Elmira Bayrasli is a fellow in New America’s International Security program. She is the author of From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places, the co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted and a professor at NYU and Bard College’s Global and International Affairs program. Before taking part in the Zócalo/Scripps College event “What Does a Feminist Foreign Policy Look Like?,” Bayrasli chatted in the green room about podcasting, her love of Turkish food, and being able to read a room.
You grew up in Brooklyn. Where was your favorite place to go as a kid?
The only place we would go is Turkey. My parents were working class and, you know, going to summer camp was never on the radar. Nobody in my neighborhood ever did that. We would play outside, and when we would go somewhere, we’d visit my mother’s family in Turkey.
During your visits to Turkey, what was your favorite dish to eat?
Everything. Anything. One of the surprising things about Turkish food is that people think it’s very meat heavy because you think of kebabs. And the irony is that Turkish food is very vegetarian—lots of very rich beans, and eggplant, and salads and all of this really wonderful produce.
What is your hidden talent?
I don’t think I hide my talents! So I’m bilingual, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m bilingual, but for whatever reason, I can just read a room. It’s a great talent to have.
If you were a vegetable, vegetable would you be and why?
I would be broccoli because broccoli is very strong and sturdy. But also because it has all these different heads. I have so many different aspects of my person, and I think that the broccoli represents that because it has so many different branches and stalks.
You’re the host of the Opinion Has It podcast. What podcasts have you been listening to lately?
I like the stuff that the BBC does when they have conversations, especially with writers just about general things. My podcast is so wonky. I’m thinking, why can’t we just invite people like Anthony Fauci and I can ask him the same questions you’re asking me? He grew up in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, and so I want to ask him, what did you do? Where did you hang out? What was it like when you were growing up? Or Janet Yellen. Janet Yellen didn’t live in our neighborhood. But she lived in Bay Ridge, which was the next neighborhood over.
What’s hanging right now on your refrigerator?
I have a bunch of magnets from different places in the world. I have a couple postcards, and I have pictures that friends’ kids made for me.
What’s the last thing that inspired you?
Turkey is a place that I pay a lot of attention to, and so I read a lot about the refugees. Even this morning, when I [got a migraine], I was just thinking to myself, what if I was in a refugee or migrant camp. What happens? And those people, you go there, and I’m gonna start to cry—you go there, and those people are so kind, and they offer you the most basic things that they have, and they have nothing, and yet they find some joy in life.