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Jeremy Ben-Ami

Jeremy Ben-Ami, born 1962, is executive director of J Street, a liberal advocacy organization in the United States whose stated aim is to promote American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Israel-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically. He is also the executive director of JStreetPac, which endorses and raises money for federal candidates.Ben-Ami was President Bill Clinton's Deputy Domestic Policy Adviser, and later Policy Director on Howard Dean's presidential campaign. He was most recently Senior Vice President at Fenton Communications. Earlier he was the Communications Director for the New Israel Fund and started the Israeli firm Ben-Or Communications while living in Israel in the late 1990s. Ben-Ami has worked with Jewish peace groups, including the Center for Middle East Peace and the Geneva Initiative-North America.Ben-Ami's father, born in Tel Aviv, was a founder of the American Friends for a Jewish Palestine and other Zionist organizations. His grandparents were among the first settlers of Tel Aviv, where many relatives continue to live. He graduated from Princeton University and received a law degree from New York University. He married Alisa Biran in 2001. Biran, who was working in fundraising at a music school, happened to be the daughter of a cantor from Ben-Ami's childhood synagogue. Despite a near set-up by their parents, they met on a popular dating website; "We had both tried JDate and we were both disillusioned with it, so we met on Match.com."