This week, Dubbs and Anthony speak with Bukharian Jewish educator, community builder, and social entrepreneur with a passion for Jewish diversity, Ruben Shimonov.
Ruben previously served as Director of Community Engagement & Education at Queens College Hillel, where he had the unique role of creating meaningful Jewish experiences for Sephardic and Mizrahi students. Currently, Ruben is the National Director of Sephardi House & Young Leadership at the American Sephardi Federation. Among his various roles at ASF, he serves as an educator and the director of a national student fellowship that seeks to infuse the warmth, wisdom, and diversity of the Greater Sephardic world into campus life. He is also the Founding Executive Director of the Sephardic Mizrahi Q Network—the sole international organization building a supportive and much-needed community for LGBTQ+ Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews—as well as Director of Educational Experiences & Programming for the Muslim-Jewish Solidarity Committee. As a visual artist, Ruben uses his multilingual Arabic-Hebrew-Persian calligraphy to build Muslim-Jewish interfaith bridges.
In 2018, Ruben was listed among The Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36” emerging leaders and changemakers. He is an alumnus of the COJECO Blueprint, Nahum Goldmann and ASF Broome & Allen Fellowships for his work in Jewish social innovation and education. Currently, he is a Jewish Pedagogies Research Fellow at M²–Institute of Experiential Jewish Education. He was also recently accepted to partake in the Schusterman Foundation’s 2022 ROI Summit in Jerusalem. Ruben has lectured extensively on the histories and cultures of Sephardic and Mizrahi communities. Among his speaking engagements, Ruben has taught at New York University, University of Southern California, multiple Limmud conferences around the world, Jews of Color Torah Academy, and Hillel International.
