Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi
Image by The Israel Project
Image by The Israel Project
In the crowded field of Israel advocacy, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder and president of The Israel Project, stands out, and not just because she is one of the few women leaders doing this kind of work. In the nearly 10 years since she founded TIP, the organization has grown from a Washington-based start-up to a global enterprise with 70 employees and an $11 million annual budget. This year, at a time when other Jewish organizations are contracting, TIP opened bureaus in India and China and launched a website in Arabic that attracted 25 million page views in its first six months.
Mizrahi, 47, a fast-talking former communications specialist who favors lots of exclamation points in her frequent e-mails, can sometimes sound like an alarmist on all things Israel. But her innovative approach to advocacy — bringing foreign diplomats to Israel, working on the ground in Asia and Latin America, reaching out to new audiences in their languages — is clearly filling an important niche. How many pro-Israel organizations have an Arabic website with 190,000 Facebook fans?
“We’re changing the paradigm,” she says. “It used to be that if you were pro-Israel, you were anti-Palestinian. We are pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. It’s not a zero sum game.”
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Dive In
-
Fast Forward An elite Jewish society at Yale fractures over its director’s embrace of Itamar Ben-Gvir
-
News Trump would eliminate antisemitism envoy in proposed State Department overhaul
-
News Harvard’s Jewish president, in new lawsuit, says Trump crackdown has ‘nothing to do’ with fighting antisemitism
-
News Pope Francis, who advanced church’s relationships with Jews, dies at 88
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion The dangerous Nazi legend behind Trump’s ruthless grab for power
- 2
Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
- 3
Culture Did this Jewish literary titan have the right idea about Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling after all?
- 4
Opinion I first met Netanyahu in 1988. Here’s how he became the most destructive leader in Israel’s history.
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Gaza and Trump have left the Jewish community at war with itself — and me with a bad case of alienation
-
Fast Forward Trump administration restores student visas, but impact on pro-Palestinian protesters is unclear
-
Fast Forward Deborah Lipstadt says Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown has ‘gone way too far’
-
Fast Forward 5 Jewish senators accuse Trump of using antisemitism as ‘guise’ to attack universities
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.