Sharon Nazarian

Overview:
Nazarian is an American Jew who currently sits on the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) national board of directors. She is on the board of several universities and institutions and is a trustee of many strategy-based and policy-making councils. Enjoying a close relationship with individuals such as Israeli President Isaac Herzog and the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, Nazarian’s wide web of intertwining economic, political, diaspora and NGO contacts have enabled her to lobby for various Zionist policy and misinformation objectives in the US and across the globe.

Nazarian’s various awards from Israeli and Zionist organizations demonstrate the extent to which this lobbyist/academic is involved in promoting Zionist objectives in American institutions of academia, art and culture. It is worth mentioning that Nazarian received an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa in 2007, the “Deborah Award” from the ADL in 2013¹, and the Israel Film Festival Humanitarian Award in 2015.²

Biography

Sharon Nazarian was born to a wealthy family that left Iran and settled in Los Angeles ahead of the Iranian revolution in 1979. Younes Nazarian, her father, bought Stadco, an aerospace manufacturing company in Los Angeles, and co-founded the Omninet technology company, which later in 1988 was merged into Qualcomm, a prominent American multinational company.³ The Nazarian family has funded several alleged philanthropic organizations in the US and Israel. Sharon Nazarian is currently the president of the “Younes & Soraya Nazarian Foundation” with a headquarters in Israel operating as the “Ima Foundation”. It is noteworthy that Sharon possesses a majority of “Nazarian Enterprises”, the family’s investment arm, and SBE Entertainment Group’s stocks.

Sharon has three siblings named Sam, David, and Shulamit with whom they moved to Beverly Hills, California amid the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In 1990, Sharon married a dentist named Sharyar Baradaran and the relationship lasted until the early 2010s. Later Sharon married Jewish Argentinian business consultant Fernando Flint. They both reside in Los Angeles with their children.

Promoting Zionism though Academia

Sharon has graduated from the University of Southern California (USC), receiving an MA in journalism and another in international relations. Nazarian has also received a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in political sciences, specializing in political economy in newly industrialized countries.⁴
Nazarian has founded a center dedicated to promoting Zionism under the guise of “Israel Studies” in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as the Younes & Soraya (Y&S) Nazarian Center for Israel Studies⁵, in which she acts as the chairwoman of its advisory board⁶. Nazarian also enjoys wide influence in various academic Jewish and Zionist academic institutions such as being in the board of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, the Berkeley Institute’s inaugural Advisory Board and the Board of Governors of Haifa University in Israel. Nazarian is also part of the board of “American Friends of Hebrew University”, a US-based non-profit seeking to facilitate funding and win influence for the Israel-based “Hebrew University of Jerusalem”.

Promoting Zionism through the ADL

In 2017, Nazarian joined the ADL where she acted as Senior Vice President for International Affairs, seeking to hush anti-Zionist critique under the cover of “racial hatred” across the globe. Nazarian has also supervised the ADL office in Israel as well.⁷ Nazarian has since taken part in multiple US Congress testimonies against “anti-semitism”, specifically emphasizing that anti-Israel attitudes “affect Jewish communities”.⁸ Being a candidate to lead the White House’s “The Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism”, Nazarian has demonstrated to have a close relationship with Washington intelligentsia, most probably facilitated through the ADL.⁹

Powerful Gov, NGO and Think Tank Contacts

During her five years of policymaking in the ADL, Nazarian has gained access to heads of state, foreign ministers, and leaders of Jewish communities, slowly paving her way to higher ranks. Nazarian later became one of the ADL’s national board of directors.
Beyond the ADL, Nazarian is embedded in many US foreign policy think tanks and institutions, influencing US decision-making with a strong liberal pro-Israel bias. Nazarian is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), the Chairman’s Circle of the National Democratic Institute (Democratic Party-affiliated foreign policy NGO) and a board trustee in the US government-funded “Freedom House” NGO.
Nazarian also has a strong influence in a number of community groups such as the left-leaning Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) as well as the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, where she serves on its executive committee.

Close Relationship with Greenblatts

Sharon’s posts on social media are repeatedly endorsed by Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s director. Nazarian and Greenblatt’s wife, Marjan Keypour appear to cooperate on a range of issues and have co-written a number of articles, specifically writing against Iran, one of Israel’s regional adversaries.
Marjan Keypour is a non-resident scholar at the US-government funded Middle East Institute (MEI). Thanks to her husband, Marjan is also co-chair of the ADL “Task Force on Middle East Minorities”, and an appointee to the Atlantic Council’s new “Iran Strategy Project”. Marjan serves on the boards of the National Union for Democracy in Iran, NUFDI, and the Iranian American Jewish Federation (IAJF). She holds a degree in sociology from the UCLA and a master’s in education from Harvard University.

Social Network

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20130314033132/https://jewishjournal.com/iranianamericanjews/item/adl_honors_dr._sharon_nazarian
2: https://embassies.gov.il/la/calendar-of-events/Pages/Israel-Film-Festival-in-Los-Angeles.aspx
3: https://pr.haifa.ac.il/2022/03/24/university-of-haifa-community-mourns-the-loss-of-dr-younes-nazarian-1931-2022/

4: https://web.archive.org/web/20101220003515/http://yandsnazarianfamilyfoundation.com/about-us/our-president
5: https://web.archive.org/web/20150627182437/http://www.paaia.org/CMS/sharon-baradaran.aspx
6: https://web.archive.org/web/20150402043933/http://www.international.ucla.edu/israel/people

7: https://la.adl.org/news/adl-hires-sharon-nazarian-to-lead-its-international-affairs-program/
8: https://www.adl.org/resources/news/sharon-nazarians-testimony-us-commission-international-religious-freedom-regarding
9: https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/Sharon%20Nazarian-%20ADL.pdf