Eric Fingerhut turned the Jewish Federations of North America toward two fronts: Israel at war and a Jewish community under siege at home. As president and CEO of the umbrella body for 146 federations across the United States and Canada, he delivered the inaugural State of the Jewish Union address, and pressed for a national, post-9/11 scale effort to protect synagogues and schools.
The Israel emergency campaign JFNA has run since October 7 has surpassed $850 million, funding trauma care, and community recovery. He paired the fundraising with advocacy, keeping support for Israel and the hostages bipartisan, and built the partnership that reshaped Jewish philanthropy this year alongside board chair Gary Torgow.
For a century, Jewish money moved in one direction, from North America to Israel. This year Gary Torgow helped turn it around. On June 28, the JFNA board chair sat in the Israeli cabinet room as ministers unanimously approved a NIS 200 million first-year plan to strengthen Jewish education in the Diaspora, money flowing from a country at war toward Jewish schools abroad, on the theory that those schools are now a strategic asset for the whole Jewish people.
He had pressed Netanyahu on the idea since 2022. In Washington, he lined up a second stream: a 2025 federal tax credit that lets any taxpayer redirect up to $1,700 to a scholarship organization and deduct every dollar. JFNA is building a national body to aim that money at Jewish day schools. A soft-spoken Detroit banker and Orthodox yeshiva president, Torgow has spent his career crossing lines others will not.
For years, Jeremy Leibler warned that Australian Jews were being pushed to the margins and their safety “eroded.” After the December 2025 Bondi terror attack, in which 15 people were killed, his warning became impossible to ignore. As president of the Zionist Federation of Australia and a partner at Arnold Bloch Leibler, he has spent the year experiencing antisemitism through the communal, legal, and political lenses.
Leibler pushed for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, then gave evidence describing how antisemitism increasingly appears under the guise of anti-Zionism. “The claim that ‘Zionist’ refers to a political position rather than a people is a fiction. It is the mechanism by which antisemitism is laundered into acceptable speech,” he said.
He told the commission his children have begun questioning whether Australia is still their home. During President Herzog’s February visit, Leibler rejected accusations against him as crossing from criticism into something more sinister. Leibler lives in Melbourne with his wife and four children.
No. 35: Yoav Turgeman, Bezalel (Butzi) Machlis, and Inbal Kreiss >>