A question about compensation for Jewish nonprofit CEOs leapt out to me from an eye-catching, stop-the-scroll Instagram post on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s feed last week. 

“When did $650,000 become a reasonable Jewish nonprofit salary?” This is the question nonprofit consultant Arnie Draiman posed in his recent op-ed.

Draiman argues that $200,000-300,000 is “fair compensation,” while $650k and above is “excessive,” and asks, “Why does this particular job require that level of compensation?” 

I’d like to answer these questions by posing a few of my own. 

Why is it assumed fair that nonprofit workers, be they CEOs or rank-and-file employees, should be automatically paid less than their for-profit counterparts? This is a common unchallenged assumption across the nonprofit sector as a whole. 

The work of the nonprofit is the charity. The salaries of the people who work there should not also be expected to be charity. They’re already giving their skills and time on behalf of the greater good; on top of that, they should be expected to live with a perpetual pay cut for the privilege of doing so? 

We want people to devote themselves to our most important causes, but we also want them to actively limit their ceiling of financial success as the cost of doing so. How does this stance attract the best people, who could easily make more elsewhere, doing far less collectively beneficial work? How does this viewpoint align with our stated priorities of doing critical work we believe in, while we disincentivize candidates by offering them as little as possible in........

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