Becca Heller

Rebecca Heller is a lawyer specializing in human rights. She is known for her opposition to the Trump travel ban,[1][2][3] and for her work providing legal assistance to refugees through the International Refugee Assistance Project, which she co-founded and directs.[4][5]

Education and career

Heller is the daughter of a physician and a teacher and she grew up in Piedmont, California. She was a rebellious high school student, often skipping classes, competing for a different school's debate team, and graduating late because of a missed physical education requirement.[1] She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2005[6] and became a Fulbright Scholar in Malawi, working there on issues of food policy.[1] She earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2010 and has worked as a visiting lecturer at Yale Law since 2010.[6] Heller has a daughter.[7]

Refugee assistance

Heller founded the International Refugee Assistance Project in 2008 as the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project,[6][8] after encountering Iraqi refugees on a side trip to Jordan during a summer internship in Israel, and learning of their need for legal assistance in obtaining resettlement.[1][4][5] She calls herself "an intensely neurotic and self-critical Jew", and has likened the recent treatment of refugees from the Middle East to the treatment received by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.[4]

Recognition

While a student at Dartmouth, Heller won the Howard R. Swearer Student Humanitarian Award of Campus Compact for her work connecting a Vermont homeless shelter with leftover food supplies from local farms.[5]

Heller is a 2010 Echoing Green Fellow. In 2016, Heller won the 2016 Charles Bronfman Prize for distinguished humanitarian work by young Jews, for her work with the International Refugee Assistance Project.[4] She was named Foreign Policy Citizen Diplomat of the Year in 2017,[2] and in the same year won the David Carliner Public Interest Award of the American Constitution Society.[9] In 2018, she was given a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.[3][6] Heller has also been named one of the Christian Science Monitor's "30 under 30" change makers, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[10]

References

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