Meet Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin

Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin knows exactly why she agreed to be Columbia University’s special advisor and Jewish life liaison. 

“I believe deeply in the promise of great universities. I have the deepest affection for Columbia, and I know we can make it better, and I believe that there are some good people here who want to help make that happen,” she said.

Columbia has been a special place for Greenberg-Kobrin since she grew up in Queens. She remembers being in fifth grade when she heard about the Core Curriculum and decided then that she would attend Columbia. Her father’s father enrolled in 1928, but withdrew a year later with the start of the Great Depression, when he had to work to support his siblings. Her mother, the only child of Holocaust survivors and a refugee from Romania, who came to the United States at 17, briefly attended Columbia School of Social Work, but had to leave to care for a relative who became ill. Greenberg-Kobrin's husband graduated from Columbia—their second date was on the steps of Low Library.

Greenberg-Kobrin’s own path at the University started at Columbia College in 1992. After graduating in 1996 and spending time in Israel working on ancillary agreements for the Oslo Peace Accords, she returned to New York to attend Columbia Law School. After law school, Greenberg-Kobrin worked as a corporate lawyer at the firm Arnold & Porter.

“It was during this time that my love of negotiating—of doing the work to bring people together—began to crystalize,” she said.

While at the law firm, she maintained a robust pro-bono practice that involved the intersection of religious and secular divorce law, with a focus on the abuse often inflicted on women seeking the dissolution of their marriage under both religious and secular legal systems. “One day, after giving a lecture at Columbia Law School about my pro-bono work, some faculty members approached me to suggest that I might want to be the dean of students at the law school,” she recalled.  She soon found herself back at Columbia. 

While serving as Columbia Law School’s dean of students for 11 years and then as a special advisor to the dean, she developed an innovative Leadership for Lawyers course, taught Deals and Negotiations, and helped build out Columbia University’s Title IX policy.

In 2016, Greenberg-Kobrin was recruited by the Cardozo School of Law to become a clinical professor and director of the Filmmakers Legal Clinic, which provides legal services to filmmakers and video journalists working to move the social justice needle through visual advocacy. She is now a tenured faculty member at Cardozo, but has remained a trusted adviser to leadership at Columbia University and has continued to teach courses at Columbia Law School and Teachers College. She will remain at Cardozo while she takes on her new Columbia role. 

All of this experience is perfect for her newest role at Columbia, which she sees as vital to building community at the University. 

“I’m always trying to figure out how to make the world better,” she said. “In this role, I see myself as a resource and a sounding board for the community at Columbia, and for the central administration, helping to problem solve. I want to connect people across Columbia’s campuses who see different pockets of what needs improvement and what should be uplifted. 

While she is in many ways stubbornly optimistic, Greenberg-Kobrin knows that conveying the importance of community building can be difficult. But she’s up for the challenge.

Although her new role is part time, she sees it as a lifetime commitment. “If you care about the Jewish experience,” said Greenberg-Kobrin, “if you care about universities, if you believe in the power of universities and their ability to be deeply impactful in American society, you lean in even when it’s not comfortable.”

And that’s exactly what she’s doing. She believes that there are many like-minded people who want to make Columbia better. Greenberg-Kobrin wants to generate a new kind of conversation around what the student experience should be and what that looks like as a broader community of students, faculty, and staff.

“I see my job as connecting various aspects of the University, problem solving, bringing people together, listening deeply, and having real conversations,” she emphasized. She wants to find ways to move Columbia in the direction of full participation, to make it a place where everyone belongs.

“People should be able to show up here every day with an expectation and a desire to bring their full selves while respecting other people’s full selves,” Greenberg-Kobrin said. “And if things are not going the way they should, there should be robust and readily accessible resources to help make it better.”