Policy Fellow

Debra Shushan, PhD is the former director of policy and government affairs at J Street. As an analyst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and US foreign policy, Dr. Shushan honed her expertise as the director of policy and government relations at Americans for Peace Now.

Prior to that, Dr. Shushan was an assistant professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where she focused on the comparative politics and international relations of the Middle East, including the Gulf states. She was also a research fellow at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar.

Dr. Shushan’s research and language studies have taken her to much of the Middle East, including Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Syria, Turkey and the UAE, in addition to Israel/Palestine. She is a former Marshall Scholar and Truman Scholar. She is a graduate of Harvard University (BA), Oxford University (MPhil) and Yale University (PhD). A foreign language aficionado, she speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish and Japanese (chotto dekimasu) with varying levels of success.