Elliot Miller

In the winter following my completion of IGF, I got an email from the consulates General in Los Angeles. He wrote that he came across my CV and asked if I'm interested in a political director position. I'd never been to the west coast before and I was intrigued. I flew in for an interview at AIPAC, and I started there in July 2017. At AIPAC 2020 I interviewed for the embassy in DC, and I've been in DC since July 2020. So, 5 years later, I'm still working on the same issues I worked on in IGF, only from the other end.

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You do IGF and you don't realize who you're meeting, who you're working with. Working now in the embassy in Washington I'm interfacing with so many people I met in my time on IGF. To this day I'm still very much in touch with IGFers across the sessions - we have a network of IGFers who work in consulates, I have my IGF friends, I'm still in touch with my IGF director whom I consider a mentor.

 

Outside of my day job, I created my own organization in the UK called the Pinker Center. It's a sort of IGF for university students – it was really modeled after IGF. We set up Pinker in universities all over London, and we invited a variety of Israeli political philosophers to come and speak. People loved it. Over the last 4 years we have reached 5-10 thousand students and young professionals. We've hosted Ehud Olmert, Dan Meridor, the foreign minister of Canada, we've hosted congress people and countless other thinkers. So IGF has deeply impacted not only my career path, but also my community outreach and activism. It is an experience that I carry with me wherever I go.