Key Facts
Career & Education
About
Sara L. Colb (also known as Sara Colb), born in 1979 in Boston, Massachusetts, is a civil rights attorney and advocate focused on combating antisemitism, discrimination, and hate. She is the second child of physicians Mark Colb and Marie Turner. Raised in a musical family influenced by 1960s rock music including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin, she performed in her 20s as a musician with Sara Colb and the Sagamore James Band, playing rock, blues, and Americana. Her work is deeply shaped by her family's Holocaust history; her grandfather, Ben Zion Kalb (later Colb), and grandmother Clara Lieber immigrated to the United States after the war, where Ben Zion served as a Jewish rescuer in the Slovak Working Group, saving over 1,000 Jews, primarily children, during the Holocaust, with his efforts documented in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's 'Jews Rescuing Jews: The Ben Zion and Clara Colb Collection.' Colb has described her advocacy as continuing this legacy 'l’dor v’dor' (from generation to generation).
Education: BA, Magna Cum Laude, McGill University (2000); JD, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University (2007), drawn partly by its Innocence Project clinic.
Career: Post-law school, she worked at private law firms including Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Clifford Chance LLP, and Day Pitney LLP, handling pro bono cases in death penalty appeals, indigent criminal defense, special education, and evictions. She was recognized as a 'Top Women of Law' in 2015. From 2016 to 2024, she served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General (Civil Rights Division, then Trial Division) under Attorneys General Maura Healey and Andrea Campbell. Key contributions included co-authoring briefs challenging the Trump administration's 'Muslim ban' and transgender military ban alongside 15 state AGs, co-authoring the brief in Lunn v. Commonwealth (ruling that state/local police cannot arrest based on federal immigration detainers), and negotiating a $110,000 settlement with Dell EMC for transgender discrimination. In 2018, she received the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Access to Justice Prosecutor Award. Her salary as Assistant AG in 2019 was reported as $79,800.
In early 2024, she joined the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) New England as Deputy Director (later Deputy Regional Director), a civil rights leader in the organization's regional office. She was promoted to Director of Advocacy for the National Affairs team (announced September 2025), focusing on K-12 antisemitism education, anti-bias programs, incident response, and policy advocacy, including state commissions on antisemitism.
Personal Life and Advocacy: Colb's work emphasizes confronting antisemitism, particularly post-October 7, 2023, events. She has authored op-eds in the Boston Herald on rising hate against Jews and co-authored pieces on Jewish identity and peoplehood. She has spoken publicly about personal experiences of antisemitism, including receiving hateful texts. No public information is available on marital status, spouse, children, or other private family details beyond known parents and siblings.
Controversies and Public Criticism: Colb and ADL New England have criticized entities for allowing or failing to address antisemitic or anti-Israel rhetoric, including calling for apologies from MassCUE after alleged Holocaust-related comments at a conference and criticizing the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) for not fully removing disputed materials. No personal legal troubles, criminal records, civil litigation involvement (beyond her prosecutorial role), allegations, or scandals are documented in public sources.