Russell Robinson
On 6 hectares (16 acres) in Beersheba, there is a construction site that will have cost $350 million by the time it opens. It is called the World Zionist Village, and it exists because Russell Robinson decided the Negev should be where young Jews from around the world come to learn what Zionism is, rather than somewhere they drive past on the way to Eilat.
Robinson has been CEO of Jewish National Fund-USA since the 1990s, which makes him the longest-serving chief executive of any major American Zionist organization. Under him, JNF-USA stopped being the blue box on the kitchen counter and became the leading provider of Zionist engagement programming in the United States: JNFuture for donors in their 20s and 30s, the Alexander Muss High School in Israel and its more than 32,000 alumni, and the reservoirs, medical infrastructure, and housing that turned the Negev and the Galilee into places people actually move to.
It also made the organization one of the highest-rated charities in America, which for a Zionist body operating under permanent scrutiny is not a minor achievement.
After October 7, JNF-USA did not have to build anything to respond. It was already there, with the infrastructure and the people on the ground. That is the difference between an organization that raises money for Israel and one that has been standing in the room for a century.
Bruce Leboff
At a defining moment for Israel and the Jewish world, Bruce Leboff has emerged as a leading figure in mobilizing Jewish communities and friends of Israel around the world in support of the Jewish state.
Since being elected chairman of the World Board of Trustees of Keren Hayesod – United Israel Appeal in November 2024, Leboff has helped lead one of the most significant philanthropic mobilizations in the organization’s history. Representing communities across more than 40 countries outside the United States, Keren Hayesod is a central bridge between Israel and the Jewish world.
Leboff has played a leading role in representing the organization’s global network of donors and communities as its focus shifted from the emergency response following October 7 to the long-term challenge of rebuilding and strengthening Israel. Since 2023, Keren Hayesod will have raised more than NIS 2.5 billion, more than 20% above its annual fundraising average in the preceding years. Funds have supported war-affected communities, victims of terror, hospitals, rehabilitation, resilience, aliyah, and other national priorities, with growing emphasis on rebuilding Israel’s north.
For Leboff, the challenge is now to transform the extraordinary Jewish and Zionist awakening following October 7 into a lasting commitment to Israel and the Jewish people.
A Canadian Jewish leader, Leboff brings together decades of experience in finance and communal leadership. He is a founding leader of Ascendant Wealth Partners of RBC Dominion Securities based in Toronto, and has spent more than three decades advising high-net-worth families. He has also devoted over two decades to Jewish communal leadership, including serving as chair of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto.
Leboff is married to Lianne, and they have three daughters: Danielle, Rachel, and Stephi. His combination of financial expertise, global communal leadership, and deep commitment to Israel has placed him at the center of a pivotal moment for Jewish philanthropy.
Elliot Brandt and Bernard Kaminetsky
A man drove to a strip of office space in Plantation, Florida, with an AR-style rifle and ammunition in the car. He had found the address on Google Maps. AIPAC had already moved out of that office, but he did not know that, and the FBI stopped him before he found out. He was charged federally with stalking. AIPAC’s public response was one sentence about not being deterred by extremists.
That is the job now.
Elliot Brandt runs AIPAC’s professional staff. Dr. Bernie Kaminetsky, a New York-born physician who co-founded the largest membership-based primary care network in the country, is its president and leads a board chaired by Michael Tuchin. Between them, they run the oldest and most consequential pro-Israel organization in the United States, at the hardest moment it has ever faced.
Brandt was not brought in from outside to fix anything. He started in AIPAC’s Pacific Northwest office, took over the western states in 2002, built coalitions across more than 100 congressional districts, and served as vice CEO before the board handed him the top job. Fundraising roughly doubled along the way. He knows where every relationship in that building came from, because he built a good number of them.
What he inherited is an organization getting squeezed from both directions at once. In this year’s Democratic primaries, turning down AIPAC’s support became something candidates announced on purpose, and not only on the far left of the party. From the other direction, an administration that agrees with AIPAC on nearly everything makes bipartisanship look, to its critics, like a costume.
They have held the line anyway. That is the entire argument for the organization’s existence. Support for Israel in America cannot belong to one party, because a cause that belongs to one party dies with it.
Holding that line has stopped being an abstraction. In November, AIPAC disclosed that intruders had spent months inside its systems and walked off with the personal information of hundreds of people. Staff now work under security arrangements that did not exist a few years ago.
There may be no harder job in Jewish organizational life in America right now. There are very few people willing to say so out loud.
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