Who could be the Jewish world’s version of Elon Musk?
Here are 25 people whose leadership and vision in the Jewish world are worthy of consideration.
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A conversation between Aish CEO Steven Burg and JOOL founder Joshua Hoffman on The Future of Jewish podcast — about leadership and vision in the Jewish world — made us wonder:
Who could be the Jewish world’s version of Elon Musk?
Here are 25 people who came to mind:
1. David Yarus
David Yarus is the founder of JSwipe, the first Global Ambassador of JDate, and the founder of mllnnl, a digital marketing agency aimed at helping brands target the millennial demographic, which features clients such as Taglit-Birthright Israel and the Schusterman Family Foundation.
2. Rabbi Dr. Benji Levy
Rabbi Dr. Benji Levy is the founding partner of Israel Impact Partners, which works with funders to accelerate the growth of the non-profits they care about. He also served as CEO of Mosaic United, a historic joint venture partnership between Israel and global Jewry to strengthen Jewish identity and connections to Israel for youth around the world, and is the author of An Oasis in Time: Seven Thoughts for the Seventh Day.
3. Jamie Geller
Jamie Geller is an American-Israeli award-winning television producer, celebrity chef, businesswoman, and most recently, the new Chief Media & Marketing Officer at Aish. She is also a bestselling author of eight cookbooks and the founder of Kosher Network International.
4. Avi Mayer
Avi Mayer served as AJC Managing Director of Public Affairs and Senior Spokesperson through June 2022, and previously served as the international spokesman of The Jewish Agency for Israel and of its then-Chairman, Natan Sharansky, and as a foreign media liaison for the Israel Defense Forces.
His professional experiences have included stints with the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee; the Embassy of Israel in Washington, DC; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); and Hillel International.
5. Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm
Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm is Chief Executive Officer at Bnai Zion, cofounder of SoulShop Studios, and Host of Good Faith Effort, a weekly podcast on the Bible and society. Prior to his tenure at Bnai Zion, he served as Special Advisor to the President of Yeshiva University.
6. Rabbi Sandra Lawson
Rabbi Sandra Lawson is the Inaugural Director of Racial Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Reconstructing Judaism, as well as an activist and public speaker known as “the Snapchat Rabbi” and “the TikTok Rabbi.”
7. Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer
Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer is the President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, as well as a leading thinker and author on the meaning of Israel to American Jews, on Jewish history and Jewish memory, and on questions of leadership and change in American Jewish life.
He is the author of Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past, which offers new thinking to contemporary Jews on navigating the tensions between history and memory; and the co-editor of The New Jewish Canon, a collection of the most significant Jewish ideas and debates of the past two generations.
8. Blake Flayton
Blake Flayton is the president and cofounder of the New Zionist Congress, focusing on fighting antisemitism on college campuses. He is also the New Media Director for the Jewish Journal.
9. Rabbi David Wolpe
Rabbi David Wolpe is the Senior Rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, and has taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the American Jewish University, Hunter College, and UCLA. He is also the author of eight books, including the national bestseller, Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times.
10. Mayim Bialik
Mayim Bialik is an American actress, game show host, and author. From 2010 to 2019, she played neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler on the CBS sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, for which she was nominated four times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and won the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2015 and 2017.
11. Nissim Black
Nissim Black (born Damian Black) is an American rapper, songwriter, and record producer who to converted to Orthodox Judaism. He was raised in Seattle as a Sunni Muslim, but was non-practicing and converted to Christianity at the age of 14. After converting, Black and his family continued to live in the Jewish community of Seward Park, the Seattle neighborhood where he grew up, until moving to Israel in 2016.
12. David Aronov
David Aronov recently became UJA-Federation of New York’s first full-time employee tasked with acting as a liaison to the NYC’s Bukharian Jews, as part of a UJA-Federation initiative launched in 2018 called “Community Mobilizers,” which aims to coordinate UJA’s grassroots relationships with the city’s increasingly diverse Jewish communities.
As a teenager, he began working for former Democratic City Councilwoman Karen Koslowitz in the 29th City Council District a decade ago. In 2021, he unsuccessfully ran for her seat, finishing third in the first round of the Democratic primary.
13. Miriam Anzovin
Miriam Anzovin became a TikTok sensation thanks to her hot-take reactions of the Talmud and other Jewish texts, “locally sourced from a millennial brain” — with the goal of making Judaism sparkle for everyone — religious and non-religious Jews alike.
14. Dvir Kahana
Dvir Kahana is the former General Manager of the Ministry of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, as well as the founder of Algo, an online AI bot and algorithm that uses patterns of successful marriages in the Jewish world to find matches for singles.
15. Ilana Kaufman
Ilana Kaufman is the Executive Director of the Jews of Color Initiative, focusing on the center of Jewish community, racial equity, and justice. Formerly, she worked as the Public Affairs and Civic Engagement Director, East Bay, for the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council, and was featured in the series “ELI Talks: Inspired Jewish Ideas.”
