David Elcott
Henry and Marilyn Taub Professor of Practice in Public Service and Leadership; Director of Advocacy and Political Action Specialization
295 Lafayette Street
Room 3068
New York, NY 10012
David Elcott has spent the last thirty years at the intersection of community building, the search for a theory of cross-boundary engagement, and interfaith and ethnic organizing and activism. Trained in political psychology and Middle East affairs at Columbia University and Judaic studies at the American Jewish University, Dr. Elcott is the Taub Professor of Practice in Public Service and Leadership at the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU and faculty director of the Advocacy and Political Action specialization at Wagner. Over the past twelve years, Dr. Elcott has worked to build a robust training program of community organizing and advocacy campaigns housed at Wagner to effectively address the pressing domestic and international issues we face. His goal is to offer year-round opportunities for NYU students to learn the skills, tools and theories of social justice transformation. He also co-directs the Dual Degree Program of the Skirball Center and Wagner.
Dr. Elcott was formally the Vice-President of the National Center for Learning and Leadership, a think-tank tasked with training community leaders to rethink the nature of contemporary community and civic obligation. As Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee and as the Executive Director of the Israel Policy Forum, David has addressed a wide array of public policy issues, building interfaith and interethnic coalitions to address Middle East peace, immigration reform, civil liberties and criminal justice reform. He has mediated conflicts between and among religious communities in the U.S. and around the world, finding collaborations and solutions on issues as diverse as posthumous Mormon Baptisms, financing the World Lutheran Federation’s hospital in Jerusalem, the conflicts over The Passion of the Christ and Israeli-Palestinian issues with many members of the National Council of Churches and the Catholic Church while working with Israelis and Palestinians on non-violent activism. He also engages German and Jewish religious leaders on reconciliation. He led a major immigration action at the Arizona-Mexican border and helped organize national demonstrations for immigration reform.
His present research is focused in a number of inter-related areas: Launched with Ford Foundation grants, Dr. Elcott addresses how religious leaders can constructively affect civil discourse and democracy, searching for pathways for positive religious involvement in civic affairs. He has published studies on how Christians across the political spectrum translate faith into policy and politics. With colleagues, he is exploring the intersections of social identity, teamwork, marginalization and grit. With past grants from the Meyerhoff and Taub Foundations, he seeks to mobilize the Baby-Boomer cohort for enhanced civic engagement and encore professional and volunteer careers in public service. He has written A Sacred Journey: The Jewish Quest for a Perfect World and numerous articles and monographs on religion and politics, power and war, minority civic engagement, and cross-cultural pluralism. He has represented the Jewish community in interfaith settings in Europe, South America and Asia.
Dr. Elcott authored Faith, Nationalism and the Future of Liberal democracy (Notre Dame Press, 2021)
In 2013, Dr. Elcott received NYU’s Martin Luther King Faculty Award.
Introduction to Community Organizing is for those who could imagine running national or local advocacy organizations that make change happen or anyone who wants to understand the art of community organizing. It will provide an overview of and training in contemporary community organizing practice in the United States. This includes defining what community organizing is and identifying its value base; exploring the strategies, tactics and activities of organizing; and thinking about marketing, language and evaluation. We also will examine the transformations of civic engagement and voluntary associations in the United States and the impact of these transformations on the ways Americans organize and advocate for change.
But there is a larger lesson here: The skills of community organizing – listening, finding areas of consensus and building on that consensus, finding ways to make change happen – are skills that can be applied to all professional and life settings. Through readings, class activities, cases studies, speakers and reflection, students will examine skills and techniques for effective organizing, including building a membership base, developing ordinary people as community leaders and running member-led issue campaigns. Students will also have the opportunity to reflect on and strengthen their own skills as community organizers and advocates.
This two-semester course will explore the role of issue advocacy as a theory and a method of social change. In the fall semester, students will learn how advocacy campaigns, legislative lobbying, issue branding, coalition building, and community organizing affects public policy through changes in political power, regulations, and/or legislation. Experts and practitioners will explain scenarios and review case studies. The course will also examine how campaign workers, organizers, community leaders, and think-tank experts can influence research and policy analysis, lobbying, and public relations via interactions with thought leaders and legislative offices or other government officials. In addition, students will learn about the varied skills of public advocacy – from finding and building consensus, making change happen, to fundraising.
In the spring semester course, taught by Daniel Altschuler, director of civic engagement and research at Make the Road NY, students will gain training in a Make The Road advocacy campaign in the area of immigration and access to health. This portion of the course will explore the intersection of immigration issues—especially immigrants’ rights and efforts to organize to protect and advance them— and health care. Students will have the opportunity to get directly involved in an active campaign to expand health care access for immigrants in New York and learn the ins and outs of developing campaign strategy, identifying and activating supporters, conducting campaign-specific research, and lobbying legislators.
Note: The course is a two-semester course spanning the fall and spring (students earn 1.5 credits each semester). The fall semester course (PADM-GP 4407) is a prerequisite for the spring semester course (PADM-GP 4408). As an elective, students can choose to complete the fall semester course only.
