May 2, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Background: Ms. Levin previously served as national executive director of Hadassah: the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, in New York, and before that, as vice president of philanthropic initiatives at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. She has also worked as a senior analyst at the think tank RAND Corporation and as a strategic-marketing and planning consultant.
Education: She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Los Angeles and a master’s in policy analysis from Claremont Graduate University, also in California.
Duties: Birthright Israel Next, which offers social, educational, and religious activities to young Jewish adults after they return from Birthright Israel-sponsored trips to Israel, spun off from its parent organization a year ago. Ms. Levin, who will be Next’s first chief executive when she takes the helm this month, is charged with leading the group’s expansion beyond its current seven cities.
Why Ms. Levin was hired: Because, in addition to her executive experience, “she’s very well connected in the Jewish community, and she has a great deal of passion for this particular work,” says Alvin T. Levitt, Birthright Israel Next’s board chairman and president of the Jim Joseph Foundation, a San Francisco grant maker that supports Jewish causes.
Why she took the job: “One of the things that is very compelling to me about Next is the idea of the collective,” Ms. Levin says. “When people form a collective of like-minded peers, they can do so much more.”
Salary: She declined to reveal it.
Her first trip to Israel: The journey, in 1991, “had a profound effect on me,” Ms. Levin says. When she returned, she says, she began to study Hebrew and turned her career path closer to Jewish concerns. “I don’t think there’s anything that’s as powerful as spending time in Israel and meeting the people,” she says, “meeting the members of our family.”
