Tabby Refael

Tabby Refael is an award winning weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, a speaker, and a civic action activist. She was born in Tehran after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and left Iran with her parents and older sister in 1988, during the Iran Iraq war, eventually arriving in the United States as refugees. Her essay about that journey, "I Was an Iranian Jewish Refugee," appeared in the first issue of Distinctions, JIMENA's online journal, in 2023.

Tabby earned a B.A. in communication at UC San Diego, where she first became involved with JIMENA as a student activist, and a master's degree in public diplomacy at USC in 2010. Earlier in her career she was director of academic affairs at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, director of campus affairs for StandWithUs, and project coordinator for the USC Casden Institute. Under the name Tabby Davoodi, she helped found and later served as executive director of 30 Years After, an Iranian American Jewish civic action organization.

Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Los Angeles Magazine, Moment Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has received first place honors at the Los Angeles Press Club's Southern California Journalism Awards and four first place Simon Rockower Awards from the American Jewish Press Association, including one for an essay on Iran sheltering Jews during the Holocaust. She is based in Los Angeles and also speaks regularly to audiences across the community.

Tabby has represented JIMENA publicly for more than a decade, speaking at Claremont and Sinai Temple in 2017 and 2018. In March 2025 she led JIMENA's virtual program The Iranian Jewish Experience, a tour of the history, triumphs, and tragedies of one of the world's oldest Jewish communities, and in 2025 she taught a session on ancient Middle Eastern wisdom and leadership for JIMENA's Sephardic Leaders Fellowship in Los Angeles.