Source: Sokatch was not pushed out
We won't be receiving a press release from the Jewish Communal Federation of San Francisco until Tuesday night, and one from the New Israel Fund sometime until early Wednesday morning, but it's for real: Daniel Sokatch is leaving his post as the CEO of the federation to take over the top spot at the NIF.
Sokatch was a much ballyhooed hire in the spring of 2008.
A super liberal, forward thinking and young Jewish leader, Sokatch -- then barely 40 years old -- left the Progressive Jewish Alliance in Los Angeles, which he helped build and turn into a major player, to take over a federation. Perhaps the San Francisco federation is the system’s most liberal, but it is a federation nonetheless and Sokatch was moving very much from the new school to the old school, and going to make an attempt to drag the old school forward.
But it appears the old school was not quite ready (or he couldn't figure out how to make it happen). Sokatch, according to insiders, found himself in the middle of a few major controversies in San Francisco, including the heated debate this past summer over the decision by organizers of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival to screen a movie about Rachel Corrie, the pro-Palestinian activist who was killed when she lay down in front of an Israeli bulldozer as it was about to raze a Palestinian house. Several foundations were outraged by the decision and then pushed to the brink when the film festival decided to invite Corrie’s mother to speak.
Sokatch had to put out a fire between a hyper liberal San Francisco Jewish populous and major foundations that were upset with the film festival. In the end, he publicly said that he thought the festival should have invited a wider range of speakers, not just Corrie’s mother.
He later irked some of the community’s more conservative factions by agreeing to speak at the upcoming conference of J Street, a new organization that has lobbied for U.S pressure on Israel (and the Palestinians) and criticized Israel's invasion of Gaza.
Still, insiders say that Sokatch was not pushed out of the job. Rather, the perfect job for him fell in his lap when NIF was unable to find a replacement for its outgoing CEO, Larry Garber.
“Nobody tried to get rid of him. Individuals who were on the right were angry at him and hostile to him, but nobody tried to get rid of him,” said one source.
Sokatch, according to one insider very close to the situation, was offered the NIF job four months ago and turned it down. But only recently had a change of heart.
We’ll see if this version of the story holds as more people weigh in over the next day or so.
Share
1 Comment
New Israel Fund,
San Francisco Jewish federation,
Sokatch
Comments RSS Feed Reader Comments
Leave a Comment
To leave a comment, you must first be logged in to JTA. If you are not registered, please click here.
Already a JTA member?
Need to know? Get JTA's free e-newsletters!
Adler
09/16/09 02:35 AM
Dear SF Federation,
Boy, you guys are getting dragged through the mud. The press thinks you are backward. The “new” generation had high hopes – finally a Federation willing to take a risk on one of us! But alas, it was not to be. I am sure the story will come out over the next few days, but my guess is that you were not quite as ready to change as you thought you were and the leader you thought you had wasn’t quite as ready to be the leader you needed him to be. It’s alright, despite the warnings of all of my friends, I am still interested in the job, but with some questions and conditions.
First, if you simply want the Federation to serve as a fundraising engine to subsidize a bunch of Jewish agencies, I am not interested. What if the agencies are not worthy of the Federation’s support? If all of your money is tied up in supporting ineffective agencies, how are you supposed to invest in innovation? Even if the demands for your allocation dollars are met, are those allocations a significant enough portion of an agency’s budget to make it stronger? How much time will I be spending on an allocations process where the end result offers only a slight difference from the previous year?
I am interested in the job if the Federation is ready to be the driving force toward a contemporary, shared vision for a vibrant Jewish community. Figuring out this shared vision is going to be a challenging task, but not doing it is a deal breaker. Therefore, if you are still interested, I need access to you and your largest stakeholders. I am going to interview you and if, after those interviews, I get the sense that a common vision is possible, we’ll move to round two. Round two involves you giving me two weeks to come up with a clear articulation of the vision and recommendations for an infrastructure and financial model which will excite the community’s stakeholders.
Should we agree that there exists a common vision and a plan, we will be ready to get serious. At this point, I have several requirements if you are interested in my candidacy. These are non-negotiable:
• I want every donor who gives more than $50,000 annually to the Federation’s annual campaign to commit to their gifts over a three-year period with a guarantee increase of 5% increase each year on each gift based on benchmarks being met. If you want me to be successful, I can’t be worrying about something as trivial as the annual campaign when a task as significant as rebuilding the community is at stake.
• I need .50% (that is not a typo – one half of one percent) of that $3 billion endowment to be made available for a critical purpose – to recruit and hire the best professional leaders to work for SF’s Jewish organizations. Simply put, this money would be used to employee the best educators, fundraisers, managers, and teachers in the world through compensation packages, professional development opportunities and other perks that are far superior to those of any other community.
• I need the best minds available for creating and implementing our plan. These are not necessarily the leaders of the Federation’s board, planning committee or management team. You are going to have to be open to a new crowd. There are plenty of intelligent people in the Bay Area who can help. We may even need to take a “crowd source” approach to building our community’s future. Think about it - if our community agencies are going to go through a series of mergers to make our financial model work, shouldn’t we engage brilliant M and A professionals? If we are going to build a digital knowledge base to bind us together, shouldn’t we bring on some technology wizards? I am confident that we can identify these people and I know that, if provided with a compelling task, they will serve.
I know your questions. Since when does the job applicant place demands on the employer, especially in this job market? What if we agree to all of these terms and you are not successful? Both legitimate questions. But what choice do you have?
If you are interested in my candidacy, just let me know.