Mel Lehman is the executive director of Common Humanity, an organization he founded in 2009 to build better understanding about the people of the Middle East. He previously worked for 20 years at the National Council of Churches as an editor focusing on international humanitarian issues. During that time, he visited the Middle East several times and became increasingly aware that the ordinary people he met there were very unlike the images of Middle Easterners he was seeing in the U.S. media. He earned an M.A. in theology at Union Theological Seminary and an M.A. in literature at Columbia University.