Directors

Ronald W. Fox

Ronald W. Fox has built his life's work around the essential Jewish values of compassion, healing and social justice.

A graduate of Harvard College (class of '60) and Harvard Law School ('63), Mr. Fox served in the US Army JAG (the army's legal branch) and spent a few years working in large law firms. By 1971, he had abandoned the world of corporate law to start a practice representing low and middle-income people with minimal access to legal advice. He became one of the first lawyers in the country to offer divorce mediation, a service that can make the process less traumatic than the traditional adversarial approach.

In 1983, Mr. Fox joined the staff of the Harvard Law School as Public Interest Career Advisor, where he counseled law students who hoped to use their degrees to help the disadvantaged. His experience at Harvard led him to found the Public Interest Law Career Planning Center (later the Center for Professional Development in the Law) with the goal of helping lawyers find ways to make their professional work consistent with their personal values. Since 1990, he has presented workshops at over 20 law schools and bar associations and provided individual guidance to over 1,000 law students and lawyers. His book Lawful Pursuit: Careers in Public Interest Law was published by the American Bar Association in 1995.

Mr. Fox has been active in the Jewish community at both the local and national level for over thirty years. In 1971, he and his wife formed a "havurah" with several other families which for fifteen years shared Jewish holidays, retreats and celebrations in a style that emphasized toleration, caring and fairness. The Fox family spent five weeks touring Israel and working on Kibbutz Gevim in 1981. Mr. Fox has served on the boards and social action committees of numerous religious and charitable organizations, including his local United Way and Jewish Federation, the Tikkun Community and the International Centre for Healing and the Law. He was instrumental in raising funds to build a medical clinic for an impoverished community in Israel. Most recently, Mr. Fox and his wife, Joan Fox, have founded a new organization called the Center for Jewish Alternatives (www.ronfox-joanfox.com), which provides resources and support for people who are alienated from their local Jewish institutions and who wish to incorporate Jewish values, principles and traditions into a spiritually meaningful life.

Mikhail Kazachkov

In 1975, Mikhail Kazachkov sought permission to leave his native Soviet Union. A physicist and a Jew, Kazachkov was arrested and spent the next 15 years in the Gulag - the Soviet Union's longest serving political prisoner. Labeled "The Man in the Window" by New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal, Kazachkov emerged in the last years of the Soviet Union as a major international human rights figure.

Upon his release in 1990, Kazachkov traveled with his mother to the United States where he took up residence and began what he came to call his "third career" (theoretical physicist and Gulag inmate being careers one and two). For much of the 1990s he focused on human rights and political change in his homeland, increasingly traveling back to what had again become Russia. During this period, he was a Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Law School and a Fellow at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

During the 1990s Kazachkov played a key role in bringing technical advice, political support and financial aid to those in his native land seeking to build democratic institutions. He assisted in the production of over 20 Russian documentaries, aired nationwide, that educated viewers to a variety of human rights issues. He advised the Duma on telecommunications policy, including on how Russia's legislature could establish the equivalent of C-SPAN. He also assisted Russian efforts to accelerate the introduction of the Internet.

Much of Kazachkov's work occurred under the auspices of not-for-profit organizations. Most important was Freedom Channel, a U.S. 501 c3 organization which he helped establish and run. Its mission was to support Russian media and other groups active in building a civil society. He also joined other boards of directors including that of a CFC federation: Human and Civil Rights Organizations of America.

In the last few years, Kazachkov has added for-profit work to his not-for-profit activity, serving as a link between Russian entrepreneurs and businesses in the United States and European Union. He has specialized in communication and other advanced technologies, a not incidental link to his "first career" in physics.

Jeffrey Musman

Jeffrey Musman has been a lawyer in private practice for more than 30 years. Currently a partner in the Boston firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, he concentrates in the areas of corporate and commercial law, real estate development, land use, and public and private finance. Before joining Seyfarth Shaw, Musman was for many years a partner in the firm of Goldstein & Manello, which eventually merged with the firm of Schnader, Harrison, Goldstein & Manello where he was also a partner.

Musman received his law degree from William and Mary and his bachelor’s degree from Carleton College. He has been active in community affairs for years and currently serves on the regional boards of the Urban League and the Association of Retarded Citizens.

Marshall Strauss

Marshall Strauss has been active in the not for profit field for more than a quarter century and has been involved in the CFC for much of that time. He is the CEO of the Workplace Giving Alliance, a collaboration involving several federations including this one.

Mr. Strauss served as chair of the National CFC Committee for two years and has helped found several CFC federations. He is president of Human & Civil Rights Organizations of America which represents some 70 charities. He has served on a number of national and local not for profit organization boards.

During the early 1990s, Mr. Strauss helped establish and served as the initial CEO of two international organizations whose programs supported democracy activists overseas: The Democracy for China Fund and Freedom Channel. As executive director of the former, he organized and participated in the 1991 human rights delegation to China led by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. During his tenure at Freedom Channel, that organization produced and aired on nationwide Russian television numerous human rights documentaries.

During the 1980s, Mr. Strauss served as associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Child Welfare League of America. Earlier, he served as special assistant to Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent and special assistant to U.S. Senator John Durkin, among other positions. Strauss was a research associate at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy from 1994-96, and an adjunct member of the faculty of Emerson College in 1995. Here and overseas, he has been interviewed extensively on issues of human rights and philanthropy by, among others, the Associated Press, UPI, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, ABC News, Actuel (Paris), BBC, Russian National Television, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.