Hannah Rosenthal
Sparking Programs to Benefit Women and Girls
By Pauline Dubkin Yearwood

When Hannah Rosenthal left New York and her job as executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs in January 2005 to accept a position as executive director of the Chicago Foundation for Women, some in the Jewish world decried the move. After all, Rosenthal was leaving a post that made her the top female executive in the Jewish world.

She is quick to point out that although her home base may have changed (actually she's a Chicago native who has spent most of her life in the Midwest), her priorities haven't.

From the time she announced, as a child, that she wanted to be a rabbi [Sally Priesand, the first woman rabbi, was at Hebrew Union College (HUC) at the time], Rosenthal, 54, says she has always been adept at "lighting fires under people." As for the Chicago Foundation—which, with a $6.5 million budget, is one of the largest women's foundations in the world—its mission dovetails nicely with her own. "We are the people who light a lot of fires under people," she says of the organization, which makes grants in the Chicago metropolitan area on issues benefiting women and girls.

Activism has been the watchword of Rosenthal's life. Her mother and father, who was a Reform rabbi and a Holocaust survivor, drove her lifelong passion for social justice, and she became involved in community organizing and the antiwar and civil rights movements of the '60s.

She enrolled at HUC to pursue her dream of becoming a rabbi but dropped out in her second year. "I decided that the vehicle I had chosen was not producing [social] change at a fast enough pace for me, so I switched vehicles." She headed a Jewish religious school for the next several years, then switched again—to politics. After getting her feet wet working for a state representative and for a member of Congress, she became the head of the Wisconsin Women's Council, leaving to devote her time to heading the ClintonGore campaign in Wisconsin.

In 2000, Rosenthal joined the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella organization of local community councils and national Jewish agencies, and made history as the only woman heading a major national Jewish organization.

Her activities before and since have been refracted through a Jewish lens, she says, noting with satisfaction that the governor of Wisconsin once told her, meaning it as a compliment, that she "had a neon sign on [her] forehead that says 'Jew.' " Today, she adds, dissatisfaction with many of the current government's policies also drives her.

Rosenthal had another powerful reason for the New York-to-Chicago move: her two grown daughters, Shira and Francie, both live in nearby Madison, Wis. (Husband Rick Phelps works in development for a bank and is also active in the Jewish community.)

As for her new job, Rosenthal says that "some days it's overwhelming, but look what's happening in the country—all our fundamental issues are on the table or on the chopping block. As a Jew, as a woman, I'm lucky that I get a platform to discuss these issues."