Shimon Peres Place: 95th & Riverside

Shimon Peres, who studied at NYU, was an Israeli politician with a 70-year career – serving as both Prime Minister and President.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for the Oslo Accords and helped engineer the Israel-Jordan peace treaty.

He also founded the Peres Center for Peace and is regarded as one of the founders of Israel’s tech sector.

Like most political figures, his legacy is viewed very differently depending on who you ask – celebrated by some for peace efforts, criticized by others for his role in nuclear arms development and military actions.

Now, a figure memorialized here as part of the NYC Honorary Streets in NYC at 95th & Riverside.

Shimon Peres Place Recap & Next Steps

From the official bio:

“Shimon Peres was an Israeli politician who served as the ninth President of Israel from 2007 to 2014 and as the eighth Prime Minister of Israel from 1984 to 1986 and from 1995 to 1996. He was a member of twelve cabinets and represented five political parties in a political career spanning 70 years. Peres was elected to the Knesset in November 1959 and except for a three-month-long hiatus in early 2006, was in office continuously until he was elected President in 2007. At the time of his retirement in 2014, he was the world’s oldest head of state and was considered the last link to Israel’s founding generation.  Early in his career, at the age of 20, Peres was elected secretary of the Labor Youth Movement. In 1947 his career as a kibbutz farmer in Galilee ended when he was invited by Levi Eshkol, a future Prime Minister and then in charge of obtaining arms for the Jewish underground, to serve as an aide. With the proclamation of Israel’s independence the following year, Mr. Peres emerged as an aide in the Defense Ministry.  After Israel’s independence, Mr. Peres was sent to the United States as head of an Israeli defense mission. He used his three years there to take courses at New York University and Harvard.  In 1952, he returned to Israel as Deputy Director General of the Defense Ministry and the next year was promoted to Director General, the top post, at the age of 29.  Later in his career, Peres succeeded Yitzhak Rabin as Acting Prime Minister briefly during 1977, before becoming Prime Minister from 1984 to 1986. As Foreign Minister, under Prime Minister Rabin, he engineered the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty, and won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the Oslo Accords peace talks with the Palestinian leadership. In 1996, he founded the Peres Center for Peace, which has the aim of promoting lasting peace and advancement in the Middle East by fostering tolerance, economic and technological development, cooperation and well-being. He died after suffering a stroke near Tel Aviv.”

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