William Daroff

Origins and early life

William Daroff was born in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1968, the son of the neurologist Robert Daroff, and moved with his family to the Cleveland area in 1980, when his father became chairman of neurology at Case Western Reserve University. He was raised in a family unaffiliated with any congregation and came to Jewish communal life as a young volunteer in the Cleveland federation; as an adult he joined B'nai Jeshurun Congregation in Pepper Pike, and in Ohio government circles, he recalls, he was often “the only Jewish Republican in the room”.

Work and career

He took his bachelor's, master's and law degrees at Case Western Reserve University and studied the history of Eastern European Jewry and the Holocaust at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He worked on three presidential campaign staffs, as a political appointee at the Department of Energy and as a special assistant to Ohio's governor, George Voinovich, and practised law until 2000, when he chose to work for the Jewish community.

After five years with the Republican Jewish Coalition, he spent fifteen years from 2005 running the Washington office of the Jewish Federations of North America as their chief advocate on public policy. On 1 February 2020 he became chief executive of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, succeeding Malcolm Hoenlein, who had held the post for 33 years. In November 2023 he was a main organiser of the March for Israel in Washington, which drew close to 300,000 people, and in December 2023 he became the first chair of the J7, the task force against antisemitism of seven large Diaspora Jewish communities.

Presidents Bush and Obama both kept him on the Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, which watches over Jewish sites in Europe, and in 2023 the Jerusalem Post named him among the fifty most influential Jews.