Firoz Ladak may well represent the future of Jewish organizational leadership — at least among those Jewish organizations dedicated to multicultural understanding and dialogue.

Ladak serves as executive director of the Edmond and Benjamin de Rothschild Foundations, the 200-year-old global network of foundations founded by the prominent, uber-Zionistic Jewish banking family. His appointment to the post four years ago surprised the philanthropic world, since he’s a Muslim of Indian origin (as well as a former investment banker).

“My sense is that I was hired not because I’m Muslim, or anything else, but because of my professional background,” he says. “Still, for an organization that prizes pluralism and diversity, we practice what we preach.”

The days of Jewish organizations singling out members of the

Jewish faith to serve as leaders at their helm may soon prove a relic of the past. “We’re already seeing boards of Jewish organizations seeking the most qualified candidates for increasingly complex settings,” says Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies and a founding trustee of the World Bank’s World Faiths Development Dialogue. “As they do, the leadership will be more and more diversified.”

For now, though, Ladak remains somewhat of an anomaly in the Jewish philanthropic world. Besides Israeli coexistence organizations such as the Abraham Fund and The Center for Jewish-Arab Economic Development that are co-led by Muslims, Solomon told the Jewish Week that he cannot think of any other Jewish organization led by a Muslim.

The Rothschild family has a long history of multiculturalism and embracing the “other,” Ladak says. His boss, Benjamin de Rothschild, often talks about the legacy of his great-grandfather, “HaNadiv HaYadu’a” (“The Known Benefactor”), Baron Edmond James de Rothschild. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, HaNadiv supported several Jewish yishuvim (settlements) and purchased large plots of land that were later bequeathed to the fledgling Jewish state. He promoted economic ventures such as two large wineries in Rishon LeZion and Zichron Yaakov, which employed a diverse labor force of both Jews and Arabs. In a letter to the League of Nations in 1934, Edmond de Rothschild wrote, “The struggle to put an end to the Wandering Jew, could not have as its result, the creation of the Wandering Arab.”

Ladak, who is based in Geneva, was in New York this month kicking off the $1.5 million flagship program of the foundation, The Ariane de Rothschild Fellows Program: Dialogue & Social Entrepreneurship. Held at Columbia Business School in Morningside Heights, the two-week training program brought together 30 Muslim and Jewish social entrepreneurs from the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

In recent years, there has been a groundswell in Muslim-Jewish encounter programs. Two weeks ago, the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding organized a four-day mission for rabbis and imams. In February, The Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement (CMJE) and NewGround: A Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change launched a pilot text-study program where Muslims and Jews studied and discussed Islamic and Judaic religious sources together. And in 2004 and 2005, the Rothschild Foundations sponsored two major conferences in Brussels and Spain addressing Muslim-Jewish relations. But conferences like these were “not addressing the needs of the youth” and provided “no clear action that could be developed after the conference.”

In other words, encountering “the other” is not enough. One must approach cross-cultural dialogue with a shared purpose, a shared identity. In the case of the Ariane de Rothschild Fellows program, participants shared a commitment to applying the skills and tactics of entrepreneurship to solving social problems.

Coming at dialogue and encounter from a sense of shared values offers a more innovative approach to cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, Ladak argues. “We felt that many of these [Muslim-Jewish encounter programs] were still operating within the limits of religious identity,” he says. “Our approach is much broader. We acknowledge the multiplicity of identities, not only across cultural boundaries, but also within.”

The technique is “quite radical,” says Bruce Kogut, director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School, and one of the organizers of the program. “This kind of dialogue through social entrepreneurship is not mainstream.”
“Different situations showed us how our identities intersected,” says Sahar Ishtiaque Ullah, the Florida-based co-founder of the Hijabi Monologues, a project that seeks to humanize Muslim women through storytelling. “Our collective identity is that of social entrepreneurs. But sometimes we divide on country lines, and other times we naturally break down into groups based on gender.”
In addition to the in-depth skills-training courses in accounting, marketing, negotiations and attracting venture capital taught by Columbia Business School professors, scholars from the University of Cambridge provided historical context by leading seminars focused on “Identity and Memory,” “Islamism and its Origins in Pakistan” and “Interfaith Dialogue in Pre-modern Times.”

Often, Muslims and Jews share “overlapping moral commitments,” such as tzedakah and sadaqa (charity), says Patrice Brodeur, associate professor of Islam, Pluralism and Globalization at the Universite de Montreal, who served as one of two facilitators for the group. The idea is to focus on shared commitments to social entrepreneurship, while not ignoring larger potential divides, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “It may undermine the trust if you don’t address it,” he says.

The fellows also visited local social enterprises, including Greyston Bakery in Yonkers and the Acumen Fund in Manhattan. They also attended services at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on Friday night and The Islamic Center on 96th Street on Sunday evening.
“Oftentimes, there’s a perceived conflict between doing well and doing good,” says Saafir Rabb, CEO of Managing Opportunity, a Maryland-based strategic planning consulting firm that specializes in socially oriented organizations. “People see religion and faith as something that exists outside of business.”

Sam Adelsberg, a junior at the University of Pennsylvania who founded LendforPeace.org, a nonprofit site that allows people to make microloans to entrepreneurs living in the Palestinian territories, says that the multifaith, global network has been empowering. Faith has a lot to do with social entrepreneurship, he says.

“The discipline that faith establishes for you” is similar to the discipline needed to succeed as a social entrepreneur, he says. “I still put on my tefillin and pray every day,” even when doubts emerge. “The same is true on the days when I wonder, ‘Am I really achieving my mission? Is it even attainable?’”

Email: tamar@jewishweek.org