Jodi Rudoren is Editor-in-Chief of the Forward, America’s leading voice in Jewish journalism, reaching 1.5 million people each month across platforms. A veteran reporter, editor and digital innovator who spent more than two decades at The New York Times, she is helping lead a transformation of the storied 125-year-old Forward, a nonprofit that went digital-only shortly before hiring Jodi in 2019.
Under her leadership, journalists at the Forward won a record 43 Rockower Awards from the American Jewish Press Association in 2021 and 34 in 2020, as well as prizes from New York’s Deadline Club, L.A.’s Press Club, the Religion News Association and the Society for Features Journalism. Jodi writes a weekly newsletter, “Looking Forward,” that has received broad acclaim, edits the morning briefing “Forwarding the News,” and helped turn the newspaper’s signature advice column, A Bintel Brief, into a podcast that just completed its second season.
At The Times, Jodi served as Jerusalem bureau chief from 2012 through 2015; covered the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign; and was Chicago bureau chief, education correspondent and education editor before joining the masthead as Associate Managing Editor for Audience Strategy. She was executive producer of the multimedia series “One in 8 Million,” which won NYTimes.com‘s first Emmy Award, in 2009, and served on the 2020 committee about the newsroom of the future.
Jodi grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, and graduated cum laude in 1992 from Yale University, where she was Managing Editor of The Yale Daily News. She and her husband, Gary, combined their surnames in 2006 and live in Montclair, N.J., with their teenaged twins. She runs “Bob’s Brunch Café,” a pop-up restaurant at her synagogue, Temple Ner Tamid, and serves on the Board of Directors of The Fuller Project, a nonprofit newsroom doing groundbreaking investigative work on gender.
