Noah Slepkov is living the ultimate dream of Diaspora Jews who want to make a difference in Israel.
Noah Slepkov and Einat Wilf
At age 28, the St. Catharines, Ont.-born political protégé is working as an adviser to fresh-faced Labor party member of Knesset, Einat Wilf, 39.
Slepkov landed the job just four months after making aliyah.
“I’m in a situation where I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. I am doing things that I hoped to be doing five years down the line,” said Slepkov, a self-confessed West Wing addict, from his office in the Knesset. “It’s like a dream come true.”
Of course, he didn’t get there overnight. It took dedication and hard work – and quite a measure of good luck.
Slepkov first met Wilf when he hosted her at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) as a stop on her Israel Campus Coalition speaking tour in November 2006. After serving as program director for Hillel Vancouver and afterward as director of Jewish Student Life at the University of Toronto, Slepkov had returned to his alma mater to take a position as director of Israel and Jewish affairs at London Jewish Campus Services.
Part of his job as leader of Israel and Jewish advocacy on campus involved bringing speakers. “Einat was the most articulate Israeli speaker I had heard throughout my eight years on university campuses,” Slepkov said. “She was totally inspiring, and I knew then that she was destined for greatness in Israeli politics and the Jewish world.”
The pair’s second meeting took place in Israel, in February 2008, when Slepkov invited Wilf to speak to a visiting group he had organized, along with the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC), of 30 students from the UWO Richard Ivy School of Business. “The feedback from trip participants was tremendous,” Slepkov said.
Wilf said that speaking on campuses, as well as to Jewish communities and organizations, is extremely important to her. “I believe that Israel is the target in many places of very malicious campaigns and you cannot leave the arena undefended,” she added.
The pair’s third meeting took place after Slepkov made aliyah in July 2008. As soon as he heard that Wilf intended to run in the Labor primaries, he sent her an e-mail with the subject line, “Put me to work.”
“I told her I would love to be involved in the campaign, and I would do whatever she needed,” Slepkov said.
“I really like politics. I came to Israel with the hope of getting involved in politics. For me, it would be so much more meaningful and more fun than going into politics in Canada.”
Wilf, a former strategic consultant with McKinsey & Company in New York and a general partner with Koor Corporate Venture Capital in Israel, said it was Slepkov’s do-anything attitude that won her over.
“The spirit of his e-mail was just great. A lot of people who are interested in politics and say they want to help don’t want to make phone calls or lick envelopes. Everyone wants to be a strategic consultant. I loved the spirit with which he approached me.”
At the time, Wilf was desperate for help with a monstrous Excel document, containing the contact details for the Labor party’s voting members. Slepkov, an Excel guru, came to the rescue. Before he knew it, he was handling Internet marketing and communications for her campaign.
“When I saw that he was true to his word and he had ideas, I said okay. I actually need his skills,” Wilf said.
“Being part of this campaign was very exciting,” Slepkov said. He was particularly interested in Wilf, because if she were to win, she would have to rise above all of the so-called compulsories of Israeli political success – being an incumbent, having the support of the party chairman or another power broker and being a national celebrity. “If she was going to win, it would be purely through strategy, hard work, and dedication,” Slepkov said.
Wilf drafted Slepkov to participate in the national election campaign that followed in February 2009, for which he handled online marketing to constituents of the Labor party. He also got a taste of campaigning, travelling with Wilf across the country.
“These road trips were amazing for me, because we would have these long, serious, intense conversations,” said Slepkov about his talks with Wilf, who has a PhD in political science from the University of Cambridge. “I was getting the equivalent of a PhD in Israeli politics. I learned so much from that experience.”
But when the national election results came back, the Labor party didn’t do as well as it had hoped, winning just 13 seats. Wilf was number 14 on the list. Slepkov watched as the election results were projected onto the Azrieli towers in Tel Aviv: first Likud, then Kadima, then Yisrael Beiteinu and finally Labor. “It was one of those screaming ‘noooooo’ moments,” Slepko said. “It was a tremendous sense of disappointment.”
Wilf then threw herself into teacher and principal meetings for her recently published book, Back to Basics: How to Save Israeli Education (at no additional cost). “Once the campaign was over, I decided to dedicate a lot of my time to meeting with teachers about the book, to try to initiate change,” said Wilf, who brought Slepkov along to assist her.
She also returned to her post as a Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. Slepkov followed her again and worked as an intern, contributing to the research and writing of the institute’s “Annual Assessment” publication, an overview of the preceding year in terms of geo-political, economic, social and political developments internationally and in the Diaspora and Israel.
Meantime, Wilf was offered a teaching position at Sapir College in Sderot, which she accepted, and she asked Slepkov to be a research assistant for her course on social entrepreneurship.
“It’s important to mention that he did such good work at every turn that I became very dependent on his good work, so I kept taking him with me,” Wilf said.
While he worked with Wilf, Slepkov continued to pursue his master’s degree in government at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. It was there, while he was working as teacher’s assistant at a master’s recitation class in research methods, that he got a mysterious SMS message from Wilf.
“I got this really bizarre text message from her saying, “Are you following? Be ready to join me,’” recalled Slepkov. After checking the news, it all became clear. Rebel Labor MK Ophir Paz-Pines had resigned, bumping Wilf onto the Labor party list.
That evening she held a strategy session at her apartment in north Tel Aviv. “I asked her, “What’s my role in all this?” Slepkov said, “and she said, ‘You’re going to do what you’ve always done.’”
Wilf said she got dozens of resumés in the first weeks of becoming an MK and “my answer to all the resumés was that I have had people who have been with me for the last two years, and they are the ones who will continue being with me.”
Slepkov and Wilf pair have been working elbow to elbow in the Knesset ever since.
“Noah is a superb strategic thinker, and he’s been great in terms of being a thought counterpart and a strategic-thinking counterpart, analyzing and making decisions,” Wilf said.
“The other thing, of course, is the amazing work that he does on the Internet. For a politician to be able to directly talk and present themselves to their constituency, unmediated, is so important. It is making politics more approachable, more personal. It’s not just a technical tool – it’s a way of political thinking – and Noah has allowed me to be on the cutting edge of that.”
“It’s nice to work for someone who believes in you,” Slepkov said.
Of course, he still faces lots of challenges as a new immigrant. Number 1 on the list? Hebrew. Slepkov gives himself five years to achieve fluency. “We’re putting Noah on a Knesset ulpan,” said Wilf, smiling. “He’s not allowed to speak English in the Knesset.”
The challenges and the hard work aside, Slepkov said it’s been an extremely fulfilling ride. “I made aliyah for several reasons, the first of which is because I believe that the Jewish people should be in the Land of Israel. The fact that my family ended up in Canada is by mere chance.”
On one of his first days in the Knesset, he was sitting in the cafeteria and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked by.
“All of a sudden, it struck me and I felt this strong connection to Jewish history,” Slepkov said. “For me to be able to work in the Knesset, I feel part of this historical narrative.”
