Director of Communal Relations

Ruti is J Street’s Director of Communal Relations. Ruti has been active in the feminist, LGBT and peace movements, in both the US and Israel, for over two decades. Ruti was born in Israel where she spent most of her childhood and first become a young leader herself in a youth movement.

After completing her military service, Ruti left Israel to study in the United States. She received a BA in Women’s Studies and a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley. Before a post-doc in Israel Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, Ruti was a Fellow at the Mandel School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem where she designed progressive Israel curricula for informal Jewish education.

Ruti has taught women’s studies, Jewish and Israel studies and LGBT studies courses at UC Berkeley and the University of Maryland College Park. Through the early aughts, Ruti worked as a consultant in diversity education, primarily assisting primary schools in becoming more welcoming environments for all different kinds of families, including LGBT headed families. From 2008-2017, Ruti worked for the New Israel Fund where she directed NIF’s fellowship programs as well as its foundation relations. More recently, Ruti directed Congressman Jamie Raskin’s Democracy Summer Project, which works to educate, train, empower and mobilize high school and college students to advance progressive social change and elect progressive leaders at all levels of government.