Asaf Elia-Shalev
Editor in Chief
J. The Jewish News of California

Asaf Elia-Shalev is an award-winning journalist and the editor in chief of J. The Jewish News of Northern California. He previously spent five years as a senior reporter at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, covering philanthropy, politics, antisemitism and Jewish institutions. Before JTA, Elia-Shalev was a news editor at Haaretz and helped found Calcalist Tech, the English-language tech news site of Israel’s Calcalist. His reporting has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and The Atlantic.

In 2024, he published his first book, “Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth” (University of California Press). The book tells the story of the Mizrahi protest movement that challenged Israel’s establishment in the 1970s. Elia-Shalev holds a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and a master’s in investigative journalism from Columbia Journalism School. He lives in Berkeley with his family.