Russell Robinson

Origins and early life

Russell Robinson grew up in El Paso, Texas, a city of three hundred thousand people with about fifteen hundred Jews, where, as he recalls, “you had to work to be a Jew” and Israel was what held the community together.

Work and career

He has written that he celebrated Israel's Independence Day at his Jewish community centre in El Paso, and he names Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as his inspiration. He began his long career in Jewish communal service in his home town, as youth director and then assistant director of the local Jewish community centre. In September 1997 Ronald Lauder, then president of Jewish National Fund-USA, hired him as its chief executive, and in 2026 the Jerusalem Post called him the longest-serving chief executive of any major American Zionist organisation.

Under him the organisation set out to bring 500,000 people to the Negev, with new communities and a stronger Beersheba, and in 2023 it reached the target of a campaign to raise one billion dollars over a decade. It runs the Alexander Muss High School in Israel, which has more than 32,000 alumni, and JNFuture, a donor society for people in their twenties and thirties that he calls the fastest-growing part of its donor base.

In Beersheba it is building the World Zionist Village, a 350-million-dollar campus where young Jews from around the world are to come and learn about Zionism. He lives in Livingston, New Jersey, and works from the organisation's national office in New York; the Jerusalem Post placed him at number 32 on its list of the fifty most influential Jews in 2023.