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Sam Graham-Felsen



"I was a counselor at a Jewish summer camp, Camp Yavneh, for two months. It's kind of like a regular camp . . . with a (Clal Yisrael) philosophy, which means 'All under Israel' in Hebrew . . . all the different sects of Judaism under one roof . . . It's aimed at creating a Jewish identity and there's a pot of praying and stuff, in addition to sports." Sam Graham-Felson will be a freshman at Harvard this fall, considering majoring in "some sort of Sociology . . . I think probably either Sociology or African-American studied . . . I'm really interested in race relations . . . I'm also interested in developing and 'Third World' countries . . . so if there's a major tailored to [all] that, I'll do that . . . As a life exploit, I'd be interested in being some sort of racial relations worker." As is already apparent from his interests and activities, Sam finds that these kinds of issues are extremely important to him and that because of this, studying and even building a career on this interest would "be most fulfilling" for him. "Even the Seevak project was mostly about racial issues for me . . . I went to Boston Public Schools most of my life . . . in 6th grade I went to an almost all-black school and there were maybe two Jewish kids . . . I experienced a lot of reverse racism and it was a tough year, but it put everything in perspective for me . . . For Boston Latin, I and a few other kids were the main representatives for those kinds of issues; we'd go to forums . . . I and Channa were the founders for this really big conference where students, teachers, public policy people . . . intellectuals are going to come and talk about the future of BLS . . . [part of the]Community Change Project: the Future Search Conference. The topic is 'What in the future of educating a diverse community at Boston Latin School?' . . . It's exploring solutions of the diversity questions . . . The Seevak project gave me more hope that human beings are capable of looking past race and coming together because Sportsman's is kind of like a haven where people can coexist regardless of tones of skin . . . so it gave me hope that the work I want to do has some real basis . . . more than just idealistic dreaming. The way it works at this place . . . it's really like color doesn't exist . . . [all the people there] just talk to each other like people . . . and I don't see that anywhere else or in any other part of society in the same way . . . that's why [Sportsman's] was so worthy [to get] recognition from this project. For somebody like me who's an idealistic person . . .doing this, witnessing and learning about that makes me realize that I'm not naive in terms of my ideals and goals. Things are possible . . . "