New York — The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is pleased and proud to announce that its Director of ZOA’s Center for Law & Justice has been chosen by the Forward newspaper, one of the “50 most influential members of the Jewish community.” The following is the Forward’s description of Ms. Tuchman’s work.

Susan Tuchman
Susan Tuchman scored a significant victory for the Zionist Organization of America when the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights agreed to investigate the 2004 complaint she filed against the University of California, Irvine, alleging a pattern of antisemitism on the Orange County campus. It was the first case of anti-Jewish harassment on an American college campus to win a formal government probe. As Jewish students on such campuses as Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, charged that professors were stifling pro-Israel voices in the classroom and intimidating them into silence, Tuchman, a Boston litigator before becoming director of the ZOA’s Center for Law and Justice in 2003, was the first to put legal teeth into Jewish organizations’ warnings of rising anti-Israel sentiment in university classrooms. Tuchman later testified at a November 2005 hearing convened by a separate office, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to air allegations of antisemitism both inside and outside of the classroom. The result of that hearing was a groundbreaking set of findings and recommendations released this past spring, which concluded that Jewish students are protected under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a federal anti-discrimination statute that bars discrimination on the basis of national origin.

ZOA President Morton A. Klein said, “We are proud and honored to have Susan as an integral member of our team. From day one at ZOA, she has immersed herself in work to benefit the Jewish students on campus. Her deeply caring, sincere, and warm personality has endeared her to young college students. The relationships she has forged has given her the knowledge and insights of the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic issues students face at many of our most important campuses. I have met few people in the Jewish communal world with Susan’s determination and commitment to help Israel and the Jewish people. Her love of Israel is unsurpassed and all of us at ZOA are privileged to be working with her.”