The position of those who collectively identify as a distinct group, generally seen as of minority status in the United States, an immigrant nation since its inception whose indigenous population was perceived as non-American, remains a volatile topic of debate that touches the core of American identity. In this course, we will focus on the status of a number of groups that have been identified as “minority” (leaving the term minority itself in question) within America’s cultural and political framework, examining how the debate over rights informs policy decisions and shapes identity and institutions. We will apply a range of theoretical constructs, seeking to define what “minority” status entails by studying how ethnicity, race, gender, sexual identity, national origin and religious identities, and their cultural expressions, play out in the public sphere. Attention will also be paid to community building - how public policies and leaders nurture or undermine collective identity and the communities they seek to build.
Advocacy Lab is for those who could imagine working in national or local advocacy organizations that make change happen or anyone who wants to understand the art of issue advocacy as a theory and method of social change. An advocacy campaign attempts to impact public policy, most often through changes in regulations and/or legislation. There are a wide range of roles advocacy campaign workers, organizers, community leaders or think-tank experts can play from research and policy analysis to education, lobbying, public relations and organizing constituencies to reaching out to a wide range of influentials, legislative offices and other government officials. At the same time, the skills of public advocacy– listening, fund raising, finding areas of consensus and building on that consensus, finding ways to make change happen – are skills that can be applied to all professional and life settings.
The course will provide an overview of and training in how to affect public policy through advocacy campaigns, legislative lobbying, issue branding, coalition building and community organizing in the United States with experts and practioners providing us real life scenarios and case studies.
Advocacy Lab is for those who could imagine working in national or local advocacy organizations that make change happen or anyone who wants to understand the art of issue advocacy as a theory and method of social change. An advocacy campaign attempts to impact public policy, most often through changes in regulations and/or legislation. There are a wide range of roles advocacy campaign workers, organizers, community leaders or think-tank experts can play from research and policy analysis to education, lobbying, public relations and organizing constituencies to reaching out to a wide range of influentials, legislative offices and other government officials. At the same time, the skills of public advocacy– listening, fund raising, finding areas of consensus and building on that consensus, finding ways to make change happen – are skills that can be applied to all professional and life settings.
The course will provide an overview of and training in how to affect public policy through advocacy campaigns, legislative lobbying, issue branding, coalition building and community organizing in the United States with experts and practioners providing us real life scenarios and case studies.
The position of those who collectively identify as a distinct group, generally seen as of minority status in the United States, an immigrant nation since its inception whose indigenous population was perceived as non-American, remains a volatile topic of debate that touches the core of American identity. In this course, we will focus on the status of a number of groups that have been identified as “minority” (leaving the term minority itself in question) within America’s cultural and political framework, examining how the debate over rights informs policy decisions and shapes identity and institutions. We will apply a range of theoretical constructs, seeking to define what “minority” status entails by studying how ethnicity, race, gender, sexual identity, national origin and religious identities, and their cultural expressions, play out in the public sphere. Attention will also be paid to community building - how public policies and leaders nurture or undermine collective identity and the communities they seek to build.
2021
2020
2017
2014
A review of Cornell W. Clayton and Richard Elgar, eds, Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 2012).The focus is on the historical activist role of religion in policy formulation and implementation in the U.S. and the implications for present day faith communities' engagement in the public arena.
2010
In this report, David Elcott finds that most Jewish Baby Boomers see retirement as a time for work and service, not rest. But he argues that organizations are unprepared to tap this potentially huge influx of talent and experience. Based on a nationwide survey of 34 metropolitan Jewish communities conducted in July 2009, the survey elicited the attitudes of more than 6,500 individual Baby Boomer respondents about their future plans for public service and civic engagement. In addition to analyzing the survey data, Elcott offers recommendations on how the Jewish community can find substantial pathways that will engage Baby Boomers in communal institutional life.
2009
"Discernment as the evaluation of one religious community by another is a critical question in contemporary interfaith dialogue theory and practice. How do the members of different religions judge the relative worth of other religious traditions? And how does this judgment connect with the complicated religious lives of modern people? The question of religious discernment has become much more pressing in an age of the globalization of religion along with economic and cultural exchange. What is so refreshing about these essays is that the authors do not shy away from the fact that every religious tradition does have ways of judging the relative merits (and demerits) of the religions of other people . . . As the Kongzi (Confucius) taught so long ago, we need to find harmony but not uniformity. These essays help us on this path
2008
2007
Writer discusses that Jews in USA support an Israel that seeks peace, reaches out in compromise, and cherishes the sacredness of human life over the sacredness of land. And as a religious minority,they rightfully protest those who, in claiming a monopoly on knowing God’s will, tell them how to act or what policies Israel should promote — whether mainline Christian Protestants or Christian Zionists.
2006
Hussein Ibish, senior fellow, American Task Force on Palestine, and David Elcott, executive director, Israel Policy Forum, have given their views on the US support for Israel. Ibish believes that the American approach to Israel and Palestine is fundamentally flawed, whereas Elcott believes that those who argue pro-Israel lobby has forced American governments to support policies detrimental to the interests or to the forces of peace are wrong.
2005
In American Religious Consequences, leading scholars of religion and theology ask what controversy reveals about Christians, Jews, and the possibilities of inter-religious dialogue in the United States.
2004
2001
2021 - 2022
Legacy Heritage Foundation
Arranged grant for student fellowship.
2021 - 2024
Littauer Foundation Grant
Arranged grant for student fellowship.