San Francisco federation names new CEO

(JTA) – San Francisco’s Jewish federation is hiring Danny Grossman as its new CEO.

Grossman, 57, is a business entrepreneur and has been a board member of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties for some time.

He will replace Jim Offel, who was named interim CEO following the resignation of Jennifer Gorovitz in early 2014. Gorovitz had been the first woman to lead a big-city Jewish federation. She resigned in her fifth year as CEO, she said, to spend more time with her children and return to work as an attorney.

A native of San Francisco, Grossman is currently the CEO of SLOW Food for Fast Lives; previously, he was the CEO and founder of Wild Planet Entertainment. He has a bachelor’s degree from Yale and an MBA from Stanford.

Early in his career, Grossman served as a legislative aide to a one-term Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, worked for the nonprofit group Ground Zero and later worked for seven years in the Foreign Service as a diplomat overseas and at the State Department.

The announcement of Grossman’s hire was made on Thursday.

“Danny is widely respected by his colleagues as a consummate leader and thinker, with an impressive and wide-ranging career – as a Jewish communal leader, as a visionary in business, as a diplomat in the literal and figurative sense of the word, and as a team player with a clear head and the ability to find consensus within complicated issues,” Tom Kasten, chair of the federation’s board, said in a statement.

Grossman’s Jewish lay affiliations include serving on the boards of his Jewish Community Relations Council, Brandeis Hillel Day School and Joshua Venture Group, according to the federation statement. His philanthropic work also has extended to a variety of children’s groups, educational projects and toy foundations.

“I am thrilled and honored to take the helm of the Federation at this important time,” Grossman said in the federation statement. “I returned to the Bay Area to pursue my passion for community and for Jewish life locally as well as globally and in Israel, and this opportunity is the realization of that dream.”