Biography
Ron Dermer was born and raised in Miami Beach, Florida, as the younger son of Yaffa Rosenthal, who was born in Mandate Palestine and moved to Florida with her parents shortly after Israel won its independence, and Jay Dermer, a trial lawyer from New York, who became Mayor of Miami Beach in the late 1960s. Dermer went to a Jewish day school. In 1984, two weeks before his bar mitzvah, his father died of a heart attack. His brother David Dermer, a Democrat like his father, also served as Mayor of Miami Beach, and helped reelect Republican President George W. Bush in Florida.
Dermer earned a B.A. in Finance and Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, and a Master's degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford University in 1996. In 1995, while still at Oxford, he helped manage Natan Sharansky's Yisrael b'Aliyah 1996 Knesset election campaign. In 1996 Dermer moved to Israel, and in 1997, he begun the process of becoming an Israeli citizen. On August 9, 1998, he married artist Adi Blumberg, the daughter of then chairman of the Bank of Jerusalem who had grown up in the Old City of Jerusalem. The wedding was presided over by Adin Steinsaltz. Blumberg died in February 2000.
Dermer worked as a political consultant for Natan Sharansky in the 1999 campaign, and from January 2001 for nearly three years he wrote a column “The Numbers Game” for the Jerusalem Post. In 2004, he and Sharansky co-wrote the best-selling book The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, famously endorsed by then US-President George W. Bush. In 2005, while Benjamin Netanyahu served as Finance Minister under Ariel Sharon, Dermer was appointed Minister for Economic Affairs to the Israeli embassy in Washington, a post for which he had to give up his American citizenship. In 2008, after his return to Israel, he became adviser to Netanyahu, whose successful election campaign replicated Barack Obama's.
Currently Dermer is Netanyahu’s senior adviser. According to The Jerusalem Post, he “runs much of the interference with the White House, and is intimately involved in the diplomatic process with the Palestinians, writes many of Netanyahu’s speeches”. He is considered Netanyahu's closest adviser and strategic consultant. Dermer is married to Rhoda Pagano Dermer. The couple has four children and live in Jerusalem.
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