El Mehdi Boudra is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. He has a special interest in minority rights and cross-cultural communication and dialogue. In 2007, he founded Association Mimouna, a Moroccan nongovernmental organization that aims to advance Muslim-Jewish dialogue, and he has since held the position of its president. In 2011, Boudra organized the first Holocaust Conference in the Arab world, and in 2012, he brought the first Arab student seminar to Israel. In 2018, Boudra was among the Algemeiner Journal’s J100 list of the top one hundred individuals who have positively influenced Jewish life. From 2015 to 2021, he joined the Royal Institute for Strategic Studies for which he serves as the head of its international relations program.

Boudra is associated with and serves on the boards of many civic and educational organizations in Morocco and the United States such as the American Sephardi Federation and the Jewish Africa Conference. Boudra is a visiting research scholar at the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Program for International Affairs at Yeshiva University. He is also a member of the Moroccan Jewish communities in the Americas research unit under the Moroccan Jewish Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Boudra speaks Arabic, French, Spanish, and English. He also has a BA in international studies from Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane and an MA from the Brandeis University program in peace, conflict, and coexistence studies. Boudra is currently a PhD candidate at Mohamed V University in Rabat.