Gidi Grinstein has spent his career in the service of Israel and the Jewish People, always seeking to make a significant and distinct contribution to humanity. Gidi began his career working on Israeli-Palestinian peace, including as the youngest member of the Israeli delegation for the Camp David Summit with Clinton, Barak and Arafat. He is one of the foremost experts on Israeli-Palestinian relations, including the Oslo Process and the Permanent Status Agreement, and has been involved in dozens of diplomatic initiatives in so-called ‘track II’ and ‘back channels’. Gidi’s coming book titled Lessons in Peace Making builds on his amazing experiences at the epicenter of historic Middle East and Israel-US diplomacy. In that early phase of his career, Gidi also founded and led the Israeli team that designed the Birthright Israel Program into its current shape, making it big-bettable for major Jewish philanthropists, thereby making a formative contribution to the Jewish People’s largest generational project of our time.
Following his government service, Gidi launched the Reut Institute, which is one of Israel’s leading research, strategy and leadership groups. In 2010, Gidi and Reut pioneered the strategic effort against the delegitimization of Israel and the BDS Movement, and has led on this effort ever since. He also leads a comprehensive effort to create ‘legitimacy surplus’ by engaging the American center and other potential partners of Israel and local Jewish communities. In addition, Gidi is one of the leading experts on the relations between Israel and World Jewry. Most recently, his work focused on the potential crisis in the alliance between Israel and the USA, and his podcast on this subject rose to be the most listened to podcast on the subject. His current focus is on the future of American Jewry.
In 2004, Gidi published his seminal book: Flexigidity: The Secret of Jewish Adaptability, which offers a unique systemic view of the history of the Jewish People and its ‘secrete sauce’ for resilience, recurring prosperity and permanent leadership. The ideas of Flexigidity underlie Gidi’s work on the future of American Jewry.
Following Gidi’s government service, he founded Yesodot Group for reforming Israel’s electoral system. Yesodot created a visionary platform that has since been accepted by key leaders in Israel. Through this effort, Gidi became an expert on constitutional reforms in Israel, and has been active in trying to address the current crisis in Israel.
One of Gidi’s biggest initiatives is TOM – Tikkun Olam Makers – which is a bold Israeli- Jewish-American global humanitarian project, that specializes in frugal innovation and has operated across Israel and in 35 countries and 47 universities, including in Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, Jordan, Turkey and the Palestinian Areas. TOM has won multiple accolades including ‘the next big idea of the Jewish People’ (2017), Blackstone Charitable Trust Award (2019) and the InnoDip Award for innovation in Israeli diplomacy (2020). In recent years, TOM was nicknamed a “Superhero startup coming out of Israel”, “The TEDx of Social Action”, and one of “fifteen Israeli companies to watch” in Forbes.
Gidi is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School of Government as a Wexner Israel Fellow, and of Tel-Aviv University Schools of Law and Economics. He served with distinction in the Israeli Navy and is a long distance runner, having run nine marathons, married to Betty and they have five children.