General Dynamics makes $2.5 million gift in honor of Lester Crown

Released on May 05, 2006
Contact: Dennis Nealon, 781-736-4205 or nealon@brandeis.edu

Lester Crown with Shai Feldman, the director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies

Brandeis announced that General Dynamics has made a $2.5 million gift in the name of Lester Crown to the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Crown recently retired from the General Dynamics Board of Directors after 32 years of service.

The General Dynamics gift will establish an endowment at the Crown Center that will support the addition of at least one middle- to senior-level researcher.

“We thank General Dynamics for this generous gift in honor of Lester Crown,” Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz said. “Lester and his family have been longtime supporters of Brandeis, and this wonderful philanthropic commitment will help the Crown Center take its place as a leading university research center for the study of the Middle East.”

“We are pleased to recognize the enormous contributions that Lester Crown has made to General Dynamics by honoring him with this gift to Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies,” said Nicholas Chabraja, the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of General Dynamics. “We are pleased to be able to support an institution that means so much to him.”

Housed at Brandeis, the Crown Center for Middle East Studies was established in 2005 through the generosity of the Crown Family Foundation. The Crown Center is dedicated to producing balanced, objective, and dispassionate research regarding all aspects of the contemporary Middle East. The research is broadly distributed in an effort to better inform worldwide public discourse about the volatile region.

Links

Crown Center for Middle East Studies

submitted by David Nathan