16. Jonathan Greenblatt
Jonathan Greenblatt is an American entrepreneur, corporate executive, and the sixth National Director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. Prior to heading the ADL, he served in the White House as Special Assistant to Barack Obama and Director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. In 2022, Greenblatt released his book, It Could Happen Here.
17. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl was the first Asian-American to be ordained as a rabbi, and the first Asian-American to be ordained as a hazzan (cantor). She has been named by Newsweek and The Daily Beast as one of America’s “Most Influential Rabbis.” Buchdahl serves as the Senior Rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City and is the first woman to lead Central’s Reform congregation in its 180-year history.
18. Ben Freeman
Born in Scotland, Ben Freeman is a gay Jewish internationally renowned author; educator; and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion specialist focussing on Jewish identity, combatting Jew-hatred, and raising awareness of the Holocaust. He came to prominence during the Corbyn Labour Jew-hate crisis and quickly became one of his generation’s leading voice against anti-Jewish racism. Freeman is the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People, released in February 2021.
19. Adam Lehman
Adam Lehman is the president and CEO of Hillel International, after serving as the organization’s chief operations officer. He previously served as president and COO of the venture-backed software and data analytics company, Lotame Solutions, and in the same role with the crowdsourced creative platform, GeniusRocket. Lehman also spent eight years with AOL, serving as senior vice president and group chief operating officer for the 150-person central business development unit.
20. Bari Weiss
Bari Weiss is the editor of Common Sense and the host of the podcast, Honestly. From 2017 until 2020, she was a staff writer and editor for the Opinion section of The New York Times. Weiss is also the winner of the Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which annually honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.” And her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, was a Natan Notable Book and the winner of a 2019 National Jewish Book Award.
21. Rabbi Adam Kligfeld
In more than a decade of service to Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles, Rabbi Adam Kligfeld has spearheaded major efforts to reinvent prayer experiences in the community. He is an active member of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, a graduate of the Hartman Institute’s Rabbinic Leadership Initiative, and a rabbinic mentor in the Clergy Leadership Incubator.
22. Leah Soibel
Born in the U.S. to Argentinean parents, Leah Soibel is the founder and executive director of Fuente Latina, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Miami, which aims to provide pro-Israel information to Spanish-language news outlets.
23. Ashager Araro
Born in Ethiopia, Ashager Araro came to Israel as an infant on Operation Solomon, a covert military mission that airlifted Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991. One of eight siblings, she grew up in central Israel and went on to excel in the Israel Defense Forces, where she rose to the rank of lieutenant in the elite Paratroopers Brigade.
Following her military service, Araro pursued a career in diplomacy and social advocacy, visiting countries around the world to engage audiences as a proud Black, Jewish, Zionist, Israeli woman. In 2021, her work was publicly acknowledged when she was received the “Light of Israel” award, presented by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
24. Daniel Libenson
Dan Libenson is the founder and executive director of Judaism Unbound. He is also the co-host of the "Judaism Unbound" podcast and The Oral Talmud videocast.
Libenson was Executive Director of the University of Chicago Hillel for six years and Director of New Initiatives at Harvard Hillel for three years. He is a 2009 AVI CHAI Fellow and has also received the Richard M. Joel Exemplar of Excellence award, Hillel International's highest professional honor.
25. Tiffany Harris
Prior to joining Moishe House as its Chief Program Officer, Tiffany Harris worked at Amazon Web Services, where she managed a global education program in cloud computing. She is also a founding member of Shalom Corps.
Joshua: You seek the new jewish Elon Musk ? To do so you have to seriously introduce real performance metrics so you can compare.These candidates are all bright, motivated, and have displayed hard to find "creativity"in the non profit jewish world . None of these fine people come close to Elon. Elon is subject to specific measurements that are crucial in separating disruptive market changing entrepreneurs from jews who have a big job or a creative , intellectual angle on things like those on your list. Yet they all grow arent changing markets, they have small shetels. Elon is a visionary growing huge numbers of paying followers. Elon sells more customers Teslas, Builds more factories,Hires thousands of new people Build s more rockets and more batteries. Elon is a performance star, not just a guy with intellectually curious ideas. Investors and market participants can easily measure his achievements. Elon Is rewarded personally by performance results that change markets rapidly and sustainably. How many of these candidates are growing the jews numerically massively from any benchmark? How many are being rewarded personally massively in recognition of their impact?. Who is leading the 5 million North American jews to grow to 8 million number mark? I'd say NONE of the people listed them. Remember Elon needs to share his real results with SEC, NASA, Transportation secretary , etc. So when your candidates add Metrics...and transparently publish each of these person's metrics and many move from self declared mavens to recognized "leaders." This would be a crucial role for The Future of Jewish to share transparently the reality of what these people are accomplishing. Nobody has the chutzpah to do so, Then we can at least rank the 20. Scalable measurable results..the key to The Future of Jewish