Dispatches from Good Name Advisors

“No one’s career makes sense through the windshield — only through the rearview mirror.” I often share this piece of advice with young professionals looking for clarity about a decision they need to make, or one that was made for them.

Thinking about that idea recently, I did a little digging and found a profile of me from 1998, back when I was a young Federation professional. (You can find the article in the Detroit Jewish News archive here.) The photo above is from that same piece — me in my Birmingham apartment, baking cookies in a U of M shirt!

Re-reading it, I realized that while I had no idea where my career would take me, even then I knew that joy and connection to the Jewish world would always be center-stage. Every chapter of my professional life — though distinct in setting — is a variation on that same theme.

From over a decade at the Jewish Federation of Detroit, focused on programming and leadership development, to eight and a half years at the American Jewish Committee, organizing Detroit leaders and building bridges across faiths, cultures, and communities, to nearly a decade at the William Davidson Foundation, supporting innovative and meaningful work in Jewish life — the thread has held.

Looking back also pulls me into the present, and reminds me of other constants that have carried through since the very beginning. As a graduate student at U of M’s School of Social Work’s Project STaR (now the Jewish Communal Leadership Program), we hosted two young men from Argentina, who had come to the University of Michigan after surviving the trauma of the Iranian-backed attacks on the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires in the mid-1990s. They came both to learn and to find respite, to be part of Jewish community, even thousands of miles from home.

Years later, at AJC, I learned in depth about Iran’s nuclear ambitions — too much, at times — from the technicalities of uranium enrichment to the complexities and compromises of the JCPOA. I remember interviewing at the Davidson Foundation and being asked what kept me up at night — and answering, without hesitation: the prospect of a nuclear Iran.

That fear hasn’t disappeared, but it has evolved. With the current war between Iran and Israel — and the United States drawn in — I worry deeply about what comes next. But I hold two truths at once: that a regime which has spent decades sowing terror around the world, targeting Western values and especially the Jewish people, must never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons — and that the Jewish people will continue to survive and thrive, to mourn and to celebrate.

Because existential dread has never stopped our pursuit of joy. Fear has never silenced our capacity for meaning. Personally, I find myself searching for the constants — the through lines. The ways choice and instinct shape us, even when we’re not aware of it.

Lately I’ve been asking: What have I carried with me without realizing? What early impressions still echo in the work I do today?

And I’ll ask you, too: What’s in your rearview mirror?

Warmly,