Eric Fingerhut

Origins and early life

Eric David Fingerhut was born in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, on 6 May 1959, the son of Samuel Fingerhut, who sold insurance, and of Alice Fingerhut, for thirty years the receptionist of the Cleveland Jewish News.

Work and career

His family belonged to Beth Am Congregation in Cleveland Heights, and as a boy he carried signs in the walkathons for Israel during the wars of 1967 and 1973; “I am who I am because of the Cleveland Jewish community,” he said in 2022. He took a degree at Northwestern University in 1981 and a law degree at Stanford in 1984, then worked for the Cleveland Works programme and for the city's mayor, Michael White. Elected to the Ohio Senate in 1990, he represented Ohio's 19th district in the United States House of Representatives from 1993 to 1995, returned to the state Senate until 2006 and was the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in 2004.

From 2007 to 2011 he was chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents and then vice-president for education and science learning at the Battelle research institute in Columbus. In August 2013 he became president and chief executive of Hillel International, the organisation for Jewish students on campuses, and doubled its combined annual revenue from 90 million dollars to nearly 200 million. On 6 August 2019 he took over as president and chief executive of the Jewish Federations of North America, which under him organised the community's response to the pandemic and raised 62 million dollars for LiveSecure, its programme to protect Jewish institutions.

In April 2022 he was on the border between Poland and Ukraine to coordinate the humanitarian response with the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee, for which the federations raised more than 50 million dollars in an emergency campaign. In 2023 the Jerusalem Post placed him at number 28 on its list of the fifty most influential Jews.