McGill law grad and doctoral student win Trudeau scholarships

Scholars off to Oxford and Middle East to help foster understanding and democracy

David Mendelsohn, a doctoral student at McGill University in Islamic Studies, and Gregoire Webber, a newly minted law grad, have both won Trudeau Foundation scholarships. The foundation, now in its second year, was created to promote international leadership, through doctoral work in such areas as human rights, citizenship, international relations, and the relationship between humans and the natural environment.

David Mendelsohn will use the scholarship, valued at up to $200,000 over four years, to promote better communication between Palestinians and Israeli Jews through his sociolinguistic study titled "Two Cultures, One Land." After living in Israel for three years during the '90s, where he became fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, Mendelsohn observed of his Palestinian and Israeli friends that both "wanted peace but were incapable of finding the means to communicate that desire to each other."

To meet his goal of mastering the nuances of the Palestinian dialect, Mendelsohn will establish a wrestling school. A longtime wrestler and coach of the McGill wrestling team, he says: "Wrestling's a great way of getting to know a culture, instead of just sitting and interviewing."

McGill alumnus Gregoire Webber's doctoral research, to begin this fall at Oxford University, concerns the ""idea of justification," whereby a principle of a country's constitution is infringed upon in the name of the greater good. Using the example of the War Measures Act, passed in 1970 during the October Crisis, to illustrate the idea of justification, Webber says: "I want to articulate and re-evaluate the tension between the constitution and democratic governance so that people can think for themselves whether particular compromises to the constitution may be justified."