ZACHARY SCHAFFER
My Story
From as early as I can remember, my parents instilled in me the ancestral Jewish wisdom of b’tzelem Elohim - the idea that every human life is sacred. They taught me that this value is a verb and that we all have a responsibility to show up for others.
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As I grew up and read family letters more than a century old, I learned about the hatred and violence my ancestors faced. As young children, my great-grandmother Jennie would flee town with her siblings throughout the year to escape pogroms, violent massacres against Jewish communities. My great-great-grandmother would tell them to hide in different fields, so that if one was found others might survive. I discovered that only a few years after Jennie fled her hometown, every Jew was exiled and the homes in their village were burned to the ground.
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As I look at the lopsided family tree hanging in my childhood den, I imagine whole branches of past and future cousins severed from the trunk. And as I travel the world, I meet so many others who have had their ancestral trees uprooted, who have had whole branches of loved ones severed by violence.
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We face a serious challenge today. So many features of our culture condition us to be apathetic or angry. Our social culture often deepens our wounds and incentivizes us to enter binary and dehumanizing frameworks. And then we regularly confront systems that perpetuate pain and alienation rather than fostering healing, accountability, and restorative justice.​
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I've seen how unprocessed fear, alienation, and self-hatred can lead to polarization and harm. And I've experienced how human connection and community can transform society. Personally, I have experienced how my own healing journey and relationships have helped me to show up with more vulnerability, compassion, and joy.
This is why I've committed my life force - my life's work - to repairing our connections with each other and ourselves.​​
My Activities
Zachary Schaffer has dedicated his career to empowering people to nurture compassion and communicate across differences.
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Zach Schaffer is an accomplished facilitator, educator, and organizer who has dedicated his career to empowering people to nurture compassion and communicate across differences. He has trained thousands of leaders worldwide including executives in Fortune 500 companies like Amazon and Salesforce and global nonprofits like the American Red Cross and Guggenheim Foundation; briefed elected officials in the US, Canada, and Australia and governmental agencies like the Federal Office of Civil Rights; and led workshops at dozens of universities including Harvard Business and Law schools, UCLA Business School, Columbia Teachers College, and Brown University.
He is the Co-Founder of Project Shema, a training and support organization working to ensure collective Jewish inclusion and safety inside healthy pluralistic societies. As an expert in depolarization, he brings a refreshing multi-disciplinary approach to relationship-building, storytelling, and advocacy. He is renowned for his unique ability to unpack complex and emotionally charged topics with clarity and compassion.
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As a consultant and trainer, Zach has supported organizations in creating safe, respectful, and equitable workplaces. Through his work with Jewish Women International (JWI), he developed a training series on masculinity and male allyship which was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice Office on Violence against Women. He has facilitated with Resetting the Table, where he supported transformative communication across political divides in the United States. previously served as the Executive Director of the Council of Young Jewish Presidents where he and his team worked to train and platform young, diverse lay leaders in Jewish nonprofit boardrooms.
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He is the proud President of an Israeli-Palestinian grassroots coexistence movement and serves on the North American Board of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish movement in North America, where he co-chairs their Racial Equity Diversity & Inclusion Committee and serves on the Commission on Social Action, where he helps to set their social justice and legislative agenda. He is also a rising voice in the conversation around the culture and legalization of psychedelics, especially within Jewish contexts.
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He received an MS in Nonprofit Management at Gratz College and his undergraduate degree in Rhetoric and Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He resides in Brooklyn where he enjoys live music, dried mango, and riding his motorcycle.​​​​​​​​