Immigrant of the Day: Fareed Zakaria (India)

Fareed Zakaria (born January 20, 1964, Mumbai, India) is a journalist, columnist, author, editor, commentator, and television host specializing in international relations and foreign affairs. For a New York magazine profiile of Zakaria, click here.

Fareed Zakaria was named editor of Newsweek International in October 2000. He writes a weekly foreign affairs column for Newsweek, which appears biweekly in the Washington Post. In 2003, Zakaria published The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (Norton). On television, Zakaria hosted the weekly Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria news show for PBS. From 2002 until 2007, he was a regular member of the roundtable of ABC News's This Week with George Stephanopoulos and an analyst for ABC News. He joined CNN to host a weekly show on international affairs that will premier worldwide on June 1 2008.

Zakaria was born in India. He attended Yale where he was a member of Scroll and Key Society, President of the Yale Political Union, and a member of the Party of the Right. Zakaria received a B.A. from Yale and later graduated with a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard.

Before his current position with Newsweek, Zakaria was managing editor of the magazine Foreign Affairs. Prior to joining Foreign Affairs, Zakaria ran a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard. He has taught courses in international relations and political philosophy at Harvard, Columbia, and Case Western universities.

Zakaria's 2002 essay for The New Yorker on America's global role has been widely quoted, as have several of his Newsweek cover-essays. He is the author of the 1998 book From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton University Press), his PhD thesis, and co-editor of The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books). His book The Future of Freedom, was published in the spring of 2003 and became a bestseller. Zakaria's most recent book, published in May 2008, is called the "The Post-American World", discusses America's role in a world where it is still the superpower in the political-military realm but where economic, industrial, financial, and cultural power is being dispersed around the world.

Zakaria has won several awards for his Newsweek columns, including for his October 2001 Newsweek cover story, "Why They Hate Us."

Zakaria currently serves on the boards of Yale University, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, New America Foundation and Columbia University's International House. He currently resides in New York City with his family.

KJ