Tim Eydelnant is a former senior U.S. Foreign Service Officer with more than two decades of experience in transatlantic affairs, diplomacy, humanitarian response, and public policy.
Most recently, he served as Executive Director of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Washington, DC, Center for Judaism, Israel, and Public Policy, where he helped build a new platform for engagement with policymakers, think tanks, and international organizations around questions of democratic resilience, antisemitism, pluralism, and the future of the transatlantic relationship.
Previously, he was a Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Wilson Center, where his research focused on the rise of antisemitism and extremism in eastern Germany following October 7, as well as broader societal fragmentation in Central and Eastern Europe.
During his Foreign Service career, Tim served as Principal Officer (Consul-General) at the U.S. Consulate General in Leipzig, Germany, where he directed U.S. engagement in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia, worked closely with Jewish communities and civil society partners, and led initiatives related to Holocaust remembrance, democratic resilience, and U.S.-German relations in eastern Germany. His diplomatic assignments also included Jerusalem, Iraq, Austria, Brazil, Russia, and Finland, as well as senior Washington roles in the Bureau of Energy Resources, the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration during the Syrian refugee crisis, Consular Affairs, and the State Department Operations Center.
He is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School.
After Kohl and Merkel
Why the CDU Is Collapsing In September, the party of Adenauer, Kohl, and Merkel failed to win even five percent of the vote in Merkel’s own home state. It was …
One of 83 Million
Last week, two sports figures offered very different answers to a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to stand with your country? In Washington, Capitals hockey legend Alexander Ovechkin …
The Language of Eastern Resentment
Of the three eastern German states I was responsible for as U.S. Consul General in Leipzig, Saxony-Anhalt always struck me as perhaps the most distinctly eastern. It was also a …
He Inherited Freedom. Does He Believe It Is His?
At the risk of dating myself, I remember a very different mood among young people in post-communist Europe. I was a student in Prague in 1994, five years after the …
Watching Ceuta, Thinking About Magdeburg
What Spain’s Border Tells Us About Eastern Germany In the last week of July, tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Spain’s Interior …
Looking for Germany’s Future in the Former East
A Week in Saxony On a warm Friday evening in late June, nearly 140 people gathered inside the former synagogue in Görlitz, Germany’s easternmost city. They had come from the …
