Eric Fingerhut

Eric Fingerhut has served as President and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America since 2018, leading the umbrella body for 146 Jewish federations and hundreds of network partners across North America that collectively raise and distribute more than $3 billion annually in support of Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world — making him the operational head of the largest Jewish philanthropic system in existence. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Fingerhut has had an unusual career for a Jewish communal executive: he served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio (1993-1995 and 2007-2009), ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2004, and served as Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents from 2011 to 2016, before becoming President of Hillel International from 2016 to 2018 — a background in electoral politics, state government, and campus Jewish life that gives him a range of relationships and institutional understanding uncommon among federation executives.

The Jewish Federations of North America under Fingerhut's leadership has been one of the primary channels through which American Jewish communal resources have flowed to Israel since October 7, 2023 — coordinating emergency funding campaigns for Israeli communities near Gaza, raising tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, and mobilizing the federation network's infrastructure of major donors for Israel-focused giving at a scale and speed that only the federation system can achieve. The federation "super-Sunday" campaign in October and November 2023 produced record emergency fundraising numbers, with individual federations reporting their largest single-day totals in decades. Fingerhut coordinated the national federation response while managing the internal diversity of a network whose constituent communities hold a range of views on Israeli government policy.

His political background from his House service has also made him an effective advocate in congressional settings, where he can speak from personal experience about the legislative process and the political pressures that members face — making him a more effective interlocutor with elected officials than most organizational executives. His Hillel presidency gave him direct credibility with the campus pro-Israel generation that is now fighting the post-October 7 battles on university campuses. At Rank 91, Fingerhut leads the philanthropic infrastructure that funds the physical and programmatic presence of Jewish life in America and Israel — the system that turns American Jewish charitable giving into sustained institutional capacity on the ground in Israel and on every campus where federation-funded organizations operate.