Meet Our Team

Ann Toback, is the CEO of the Workers Circle. Ann has served in this position since June 2008. A lifelong progressive activist – whose grandparents met at a union hall - and trained attorney, Ann previously served as the Assistant Executive Director at the Writers Guild of America, East from 1999-2008. A highlight of Ann’s union career was successfully directing and organizing the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike on the East Coast before coming to lead the Workers Circle. During Ann’s tenure as the nonprofit’s first woman leader, she has led the organization through a reboot process, resulting in today’s Workers Circle, a social justice organization that powers progressive Jewish identity through Jewish cultural engagement, Yiddish language learning, multigenerational education, and social justice activism.

Under Ann’s leadership, the Workers Circle made the strategic decision to reengage around its progressive roots and launched a new activist agenda prioritizing immigrant rights and economic justice activism. In the past years the Workers Circle has taken lead roles in the Fight for $15 living wage campaign and Green Light NY, which successfully advocated for access to NYS Drivers’ Licenses for undocumented immigrants, and currently against the anti-immigrant federal Public Charge Rule.

Today the Workers Circle is committed to honoring its Yiddish and Bundist roots and has become the largest Yiddish language program in the world, teaching over 1000 students Yiddish language and connecting many more to their Yiddishkayt roots. The organization is organizing and working fiercely in support of fights for the dignity and economic rights of immigrants; worker protections, including the right to unionize and collectively bargain; living wage; and currently the organization is fighting the national rise of Fascism, bigotry, including anti-Semitic acts, systemic racism, and hate crimes.

Melissa joined the Workers Circle in June 2018 as our Director of Development and External Affairs and was promoted to Deputy Executive Director and Development Director in October 2020. Melissa has worked in leadership positions at national and international nonprofit organizations for more than 20 years. Her two most recent positions prior to joining the Workers Circle were: Division Director, Member & Unit Services at Hadassah, WZOA, Inc., and Director, Membership and Communications, the National Council of Jewish Women, Inc. (NCJW, Inc.).

Jonathan Gold is our Director of Finance and has been with the Workers Circle since 2007. Prior to joining our staff, he worked at a Long Island based design firm as well as a UJA-Federation agency, which is where his accounting career began. He has a B.A. in Accounting from Queens College/CUNY.

Kolya Borodulin is the master teacher and Director of Yiddish programming at the Workers Circle in New York, the largest non-academic program in the United States. Kolya has been teaching Yiddish since 1988, just three months after he began learning the language himself. He joined the Workers Circle staff in 1993, and has been developing curricula and leading classes for Workers Circle students of all ages ever since. He teaches Yiddish language and culture to multigenerational audiences: kids, teens, and adults (sometimes four generations together), nationally and internationally, and is credited with giving hundreds of Yiddishists their foundation in the language. His dynamic style has garnered a growing fan base across the United States and beyond.

Noelle Damico is the Director of Social Justice at the Workers Circle and joined our staff in April 2020. With 30 years of experience in grassroots and institutional organizing at the local, regional, and national settings, Noelle is an adjunct teaching organizing and political advocacy at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She has worked alongside the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for two decades to build consumer support for the farmworkers’ Campaign for Fair Food which gave birth to the internationally recognized Fair Food Program that has dramatically advanced human rights for farmworkers and the Worker-driven Social Responsibility paradigm. An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Noelle previously served as national staff focused on human trafficking and farmworker rights for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and directed the United Church of Christ’s legislative network on Capitol Hill. Noelle has lectured widely on human rights, forced labor, and corporate accountability including keynotes at the OSCE and the US Department of Justice conferences. She holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College as well as a M.Div. and Th.M from Princeton Theological Seminary. She resides in White Plains, NY with her husband Jeffrey Geary and their son August Xavier.

Prior to joining the Workers Circle in 2021, Shelley was a development consultant providing comprehensive development services to non-profits such as the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and the American Federation of Aging Research.

Shelley brings more than 30 years of experience in fundraising and program development. She has held leadership positions in a number of international non-profits, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she served as Northeast regional director. Shelley specialized in capital gifts and special projects as a senior development officer at UJA-Federation of New York, and managed programs and budgets in Latin America, Africa and Asia at the American Joint Distribution Committee. Born in South Africa, Shelley holds a B.A. in political science from the University of the Witwatersrand (S.A.) and studied further at the University of York (U.K.) specializing in the political economy of Africa.