Cora Weiss

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Cora Weiss received the President’s Medal of Merit at Dr. Robert Scott’s inauguration as Adelphi’s president in 2001. Weiss, president of the Hague Appeal for Peace, has been well known as a peace activist since the early 1960s, when she was a national leader of Women Strike for Peace. She was a leader in the anti-Vietnam war movement, organizing demonstrations including the largest one, on November 15, 1969, in Washington, D.C.

As co-chair and director of the Committee of Liaison With Families of Prisoners Detained in Vietnam, she organized the exchange of mail between families and POWs in Vietnam, which revealed names of those alive. She also arranged transport for, and accompanied, some returning POW pilots. Weiss was also a volunteer teacher in the New York City public school system.

As a trustee of Hampshire College, she started the campus campaign to divest stocks in companies doing business in South Africa. She has a long record of support for the United Nations, starting in the 1950s when she hosted colonized Africans who were petitioning for the independence of their countries. She has devoted most of her life to the peace movement, the movement for the advancement of women, and for civil rights and human rights.

Weiss was among the 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize nominated in June 2005, and was the first recipient of the William Sloane Coffin ’56 Award for Peace and Justice granted by the Yale Divinity School in October 2003. Among her many other honors are the Pope John XXIII Peace Studies Medal from Manhattan College and New Jersey Peace Action’s George F. Kennan Award.

In May 1998, she and William Sloane Coffin were honored at The Riverside Church New York City on the 20th anniversary of their founding of the Riverside Disarmament Program, which Weiss directed for 10 years. In 1999, she was honored by the Phelps Stokes Fund for her work in the 1950s and 1960s related to Africa. In July 2004, she received the Colombe d’Oro per la Pace (International Golden Dove for Peace Award) from the Institute for International Research, Archivio Disarmo, Rome, Italy, for peace building and human rights.

She is president of the International Peace Bureau, the 1910 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Weiss participated in the Nobel Centennial Symposium held in Oslo, Norway, in December 2001. She is also joint-principal of the Peace Boat Global University, an advisory board member of Peace Child International’s Millennium Action Fund and honorary patron of the Committee on Teaching About the United Nations.

As President of the Hague Appeal for Peace, she is leading a campaign dedicated to the abolition of war. It seeks to refocus thinking on the vision of a world in which violent conflict is publicly acknowledged as illegitimate, illegal and fundamentally unjust. To implement that vision, the Hague Appeal for Peace has launched a Global Campaign for Peace Education.