Jon Basil Utley was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1934 and emigrated
to America in 1939. He is Associate Publisher of The
American Conservative,
a Robert A. Taft Fellow for International and Constitutional Studies
at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and a Fellow with the Atlas Economic
Research Foundation. He has written widely on third-world development
economics and foreign policy.
He is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign
Service, with language studies in Germany, France, and Cuba. He worked
from 1956-75 in South America, starting in the insurance business (American
International Group in Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia). He later founded
the Bogota Bulletin, Colombia's first English-language news publication,
and managed a mutual fund and insurance sales organization in South
America. He also worked as a foreign correspondent in South America
based in Peru for the Journal of Commerce and Knight-Ridder newspapers.
He was Associate Editor of The Times of the Americas for
12 years and a commentator on the Voice of America from 1985-2003.
He has written for the Harvard Business Review, The Washington
Post, The Washington Times, National Review, Human Events, and
the Miami
Herald and is listed
in Who’s Who in the World & Who’s Who
in America. He
also worked in the oil development business in Pennsylvania and in
real estate development in Washington, D.C. In 1990 he was a cofounder
of the Committee to Avert a Mid-East Holocaust, which opposed the
attack on Iraq.
He is now Chairman of Americans Against World Empire, a.k.a. ConservativesForPeace.com.
He has served on the Board of Directors or Advisory Councils of many
leading conservative and libertarian organizations, including Accuracy
in Media, Conservative Caucus, Council for Inter-American Security,
Ethics & Public Policy Center, Reason Foundation, and Solidarity
America. His articles have been widely disseminated. He is fluent in
French, German, and Spanish.
In 2004 he visited Vorkuta, the northernmost former concentration
camp in European Russia, where his father, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was executed in 1938.. He
has written the account of researching the archives and his visit to
Vorkuta and the Perm concentration camp museum in the Urals. It is
accessible by searching for Vorkuta Perm on Google.
In 2011, Jon Utley hosted a panel discussion at the National Press
Club in Washington, D.C. on the new book, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer
Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism. The book, which discusses
his mother, British-born journalist Freda
Utley,
was written by Jack Ross. An excellent article on
the event,"The
World for Israel or Jews for the World," was written by W. George
Krasnow and published at antiwar.com.
The forum can
be seen at the Rabbi Outcast YouTube channel.