Megan Nesbitt, executive director of Brown/RISD Hillel, will be leaving at the end of the semester to pursue graduate studies. She will be replaced by Marshall Einhorn, who comes from a business background.
Einhorn has been working with Nesbitt since Jan. 25 and will fully take charge this summer, he said. This arrangement gives him the opportunity to meet students, faculty members, administrators and alums and to "get an overall sense of Brown and the Jewish community at Brown," he said.
Nesbitt will leave Brown in June to pursue a master's degree in critical psychology at George Washington University, she said.
She said she loves Brown for "the strength of the community and the sense of really belonging here." Her experience at Brown has been "incredibly rewarding," challenging her in unexpected ways as well as teaching her what she wants to do next, she added.
Einhorn said the Hillel community has been very "warm and welcoming." He said he has been struck by the diversity of the Jewish community at Brown in terms of Judaic practices and student backgrounds. "It has been amazing for me to see the different avenues for Jewish students to get involved and to have Jewish experiences with their classmates," he said.
Einhorn called himself a "career switcher." Prior to coming to Hillel, he had 11 years of working experience in business, consulting, informational technology and marketing. He also holds a masters in business administration.
But his career in the for-profit world "wasn't speaking to me," Einhorn said, and so he began looking for "work that had a larger meaning to the community," he said. "I wanted to be in a position where I felt the connection to the work that I was doing."
As an undergraduate student at Tufts University, Einhorn was on the executive board of Hillel for two years, and had been "a big believer in helping develop Jewish life on campus." He said this position at Brown/RISD Hillel "was exactly the kind of thing that I was looking to shift into."
Einhorn also said he wanted to have a career through which he could "help improve the world in some small ways," so as to set up an example for his kids — a four-and-half-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy.
Einhorn said he thinks having a strong set of business experiences will serve him well in Hillel. He said he sees similarities in operation between Hillel and a business, and will utilize skills he gained in the for-profit world, such as financial and marketing skills, to serve the Hillel community.
Nesbitt said she has been "very impressed" by Einhorn's "mind for business operations and management" and his ability to see how the community works as a whole and how individuals fit into the organization.
The student executive board at Hillel is "very excited" to have Einhorn, according to Yoni Dolgin '10, president of the board. Dolgin said he thinks Einhorn is a "good listener," "a true leader" and someone who is both visionary and capable of gathering resources to support his visions.
"People just love him," Dolgin said.
Einhorn will work on crafting an "authentic experience for students to connect and do so in a way that is meaningful to the individual students themselves," he said. He said he hopes that when students leave Brown, "their Judaism is in some ways important to them" and they will bring this to other communities.
