich received his bachelor's from Columbia University, where he also did graduate work in philosophy, and received his Doctor of Medicine from the New York University School of Medicine. While in medical school he studied neurology at the National Hospital for Neurological Diseases at Queen Square, University of London, and studied child psychiatry at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic in London under Anna Freud. He was an intern in internal medicine at the University of Miami; did his residency/fellowship in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine; and worked for 21 years in research, teaching, and administrative positions at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). While at NIMH, he was seconded several times to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he studied Soviet psychiatry as a fellow in the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and, as a senior scholar in Security Studies, focused on the origins of terrorism.

Affiliations:

• Committee of Concerned Scientists, co-chair
• George Washington University, Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences
• Hertog Political Studies Program, speaker
• International Center for Conciliation, advisory board, member
• Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, international board of academic advisors, executive committee, member
• Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, academic advisory board, member
• Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes journal, advisory editor
• Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, professor of psychiatry

Education

• B.A., Columbia College, Columbia University, 1965
• M.D., New York University School of Medicine, 1970
• Certificate, Internship in Internal Medicine, University of Miami School of Medicine, 1971
• Certificate, Postdoctoral Fellowship in Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, 1975
• Diploma, General Medicine, National Board of Medical Examiners (1971)
• Diploma, Psychiatry, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (1977)