Dr. Seth Pollack OBITUARY

Dr. Seth Pollack OBITUARY

Dr. Seth Pollack, a fearless champion for social justice and peace for all, died on December 5, 2025, in Pebble Beach, California. Husband, father, brother, friend, life-long learner, teacher, mentor and ardent cyclist, he seamlessly merged his values into every relationship in his life, whether personal or professional, community-based or academic, local or global. His life can also be read as the story of how relationships lie at the core of every strong community and are the surest way to repair the world.

Seth was born December 20, 1958, in Fresh Meadows, Queens, New York, to Abe and Ellie Pollack. His older sister Lee was born one year before him, on the same date. In 1969, his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, and the beauty of this region and the friends that he made there occupied a special place in his heart throughout his life. Seth graduated one semester early from Boulder High School in 1976 and spent the spring of his senior year working on a kibbutz in Israel, providing him with his first taste of the broader world. After a gap year travelling in Europe, which further piqued his interest in other cultures and languages, he returned to enroll at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He left again to spend his junior year at the Institute for European Studies in Vienna, Austria, where he became fluent in German and travelled throughout Europe and the Eastern Bloc behind the Iron Curtain. He graduated with a B.A in International Affairs with Honors from CU Boulder in 1982.

Never one to limit his curiosity, Seth then turned his interest to Africa. From 1982 – 1985 he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, working with women’s groups to develop conservation efforts in rural communities. He then spent an additional two years there (from 1985-1987) as the Country Director for the American Friends Service Committee, working with women’s cooperatives on income-generating activities, health and literacy education. During this time, he created Mali’s first independent women’s non-governmental organization, FEDEV: Femmes et Development. In Mali, he also became fluent in both French and Bambara.

Seth often spoke about his years in Mali and how formative they were for him, both personally and professionally. The lessons that he took away from his time there – about how community strength and resilience are founded on relationships and connections – became a textbook for how he viewed the world. Even after Seth left Mali, Mali never left Seth, as he maintained and nurtured the relationships he had made, and continued to embrace the food, music, languages and traditions that he learned there.

After returning to New York City in 1987, Seth began fundraising for an independent documentary film series, The Quiet Revolution, and over the next five years he raised $1.7 million and produced six award-winning films for PBS and international television about sustainable rural development success stories from Bangladesh, Nepal, Honduras, Zimbabwe, India and Arkansas.

And then, in 1988, his world turned over when he met the great love and partner of his life, Naomi. They were married in Bridgehampton, New York, in October 1990, and in lieu of a honeymoon, they spent six months in India, Bangladesh and Honduras filming The Quiet Revolution. After returning to New York City, Seth worked for the New York Association for New Americans, where he taught English to Jewish Russian immigrants, while Naomi worked as a collection curator at the New York Botanical Garden. While in New York, Seth and Naomi continued to nurture their combined relationships and developed a deep connection to their synagogue community of B’nai Jeshurun, which was the site of their first date.

In 1993, Naomi and Seth took their adventure on the road as they headed to California, where Seth had enrolled in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. In 1997, he was awarded an M.A in Organizational Sociology and a Ph.D. in International Development Education. While at Stanford, they developed many new friendships and created new communities. But most importantly, their Stanford years were book-ended by the births of Naomi and Seth’s two beloved daughters, Alex in 1994, and Maya in 1997.

In 1997, Seth and his family moved to Monterey, where he became the founding Director and Department Chair of the Service Learning Institute at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB), a position he occupied throughout his 25-year career, eventually retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2022. During his time at CSUMB, he was instrumental in embedding experiential service learning across every department and major, advancing his vision of linking higher education to a community’s need for justice, equity and civic responsibility. Under his leadership, CSUMB received multiple national recognitions for its service learning program, including the 2015 Carnegie Community Engagement Elective Classification, the 2013 Higher Education Civic Engagement Award, and the White House President’s Award for Community Service in Higher Education. The lessons that Seth learned in Mali, about the importance of developing local relationships and strengthening local communities through education and service, had now made it halfway across the world, to California.

During his time at CSUMB, Seth was also awarded two Fulbright Scholarships to fund sabbaticals at the University of Cape Town, South Africa from 2008-2009, and the University of Brighton, United Kingdom and University of Bologna, Italy from 2017-2018. While in Italy, he developed a love of all things Italian, to include espresso, grappa, digestivos, cycling in the Dolomites, and the Italian language. With his usual life energy, language lessons and regular trips to Italy, he became fluent in Italian.

Since retiring in 2022, in his usual fashion, Seth pursued his interests through the lens of relationship and community building. He was a huge sports fan and shared in both the victories and the losses of the CU Boulder Buffaloes, the Stanford Cardinal, the CSUMB Otters and the Tour de France sports communities. He loved world music, and especially the music of West Africa, for how it can magically connect people no matter what their native tongue. As a life-long cycler, he continued to ride daily, and led organized annual cycling tours to Slovenia and Italy. As the J Street liaison for Monterey, Seth advocated for a secure and just future for both Israelis and Palestinians – continuing to be a champion for social justice and peace. And over the past five years, he dove deeply into his Judaica studies, to explore more fully the beauty and mystery of life.

Seth loved to bring people together – to make you a coffee, offer you a drink, make you a meal, engage you in conversation, or bring you into a community project. And though he most certainly loved all of the communities that he belonged to, all of the relationships that he nurtured, and all of his many friends, his greatest love of all was, and forever will be reserved for his wife, Naomi and his two beloved daughters, Alex and Maya.

Seth is survived by Naomi, Maya, Alex, son-in-law Luis, and his sister Lee.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Dr Seth Pollack’s honor to J Street Education Fund, World Central Kitchen, and Breakthrough for Men.