Vera Institute of Justice

Joel J. Levy joined Vera in August 2009. For the previous eight years he was the New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. Prior to that, Joel was the chairman for Germany of The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation; in that capacity he built the first yeshiva in Germany since the Holocaust. Simultaneously, he was co-managing director of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Berlin. For more than 20 years Joel was a United States Foreign Service Officer, with assignments in Romania, Tanzania, Malta, Washington, DC, and Berlin, where he was the head of the American Embassy Office. He was the founding president of the Foreign Service Youth Foundation. Before joining the Foreign Service, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Seoul, Korea, where he taught at a Jesuit university. He also taught social studies at Port Chester High School. He holds a BA from Franklin and Marshall College and an MA from Columbia University, and he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.