Saba Soomekh
Dr. Saba Soomekh serves as AJC's Director of Training and Education. She came to AJC after twenty years as a professor and university administrator. She received her BA in Religious Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Soomekh teaches and writes extensively on World Religions, Women and Religion, intersectionality and its impact on the Jewish community, and the geo-politics of the Middle East. She is a graduate of the 2021 Fellows Program at King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID), an inter-governmental organization that promotes inter-religious dialogue to prevent and resolve conflict. In the summer of 2019, Dr. Soomekh was a Scholar-in-Residence at Oxford University with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
Professor Soomekh is the editor of the book Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in America and the author of the book From the Shahs to Los Angeles: Three Generations of Iranian Jewish Women Between Religion and Culture. Her book was awarded the Gold Medal in the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Award in the Religion category.
She was also featured in an NPR story on Iranian Jews in America entitled "For Persian Jews, America Means 'Religious Pluralism At Its Best' and the Times of Israel wrote a piece on her entitled “Iranian Scholar Breaks Stereotypes While Studying Them.”