An Unorthodox Hire

Mark Abramson, for the Chronicle

Despite his years behind a university lectern, David Schizer isn’t one to speechify.

So he spoke for only a few minutes at a recent gathering of young Jews hosted by the international-aid charity he runs, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC. Then he opened the floor to questions.

One of the first came from a dark-haired woman seated at the far end of the circle of roughly 30 people. “I apologize if this is a little probing,” she said with some hesitation, “but prior to your time here at JDC, were you Jewishly involved, and if so, how?”

It’s the sort of question he hears often.

Mr. Schizer, 48, joined JDC, a century-old nonprofit, this January after a decade as dean of Columbia Law School. Before that, he taught tax law, worked at the law firm Davis, Polk & Wardwell, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

A 2005 article in The New York Observer referred to him as one of a handful of “Little Supremes.”

Before President Trump’s inauguration, he was offered a position to shape the White House’s tax-overhaul plan, a job he says he might have taken were it not for JDC.

By contrast, Mr. Schizer’s two predecessors in the CEO role at JDC each spent more than a dozen years climbing the ranks of the Jewish aid group. (Mr. Schizer notes that he is only the second leader to come from outside the organization; the first lasted six months.)

“Frankly, we had a lot of skeptics who thought this person isn’t necessarily someone who knows our world,” says Penny Blumenstein, a Jewish philanthropist and trustee who chaired the board at the time Mr. Schizer was selected. “But I don’t think I’ve ever interviewed anyone who gave a better interview or who is more intelligent.”

Successful Fundraiser

On top of his analytic intelligence, Mr. Schizer is also a crack fundraiser. After he was selected dean of the law school at age 35 — making him Columbia’s youngest-ever dean — he more than doubled the institution’s annual fundraising, led a $353 million capital campaign, and hired 43 faculty members.

“David is one of those rare people who is liked by almost everyone who knows him,” says Roger Hertog, the businessman and conservative philanthropist, who gave $2 million to start a program on national security at the law school. Unlike some fundraisers, says Mr. Hertog, “he doesn’t just give you a call once a year and tell you everything is running fine. He is really serious about his end of the bargain.”

All this impressed the JDC board, as did Mr. Schizer’s familiarity with Jewish causes. (Yes, he had some: At Columbia, he started a center for Israeli law, and he advised the Tikvah Fund, a group focused on Jewish thought, which Mr. Hertog chaired. Mr. Schizer also served as volunteer president of America’s Voices in Israel, a relatively controversial group that takes celebrities on trips to the country.)

“His leadership qualities just jumped out,” says Stanley Rabin, JDC board chair, who cites Mr. Schizer’s work to establish a joint business-law degree program at Columbia.

David Schizer’s Recipe for Fundraising Success

Chris Taggart/Columbia University

ASK PRECISE QUESTIONS.

Learn how your team is meeting goals and whether there are new ways to approach problems.

BE YOUR OWN HARSHEST CRITIC.

Also be rigorous in program planning — if you can persuade yourself, you can persuade a donor.

NEVER OVERSELL.

Honesty, always and without fail, is the best path to raising money and changing lives. “There’s a cliché that I don’t agree with: Good news raises money,” David Schizer says. “Sure, that’s fine. But I actually think bad news can raise money, too, in the sense that if somebody cares about the goal, and the goal is becoming more challenging to accomplish, then it’s important to bring them in. If they see the problem as their problem, too, you’re not only harnessing the power of their wallet but you’re also harnessing the power of their brain.”

OFFER STRONG DATA AND STRONG STORIES.

It takes both the brain and the heart to persuade donors, but if you have to pick, go with the brain: “I could tell you a story that would move you about a problem and what I’m trying to do about it, but what I would really rather do is prove to you I can solve the problem. If I can do that, it seems to me you should feel confident that your money is well spent.”

LISTEN CAREFULLY.

Great ideas sometimes come from donors. “You begin often with the misimpression that you’re supposed to give a great presentation,” Mr. Schizer says. “It’s really more of a conversation. If someone is interested in the area, then they may well have an intriguing suggestion which could be even better than what you were thinking of.”

CHARITIES DON’T JUST TAKE, THEY ALSO GIVE.

If you offer someone the opportunity to be a part of something amazing, they will come along.

CAUSES (AND FUNDRAISERS) CREATE COMMUNITY.

People like to be around others who share their goals and values. At the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Mr. Schizer notes, board members take overseas trips together to learn about, and volunteer with, the charity’s programs. “A wonderful side benefit is they get to know other people who care about the same things they care about and enjoy the same experiences they enjoy, and it’s really precious to find that.”

DONORS CAN BECOME LIKE FAMILY.

Open conversations can be hard, but with family they are resolved with shared interests and a desire for the best outcome.

Caroline Preston

At a time when many of the elderly people served by JDC in the former Soviet Union are dying, and divisions between American Jewry and Israel are widening, the charity’s board decided Mr. Schizer had the mix of plugged-in perspicacity and managerial might to lead it.

Grandfather Fled Russian Pogroms

Yet Mr. Schizer’s career zag was a surprise even to himself. After his 10-year term at Columbia concluded in 2014, he worked as a visiting professor at Georgetown, Harvard, and Yale. Occasionally he’d hear from universities that wanted him to serve as president, a conventional next step. But neither he nor his wife, Meredith, a book editor and consultant, wanted to leave New York.

Then one day, the search firm Spencer Stuart called about the JDC job. Mr. Schizer reacted first by asking if the recruiter had the right number. As he familiarized himself with the group, however, he became intrigued.

Above all else, he was drawn to the mission. Mr. Schizer has long felt he owes his success in part to his immigrant forebears. The story of his paternal grandfather, after whom he is named, looms largest.

