Benjy Cannon is a sophomore Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the president of J Street UMD, as well as the chair of J Street U DC/Southeast region. He is an employee at the Computer and Communications Industry Association and a Community Engagement Intern at the University of Maryland Hillel.
Benjy was born in Oxford, England to an Orthodox Jewish family on February 27th, 1993. His parents were teachers at a Jewish boarding school there. In 1995, Benjy’s father, Jonathan, received an offer to head up the Carmel school in Hong Kong, China. In 2001, Benjy and his family moved to Potomac, Maryland, where he attended the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School. During his time there, he was captain of the Mock trial team, president of a student group, which discussed the Arab-Israeli conflict from an Israeli and Palestinian perspective, and the co-founder of a blog, Table Talk, with a similar mission.