John Jay Medal Dinner Honors Pulitzer-Winner Joseph Ellis

On Saturday, May 14, the Jay Heritage Center will hold its second John Jay Medal Dinner. In keeping with the legacy of one of America’s greatest Founding Fathers, the John Jay Medal for Service recognizes individuals who demonstrate a selfless spirit of commitment and engagement with their community through leadership, education, scholarship, civic advocacy or historic preservation.

JHC's first honoree for 2016 is Joseph Ellis, is one of our nation's leading historians and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation. His nuanced portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the National Book Award. Ellis' newest book "The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution 1783-1789" restores John Jay to the pantheon of nation builders; Ellis identifies four men, Washington, Hamilton, Madison and Jay as agents of decisive and visionary thinking, executing “the most creative and consequential act of political leadership in American history.’’

Ellis' essays and book reviews appear regularly in national publications, such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Ellis’s commentaries have been featured on CBS, CSPAN, CNN, and the PBS’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and he has appeared in several PBS documentaries on early America, including “John and Abigail [Adams]” for PBS’s The American Experience and a History Channel documentary on George Washington. Professor Ellis lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, his youngest son, three dogs, and a cat.

JHC's second honoree is Prof. Nicholas A. Robinson who specializes in comparative and international environmental law. Together with JHC's founders and over 62 historic and environmental organizations, he helped preserve the 23 acre Jay Estate in Rye, NY and save it from commercial development. He was Legal Advisor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) from 1996-2004, and was an officer of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental law from 1978–2004. He served under five presidents as a US delegate to the bilateral environmental negotiations between the USA and USSR (1974-92).

In 1978 Prof. Robinson founded the environmental legal education programs at Pace University School of Law, which has just recently through his efforts been renamed the Elisabeth Haub School of Law. In New York State, he was General Counsel and Deputy Commission of the NYS Department of environmental Conservation (1983-85), and thereafter chaired Gov. Mario Cuomo’s environmental advisory board. He previously chaired the NYS Freshwater Wetlands Appeals Board, after having authored New York’s wetlands legislation. In 1970-72 he served on the Legal Advisory Committee to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. He and his wife Shelley live in Tarrytown near the Hudson River that he has helped protect these many years.

Samuel W. Croll III, Prof. Shelby D. Green, Charlene Laughlin and Thomas R. Mercein are Co-Chairs of the event.

Previous honorees were Catherine "Kitty" Aresty and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.

Cocktails at 6pm Seated Dinner at 7pm Presentation at 7:30pm. Tickets start at $125 Tables of 10 start at $1250