Having served in two presidential administrations, worked in civil rights law for more than 30 years and started a nonprofit from scratch, Matt Nosanchuk has dedicated his career to pursuing justice. He cites his Jewish values.
“I had a strong sense of my own Jewish identity informing my desire to do work to advance social justice, my desire to do work that was in the public interest, my desire to do work that was related to public service,” Nosanchuk said.
Nosanchuk recently assumed new roles as the Lerner Family associate dean for public interest and public service law and professorial lecturer in law at George Washington University Law, which he began in February.
The Washington, D.C., resident is a longtime member of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda.
Nosanchuk described his Jewish upbringing as “atypical.” He was raised in Windsor, Ontario, where his father was a communal leader, and Detroit, home to a larger Jewish population. When his parents separated, Nosanchuk moved to Detroit with his mother. The family attended a Humanistic Jewish temple, which Nosanchuk called an “approach to Judaism focused on secular Jewish values.”
He became interested in cultural and religious Judaism in college during a year studying abroad in Israel.
“I think I always had a strong sense that I wanted my Jewish community, my Jewish identity, to be a part of me,” Nosanchuk said. “And I decided I wanted to explore Reconstructionist Judaism.”
The summer before his senior year of high school, Nosanchuk came to D.C. to intern for Sen. Carl Levin, a Jewish senator from Michigan.
“He and his brother, Sander Levin, who was in Congress also for 36 years, brought their Jewish values in the way that they approached their politics in giving back — tikkun olam — supporting civil rights, criminal defendants, people who were experiencing discrimination and inequality,” Nosanchuk said. “As Jews, we have a strong aversion to [inequality] and desire to combat it, whether it’s impacting us or impacting others.”
The Levin brothers inspired Nosanchuk to further embrace these Jewish values through public service.
“My identity played an important role. It’s only over time that I’ve been able to tap into it in various ways,” Nosanchuk said. “And it was when I became the liaison to the Jewish community for President Obama that I really tapped into it in ways that I never had before.”
Nosanchuk had joined the Obama administration in the Civil Rights Division, where he worked to advance LGBTQ+ rights.
He left the Department of Justice to serve as senior lawyer in the Department of Homeland Security. In 2013, after President Barack Obama was sworn in for a second term, the liaison to the LGBTQ+ community and the White House called Nosanchuk to ask if he was interested in the Jewish liaison role. The answer was a resounding “yes.”
“Accepting this Jewish liaison role meant I was stepping away from law, but it meant I was going to be the kind of representative of the Obama administration to the Jewish community,” he said. “I’m engaging the Jewish community so that they support and help to advance the Obama administration and President Obama’s priorities.”
One of Nosanchuk’s proudest accomplishments is helping to marshal “significant numbers of American Jews” to support Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which aimed to prevent the Middle Eastern country from developing a nuclear weapon.
“It was a huge fight within the American Jewish community,” Nosanchuk said. “[The] Iran nuclear deal may not have been perfect, but it, at that time, was viewed as a meaningful diplomatic achievement.”
He is also proud of the work he did in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights highlighting the issue of antisemitism on college campuses and schools, particularly after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Nosanchuk began at the DOE about a month before that pivotal date.
“We were able to resolve five times as many antisemitism cases — with the very limited resources that we had — than the first Trump administration,” he said. “It was a commitment of the Biden administration and those of us at the OCR to ensure that we were addressing the very troubling rise in antisemitic incidents that had occurred and implementing the first-ever National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.”
Nosanchuk worked to counter anti-Jewish hate in New York through the nonprofit New York Jewish Agenda, which he co-founded and leads. Its mission is to advocate for the values of liberal Jewish New Yorkers.
“Our position when we started this organization was that … whenever Jews are being targeted by antisemitism, we would stand up and call it out,” Nosanchuk said. “We also are calling out efforts to weaponize antisemitism to further a political agenda in the name of combating antisemitism.”
He also worked nationally with the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that seeks to counter antisemitism through education, advocacy and policy implementation. After decades in the field, Nosanchuk is ready to mentor and teach the next generation of public servants.
“I’m excited about the opportunities here at GW to bring the range of my experience to help build a community of committed public interest lawyers, law students, faculty and alumni who are working to embed commitment to public interest,” he said.
He isn’t done with his work against antisemitism either, as evidenced by his recent testimonies before Congress and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
“I continue to be very focused on addressing and responding to antisemitism and using the knowledge I have from my time working in the Biden administration to help highlight what I see is the critical need to address civil rights issues around rising antisemitism in a responsible way,” Nosanchuk said. “I’m continuing to be helpful there where I can.”
