Doug Seserman

Origins and early life

Doug Seserman grew up in Denver, Colorado, where he graduated from Cherry Creek High School in 1981, in a Conservative Jewish family that kept a kosher home and in whose congregation he had his bar mitzvah.

Work and career

He has credited his mother, the Jewish youth movement BBYO and Jewish summer camps for the Jewish leader he became, and as a young man he was a counselor and then program director at the JCC Ranch Camp. His father, Robert Seserman, died in 1985, the year Doug graduated from Northwestern University, where he went on to earn an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management in 1986. From 1986 to 1996 he worked for the Quaker Oats Company, rising from marketing assistant to European brand equity director, and he then launched the country's first digital cable television product at TCI.

Later, after a spell at AT&T Broadband, he spent some fifteen years as president and chief executive of the Jewish federation of Colorado, which he merged with the Jewish Community Foundation under the name JEWISHcolorado. During that tenure he raised more than 200 million dollars and nearly tripled the endowment, sat on the board of governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel from 2005 to 2016, and was named to the Forward 50 in 2014.

In October 2017 he became chief executive of the American Associates of Ben-Gurion University, which he renamed Americans for Ben-Gurion University in 2021, and he launched a Ben-Gurion Day in the United States. After the attacks of 7 October 2023 he led the organisation's emergency aid to the university community and its support for rebuilding southern Israel, and that year the Jerusalem Post named him among its fifty most influential Jews.

He stepped down as chief executive in 2025, after nearly twenty-four years at the head of Jewish organisations during which, by his organisation's count, he oversaw more than 500 million dollars in fundraising.