Seven of AJC's Top Staff Came From ADL

The American Jewish Committee runs the largest budget in American Jewish advocacy — $126.7 million in fiscal 2024, against ADL's $135.3 million on a shorter reporting history and Hillel International's $72.8 million. Roughly 393 people work there. Sixty-seven are named publicly.

This is who they are, where they came from, and what that says about what AJC is actually built to do.

The C-suite has no diplomats

AJC operates 17 international offices and posts — Brussels, Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, plus country representatives in New Delhi, Tokyo, São Paulo, Sofia, Prague, Budapest and Rome. It maintains partnership agreements with 41 Jewish communities worldwide. Japan became the 41st in November 2025.

You would expect that network to be staffed by former diplomats. It is not.

Across AJC's 13-person senior executive team, there are zero alumni of the U.S. State Department, zero from any foreign ministry, zero from the diplomatic service, zero from intelligence or security, and zero from journalism. There are also zero holders of rabbinic ordination.

The actual pipelines: four internal promotions, three from Capitol Hill, two from the corporate private sector, two from other Jewish communal organizations, one from elected office. One background could not be established.

Daniel Silver holds the title SVP of Diplomatic Affairs. He built that expertise inside AJC, running the Asia Pacific Institute and Global Events. Jason Isaacson, Chief Policy and Political Affairs Officer, was in the room at the 1991–92 Madrid talks — after roughly 35 years at AJC, not before.

AJC manufactures its diplomatic corps rather than importing one. That is a genuine institutional achievement built over decades, and it is a more interesting fact than any revolving-door story.

The CEO brought his chief of staff

Ted Deutch became AJC's CEO on October 1, 2022, after twelve years representing Florida in the U.S. House. Casey Kustin, his own congressional chief of staff, joined AJC in 2023 and is now Chief Impact and Operations Officer — one of the five most senior roles in a $126.7 million organization.

Kustin spent roughly 13 years on Capitol Hill, including as Staff Director of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and Counterterrorism. The credentials are real. The transfer from a member's House office into the C-suite of the nonprofit he now runs is documented on AJC's own bio page.

Two more of the 13 came from the Hill: Julie Fishman Rayman, SVP for Policy and Political Affairs, from Rep. Heath Shuler's office; Jon Schweitzer, SVP Marketing and Communications, from Sen. Amy Klobuchar's press shop.

One level down, the pipeline inverts completely

Below the C-suite sit 29 issue and institute directors and 25 regional directors. Backgrounds were established for 52 of 54 — 96% coverage.

The composition is nothing like the executive floor:

• Other Jewish communal organizations — 39% (21 people), against 15% in the C-suite
• Internal promotion — 22% (12)
• Law — 19% (10), concentrated in the regional directorships
• Academia — 13% (7)
• Israeli government, IDF or Israeli state service — 9% (5)
• Capitol Hill — 6% (3), against 23% in the C-suite
• The rabbinate — 6% (3), plus one cantor

Read it plainly: Capitol Hill staffs the top of the house and almost nothing else. The desks and the regions are staffed by the rest of the American Jewish organizational world — ADL above all.

Seven ADL alumni now run pieces of AJC

This is the finding that connects two of the largest organizations in American Jewish life.

• Seth Brysk — ADL Central Pacific Regional Director → AJC Northern California → AJC VP Regional Operations, July 2026
• Tammy Gillies — ADL San Diego Regional Director, ten years → AJC SVP Regional Operations
• Teresa Drenick — ADL Central Pacific deputy and interim director → AJC Northern California Regional Director, July 2026
• Kimberley Plotnik — ADL Los Angeles civil rights area counsel → AJC Los Angeles Regional Director, August 3, 2026
• Robert Leikind — ADL Connecticut and Boston → AJC New England, 2008
• Laurence Milstein — ADL Director of Corporate Development → AJC Palm Beach County
• Joel Schwitzer — ADL → AJC Dallas, 2015

Both of AJC's senior regional-operations executives are ADL alumni. Both California regional directorships changed hands in 2026 — to ADL alumni.

Three more came from Hillel, including Brysk, who ran San Francisco Hillel before ADL before AJC. The three organizations audited in this series are not staffed by three separate professional classes. They are staffed by one, circulating.

