World Jewish Congress

Shai A. Franklin is Director of International Organizations for the World Jewish Congress and Executive Director of the WJC American Section. In this capacity, he oversees the WJC agenda regarding the United Nations and other international organizations, and coordinates outreach to the U.S. Government and the American Jewish community.

In his role with the American Section, he also directs the North American Jewish Congress. On behalf of WJC, he served three years as Treasurer of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CONGO), and has been one of the organizers of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians. Since 2005, he has been a member of the Executive Leadership Cabinet of the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Public Policy, nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2006, he joined the Advisory Board of Yale University’s Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

Prior to joining the WJC, Mr. Franklin served for six years as Director of Governmental Relations in the Washington, DC, headquarters of NCSJ: Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia (formerly the National Conference on Soviet Jewry). As a member of NCSJ’s staff, he participated in planning and organizing the April 2002 Israel Solidarity Rally in Washington, DC, and coordinated follow-up activities with the U.S. Congress. He helped develop the coordinated strategy by 55 European and North American governments to combat anti-Semitism through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), known popularly as the Helsinki Process.

Previously, Mr. Franklin was the Managing Editor of Middle East Insight Magazine in Washington, DC; a Fellow at both the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and United Nations Watch in Geneva; and a community professional with the Anti-Defamation League. He managed humanitarian projects in Russia and India as Ralph I. Goldman Fellow of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and conducted research in Israel with the late Daniel J. Elazar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Shai Franklin has testified before the U.S. Helsinki Commission (CSCE) in the U.S. Congress, and participated in the 2002 OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Berlin; the historic OSCE conferences on anti-Semitism in Vienna (2003), Berlin (2004), and Cordoba (2005); and the annual OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw. In Brussels in 2004, he addressed the Interparliamentary Conference on Human Rights and Religious Freedom.

He has attended several Democratic and Republican national conventions, and worked in a number of local and national political campaigns within the United States. He has participated in the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, in Sweden, and in March 2003 he joined other former JDC Ralph Goldman Fellows on a study mission to Argentina. In September 2005, he conducted research in France on Islamic-Jewish relations, under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Mr. Franklin has held leadership positions within the American Jewish community, serving on the Israel Task Force of the Jewish Federation of Rhode Island's Community Relations Council, and as Co-Chair of the Gelfand Memorial Institute of Adult Education at Kesher Israel Congregation in Washington, DC. He has chaired the National Institute for Jewish Leadership at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center (DCJCC), where he was a member of the DCJCC Board of Directors. As a student activist, Mr. Franklin was National Political Officer of the North American Jewish Students Network.

Mr. Franklin earned a B.A. in political science (summa cum laude) from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He holds an M.A. in Middle East studies and international economics from the Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where was selected for the U.S. Government's Presidential Management Intern Program. A former Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he has also attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence and the University of Haifa in Israel.

Mr. Franklin has published numerous articles on Jewish affairs, foreign policy, and Middle Eastern politics. He has traveled widely in Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia, as well as seven of the 15 Soviet successor states, meeting with high-ranking government officials and with Jewish and other religious leaders. In addition to fluent English and Hebrew, he also speaks Arabic and French. He and his wife have one son, and live in the New York suburbs.

About the World Jewish Congress

Shai Franklin