For Eve Stieglitz ’07SB, talk is cheap. Doing, however, is much more valuable, and as a testament to her strongly-held beliefs, Stieglitz does things—a lot.
The accomplished corporate recruiter currently holds a full-time position at MediaVest, a leading full-service media specialist company, and a part-time job managing professional development seminars at New York Institute of Technology. Despite her busy professional life, Stieglitz—who, like many other young Jews, frequently discusses causes of concern to the Jewish community—turns talk into action. She has helped organize and run a host of events, rallies and committees for various Jewish causes, including her most recent success: a Pro-Israel Solidarity rally to express support for Israel and its ongoing military operation against Hamas and to call for peace in the beleaguered region.
Stieglitz was instilled with a strong sense of Jewish identity and communal involvement growing up in Providence, Rhode Island. “It was a small, very tight-knit Jewish community where everyone , no matter their affiliation, did things together and got along,” said Stieglitz, who began volunteering at the age of ten at the local Jewish Community Center by making fundraising phone calls. “I thought every Jewish community worked like that and was surprised to learn later on that it wasn’t the case.”
After freshman year in a public high school, Stieglitz chose to attend the Maimonides School, a Modern Orthodox school in Brookline. “Continuing my Jewish education was very important to me, and without those years at Maimonides, I might not have had a religious anchor today,” said Stieglitz. “Realizing the critical role Jewish education plays in life was a big part of the reason I also decided to attend Yeshiva University.”
At YU’s Sy Syms School of Business, Stieglitz loved the New York City locale and the smaller environment that Syms offered—the type of setting in which she thrived. In addition to devoting time to her studies and majoring in Marketing, Stieglitz served on the Sy Syms Student Council and managed the marketing and scheduling at YUWR, Yeshiva’s student-run radio station. There, she co-hosted her own show with fellow Syms student Yoni Shenkman ‘07SSB called The Random Tandem. “We were on the air on Wednesday nights in a great time slot, which I freely admit was only due to my influence as scheduling manager,” laughed Stieglitz.
In the classroom, Stieglitz found great support in her peers. “We studied together and cheered each other on, and no one was selfish when it came to succeeding in class,” said Stieglitz. “We supported one another, and it helped that we were all similarly motivated to succeed professionally. Most of us had several internships while we were students, and I think something like 90 percent of us had jobs already secured before we graduated.”
Stieglitz wasn’t sure what kind of career she wanted; real estate, perhaps. But when she attended a Sy Syms alumni and board networking event at Abigael’s during her junior year, she took a proactive approach and scanned the guest list prior to the event to see where—and next to whom—she wanted to sit. “I asked to be placed next to Phil Friedman, a member of the YU Board of Trustees who owned Computer Generated Solutions,” said Stieglitz. “Most of the other professionals there worked in accounting and finance, and I knew I didn’t want to pursue those fields.”
She and Friedman got along famously, and by the end of dinner, he had offered her an internship at his company as a recruiter. “I hadn’t thought of recruiting before that, but I liked doing it, and I was good at it,” said Stieglitz simply.
She secured a position at a powerhouse New York executive recruiting firm in February of her senior year, and went to work two weeks after commencement. After five years, she obtained her current position at MediaVest, where she recruits top talent in the advertising and digital media space. Along her professional journey, she kept in close contact with Deborah Cohn, one of her professors at Syms, who often served as a reference. And it was this line of communication that led Cohn to recruit Stieglitz to help manage professional enrichment seminars at New York Institute of Technology, where Cohn now teaches.
But Stieglitz, imbued with the spirit of social action in the Jewish community at such a young age, needed an outlet for that part of her, too, and so she began seeking opportunities to get involved. “After a family trip to explore our roots in Poland, I was really inspired and wanted to give back in a relevant way,” said Stieglitz. “I did some reading and discovered that there are tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors at or below the poverty level. It was tough to learn that we’re not taking care of our own. I volunteered for an organization called Blue Card, which provides direct financial assistance to needy Holocaust survivors. They liked my work so much that they created a young leadership committee so that I could chair it.” Since then, Stieglitz has run five fundraising events, each raising between $18,000-$20,000, and helped launch a program for people to visit survivors who are hospitalized.
Stieglitz also volunteered for pro-Israel events, but it was only recently, with the events unfolding in Israel, that she was inspired to take even further action. When her good friend Uri Turk ’07SB—who served as paratrooper in the IDF for two years—called to tell her that he was founding Bring Back Our Boys NYC in the wake of the kidnapping of three Israeli teens, she quickly signed up to help, and co-chaired a Bring Back Our Boys fundraiser on June 25 at a Lower East Side lounge that raised over $16,000. “Just because we’re in the U.S. doesn’t mean we can just sit back,” Stieglitz told The Jerusalem Post at the time.
And, when the terrible news came that the teens had been murdered, and with the escalating violence in Israel and negative world opinion, Stieglitz had more work to do. Along with a few friends and within the span of just six days, Stieglitz organized a major pro-Israel rally and solidarity protest attended by thousands of New York-area Jews at which she spoke publicly on stage. The protest was widely covered in the Jewish press, and Stieglitz was interviewed by numerous media outlets, including CBS, ABC, and Shalom TV.
“It’s a little sad that it takes something like this to unify the Jewish people, but it was beautiful to see so many people present in a space with no hatred or politics,” said Stieglitz. “I was speaking to a friend on Facebook before the rally, and he was bemoaning the current state of world affairs and I challenged him to come to the event. He didn’t show up, and that’s very hard for me to respect. There’s talking, and then there’s doing.”
Rousing people into action is a natural fit for Stieglitz, as she sees the corporate recruitment she does as integral training for her volunteer communal work. “My job is getting people from point A to B to C,” said Stieglitz. “And that’s what the Jewish community really needs: its members, its family, to actually show up.”
