By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
A new regional director is riding high in the saddle at the Northwest regional office of the Anti-Defamation League. Ellen Bovarnick moved into her new role at the Seattle office of the ADL last month, close to eight months after the shake-up that resulted in former director Rob Jacobs’ departure from the post. As regional director, she is responsible for the overall efforts of the ADL in five states, covering Alaska, Idaho and Montana, as well as Washington and Oregon.
“The ADL has come through this transition and continues to focus on our outstanding work in civil rights complaints and discrimination complaints, [in] anti-bias education legislative advocacy and [the] support of Israel,” Bovarnick says.
A native New Yorker, Bovarnick has been living and working in Washington state since coming to study for her Master’s in Social Work at the University of Washington more than a decade ago. A licensed psychotherapist — though she says she no longer practices— she also studied at Rippon College in Madrid, Spain, and at the University of Virginia, where she received an MBA.
Prior to coming to Washington, she worked in the corporate world, for AT&T and for Capital Cities-ABC, (the parent company of the American Broadcasting Company before its takeover by Disney Corp).
“My interest in social justice predated my work in that field, but I spent some time in that arena, and then said, ‘I want to align my work with my values,’” Bovarnick says.
So she left the Fortune 500 companies behind and moved to the West Coast to attend the UW. She says she was attracted to the Social Work school here in part by the social justice and multicultural components of their program. Those elements are also things that she says she values about the work of the ADL.
“Coming to the ADL feels like coming home,” she says. “I grew up in a community that was predominantly Jewish and the ADL was present in the background, somewhere around all the time. I also grew up with a set of values around social justice, support of Israel and civil rights,” she says. All of that makes her feel that her new position is the ideal job for her at this point in her life.
“For me, it’s an opportunity to combine my social consciousness, [and] my interest in civil liberties and civil rights with my roots, which are in the Jewish community,” she says.
Pam Schwartz, the local ADL chapter’s board chair, said that current and past board members spent about six months working to find the right fit for the executive director position, with some candidates being flown in to interview.
And then “in walks Ellen, and she was just a breath of fresh air,” Schwartz says.
The position is filled through the ADL’s national office, so a representative from New York spent time in Seattle throughout the process, until it was complete. Bovarnick was introduced at the organization’s annual meeting in March.
Schwartz said Bovarnick’s biggest challenge at this point is to get out into the community and introduce herself, particularly since her predecessor was well-known in the position.
“Through her actions and through what she does with the ADL, she’ll lead her own path,” Schwartz says. “She’ll make her own statements.”
One way Bovarnick will put her stamp on the organization is with its response to racial and ethnic bigotry in its “A World of Difference” educational program.
“It’s an amazing educational curriculum, starting with early childhood education, all the way through to corporations. So we have ‘A World of Difference’ in elementary schools and in high schools. We have ‘A World of Difference’ curriculums available in corporations and communities,” Bovarnick says. “We care about the civil rights of everybody, so the ADL has a really broad mission in that sense. We understand [that] racism and bigotry exists in many forms, including anti-Semitism, and the way that we respond is to help all of us eliminate racism and bigotry.”
On the day she spoke with JTNews, “A World of Difference” was being taught in the Bethel School District schools in Spanaway, following a series of racial incidents and threats of violence. In late March, about 500 of Bethel High School’s nearly 1,300 students stayed home because of a reported threat of a violent action being planned for the school, the second time in less than a month that something of the sort occurred, according to a report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Earlier that same week, another incident reportedly occurred involving white and black students that resulted in disciplinary action against several participants, and the arrest on possible hate-crime charges of an 18-year-old white male who was accused of holding a noose during the episode.
“The Bethel School District needed to do something about that, and what we were able to share with them was our expertise in helping schools address racism, [both] between students and within the system,” Bovarnick says. “They invited us in, and we’re there today to begin a series of ‘A World of Difference’ training sessions to help their students, and to help their faculty and their administration, to address racism and bias, and to foster tolerance.”
Before coming to the ADL, Bovarnick worked in community mental health in central Washington as a therapist, and served as the director of a mental health clinic in Edmonds. She also worked as executive director of Team Survivor, a nonprofit agency that provides fitness and health education programs to women who are survivors of cancer, in any stage of treatment or recovery and at any fitness level.
The need for the work of the ADL is obvious, she says. That includes “the anti-bias work, the civil rights complaints and the legislation that we’ve been involved with [in] this session of the state legislature in Washington.”
One of the highlights of this year’s legislative session from the ADL’s perspective, Bovarnick says, was the passage of a bill prohibiting the training of people in the destruction of property as part of a terrorist activity. The legislative agenda and most of the work in the session happened before her arrival, but she did attend the governor’s signing of the bill.
“Sometimes,” she says of landing in her new position, “I think the moon and the stars aligned. There couldn’t have been a better opportunity for me than this job, in terms of my skill-sets and my interests, and the needs of this organization.”