Maya Rackoff - Author

Maya Rackoff is a senior at Riverdale Country School, whose life’s mission is supporting refugees. Maya has extensive experience working with refugees across the world; in 2015 she helped found an organization that delivers daily hot meals to Sudanese and Eritrean refugee children at day-care centers in South Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Maya is also a member of B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue, where she works with an Afghani refugee family in the Bronx, providing tutoring for children, cultural excursion trips and support with tasks like moving apartments. 

Since 2019, she has been an intern for Syrian Youth Empowerment, an organization that helps Syrian teenagers apply to colleges in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Maya worked with Columbia Professor Jessica Lee during summer 2020 through HUGO to research the refugee crisis.

Jessica Lee studies the history of immigration and citizenship in the United States. She wrote her dissertation, under the supervision of Mae Ngai, on the creation of an Italian American voting block before World War II and Mussolini's ability to grow his emigrant population in America into a political asset. She continues to study citizenship as a legal status, human right, and a tool for political representation. Jessica is currently the Executive Director of the educational nonprofit Freedom & Citizenship in the Center for American Studies at Columbia University. Freedom & Citizenship brings low-income New York City public school students to Columbia's campus each year to teach the philosophy, history, methods, and mechanics of citizenship from Ancient Greece to contemporary America. Its goal is to prepare dedicated, underserved youth for lives as active citizens.

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