The elder David Schizer was born in what is now Ukraine around 1900. Orphaned as a child, he and his younger siblings were raised by their grandfather. But when he was 16, his grandfather was lynched in a pogrom. Not long after, during the Russian Revolution, he was nearly killed by counterrevolutionaries who raided his village.

At that point, the young man decided to emigrate. He settled first in Tennessee, where he worked as a peddler, before moving to New York and finding a job as a Hebrew teacher. He learned English at the public library. But other misfortunes followed: Soon after the stock market crashed in 1929, he went blind.

“My life is completely different,” JDC’s Mr. Schizer told the group of young adults, who’d traveled from across the United States for a three-day training sponsored by Entwine, a program founded by JDC in 2012 to take young Jews on service trips abroad. Those assembled were volunteer leaders with the program.

“There’s been pain, mostly about the New York Giants,” Mr. Schizer adds wryly. “But mostly things have gone well. But there are people in the world who are facing these kinds of problems today.” JDC, he says, has provided him a platform for aiding these people, the world’s most vulnerable.

A few weeks after the Entwine event, sitting in his corner office above Third Avenue, Mr. Schizer elaborated on his thinking. In addition to JDC’s mission, he was impressed by its approach. Established during World War I to aid Jews in Ottoman Palestine, the group now works in 70 countries.

In Israel, it operates what Mr. Schizer calls a “venture capital” model, researching and incubating programs. If they’re successful, the Israeli government adopts them. Current projects tackle unemployment among two of Israel’s fast-growing groups: ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli Arabs.

JDC also works with Jews in places as diverse as Tunisia and Venezuela and offers nonsectarian aid after emergencies, such as the Nepal earthquake. Mr. Schizer sees this inclusive approach as good for reaching young Jews, many of whom feel alienated from Israel because of its uncompromising foreign policy and treatment of Palestinians.

He says: “My commitment is to help people who are otherwise disappointed with aspects of Israeli policy find things to love and work on.”

Supreme Advice

Mr. Schizer was born in Midwood, Brooklyn, the youngest of three children. His parents were lawyers. After graduating from Midwood High School, a public magnet school, he received three degrees from Yale.

He’d planned to be a corporate lawyer, but during his Supreme Court clerkship, he realized how much he enjoyed the intellectual exercise of interpreting legal statutes. On the last day of the clerkship, he asked Justice Ginsburg for advice on what he should do. “What do you want to do?” she demurred. When Mr. Schizer pressed, she gamely suggested he speak with her husband, the late Martin Ginsburg, an expert on tax law. Soon, Mr. Schizer was besotted by the field.

In person, he is disarmingly down-to-earth. “Tax lawyers and tax-law professors aren’t usually the ones who come across as gregarious, great personality, friendly,” says Rolando Acosta, a Columbia trustee and presiding justice of the New York State Supreme Court, “That’s not a combination of personal attributes that come together, but in this case it is.”

A father of three who wears khaki suits and round eyeglasses , Mr. Schizer converted from conservative to Orthodox Judaism when he married his wife. (Her grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi.) His weekends belong to family. They observe Shabbat, and on Sunday, they often take long bicycle rides together. (True New Yorkers, his children, ages 15, 13, and 9, only recently learned to bike,) Mr. Schizer makes time for reading and scholarship, too; long ago, he began getting by on just five hours of sleep a night.

In his academic writing, the tax treatment of charity has been a major focus. He argues that the charitable deduction enlists Americans in using private money for public goals and that giving generates a “double utility,” as both donor and recipient benefit.

Zoltan Szabo

Tax law is such a passion, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine Mr. Schizer staying disengaged from it for too long. “I would be very surprised if I retired from here,” he says. But while “I believe with all my heart that a well-functioning tax system helps really poor people,” he says. “I also recognize the work we do helps them more immediately and more directly.”

Ensuring a Return From Gifts

Indeed, he is currently preoccupied with maximizing that double utility on behalf of JDC, by giving donors a stake in the organization and helping them gain satisfaction from giving. The group raises roughly $150 million a year from private sources and spends about twice that much. (The rest comes from the Claims Conference, which provides restitution for Nazi victims, and from the Israeli government.)

One of Mr. Schizer’s challenges will be shrinking the group’s footprint in the former Soviet Union as Holocaust survivors and other elderly clients die off. Today, the organization runs 117 welfare centers in the region, but increasingly, JDC will look for lower-cost ways to help.

The group is also testing efforts to help Europeans of all faiths prepare for security threats. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, it collaborated with local groups to offer mental-health services.

In addition, Mr. Schizer is investing in measurement. JDC operates an in-house think tank in Israel that runs evaluations of its work there. Those assessments will be extended to other regions.

Meanwhile, Mr. Schizer, who started part-time last July so he could work with the departing CEO, Alan Gill, has made one big decision so far. Soon JDC’s office will be relocating a few blocks south to the 36-floor Art Deco skyscraper on which the fictional Daily Planet headquarters was modeled.

Much of his time has been spent on the road, visiting JDC programs in Israel and the former Soviet Union as well as meeting with donors across the United States. At the Entwine event, though, young people had gathered in New York, in part to see him. JDC has taken pains to reach out to young adults and recently reserved 15 board spots — out of more than 170 — for people under age 45.

As afternoon turned to evening, Mr. Schizer fielded queries about his background as well as JDC’s profile and his goals. He talked about his travels with the charity, how his visits with the elderly in places like Minsk and Babruysk, in Belarus, make his own worries seem picayune.

After about 25 minutes of discussion, a JDC staff member intervened to let Mr. Schizer off the hook. The group of young adults would soon begin their Shabbat dinner of chicken with preserved lemon, saffron couscous, and beef tagine. Mr. Schizer would be headed to San Francisco for JDC the following week. But first, he was off to spend Shabbat with his family.