President Carter announced today the appointment of William B. Schwartz of Atlanta, Ga. as U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas. The Atlanta-born Schwartz has been president of the Weine Investment Corporation, an Atlanta real estate firm, since 1969. He is also a member of the President’s Council of Brandies University.
In other actions, Carter has appointed two Jewish natives of Chattanooga, Tenn. to high offices in his Administration–Jay Solomon as administrator of the far-flung U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and David Freeman as a commissioner of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
Another recent Jewish appointee is former Democratic Representative Edward M. Mezvinsky of Iowa City, Iowa. He is U.S. Representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Mezvinsky, born in Ames, Iowa in 1937, received his law degree from the University of California. He lost in his bid for re-election to a third term to the Congress last year. Mezvinsky was sworn in Aug. 4.
Solomon was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Arlen Shopping Centers Company, the country’s largest shopping center development corporation. It owns and manages 184 centers along with residential complexes, office buildings and planned communities across the country. GSA, the federal government’s business arm and the landlord of its office buildings, has more than 37,000 employees.
Solomon, a member of the Ochs Memorial Temple in Chattanooga, was president of that city’s Jewish Welfare Federation in 1958 and 1959 and chairman of campaigns for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee. He is a national board member of both of those organizations. He was sworn in May 8.
Freeman, who holds a civil engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a law degree from the University of Tennessee, worked as an engineer and as a lawyer for TVA before going on to serve the Federal Power Commission, the Senate Commerce Committee, the Ford Foundation, and as chief assistant to Dr. James Schlesinger, Secretary of Energy. Freeman, a member of the Bethesda Jewish Congregation in suburban Bethesda, Md., was sworn in last Thursday.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