Five came from the Israeli state

All of them below the C-suite:

• Avital Leibovich, Director of AJC Jerusalem — IDF, 20-plus years, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.), head of the Foreign Press Branch in the IDF Spokesperson's Unit
• Dov Wilker, VP Advocacy and Innovation and Atlanta Regional Director — Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• Andrew Gross, Director of AJC New York since July 2026 — Political Affairs Director at the Israeli Consulate in New York
• Seth Brysk — IDF service
• Brian Siegal, Miami and Broward Regional Director — clerk to the Chief Justice of Israel's Supreme Court

No Mossad background was found at any level. By comparison, Hillel International has zero staff with Israeli government or IDF backgrounds. ADL has at least one — Marina Rosenberg, SVP International Affairs, formerly Israel's ambassador to Chile.

Three rabbis, in exactly the two jobs where ordination is useful

Across roughly 50 named content experts and regional directors, three hold ordination: Rabbi Noam Marans (Jewish Theological Seminary), Director of Interreligious Affairs; Rabbi David Levy (Hebrew Union College), New Jersey Regional Director; and Rabbi Andrew Baker, Director of International Jewish Affairs, who retired in June 2026 after roughly 50 years with no announced successor.

Ordination at AJC sits in interreligious diplomacy and regional community work — and nowhere else. Not in strategy, policy, finance, operations, development, legal, HR or technology. That is a defensible staffing choice for an advocacy organization. It is also a measurable one: ADL lists no rabbis on its senior roster at all. Hillel is 8% rabbinic.

AJC will not publish its Board of Trustees

AJC lists 174 members of its Board of Governors and 24 on its Executive Council. It publishes no roster for its Board of Trustees. Only the chair is named — and AJC's own pages disagree about who that is.

The lay leadership page, self-dated September 2025, names Steven J. Wisch, Managing Partner of El Dorado Partners. The leadership page and Curtis Lane's own AJC bio name Curtis Lane, founder of Elements Health Investors and WindRose Health Investors and formerly head of healthcare investment banking at Bear Stearns.

The likeliest explanation is that Lane succeeded Wisch after September 2025 and the older page was never refreshed. No press release or news report of that transition exists anywhere. For a $126.7 million organization sitting on $334.9 million in assets, an unannounced and unreconciled change of board chair is not a footnote.

The same page problem runs elsewhere: AJC's leadership page still listed Josh Kramer as New York director in August 2026. Kramer left on June 1 to become CEO of Ohio Jewish Communities, and AJC itself announced his successor on July 29.

And AJC is choosing a new CEO

A page titled "AJC CEO Transition: Frequently Asked Questions" is live on AJC's website. Ted Deutch is confirmed in post as of August 2026 across multiple independent 2026 sources, so this is a succession process in motion rather than a completed change.

A $126.7 million organization, contributions up more than 50% in a single year, $24.4 million banked in surplus, running a CEO search it has published an FAQ about — decided by a Board of Trustees whose roster it does not publish and whose chair its own pages name two different ways.

That is the governance question worth asking, and AJC has not been asked it publicly.

Three organizations, three theories of the work

Set the pipelines side by side and the differences are not rhetorical:

• Hillel International recruits from inside its own campus network — 42% internal promotion, zero Capitol Hill, zero Israeli government, 8% rabbinic.
• ADL recruits from the U.S. federal executive branch — the NSC, DHS, DOJ and GSA — not from Congress, and carries no rabbis on its senior roster.
• AJC recruits from Washington and Jerusalem — Capitol Hill into the C-suite, Israeli state service into the director tier, and the rest of the Jewish communal world underneath.

Three organizations. Three completely different answers to the question of who should do this work.

Methodology

This study draws on AJC's published leadership roster and individual biography pages, Form 990 filings via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, federal Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, and contemporaneous reporting from Jewish Insider, JTA, J. Weekly, the Jewish Journal, the New Jersey Globe, the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle and the Cleveland Jewish News. All pages retrieved August 14, 2026.

Source hierarchy: IRS filings, then grantmaker filings, then official organizational publications, then archived pages, then media reports. Backgrounds were established for 52 of 54 tracked directors and regional directors. Two — Eric Post and Sarah van Loon — publish no pre-AJC employer anywhere and are excluded from the pipeline counts. No individual was coded by gender, religion or denomination; rabbinic ordination is counted as a professional credential relevant to a Jewish communal organization. Where a search returned nothing, it is reported as not found, never as proof of absence.

AJC did not respond to a detailed list of questions submitted more than seven days before publication.

Also in this series: AJC's $126 Million Machine · What Does AJC Actually Believe?

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.