Aleeza Ben Shalom

Origins and early life

Aleeza Ben Shalom was born and raised in Philadelphia in a relatively secular Jewish household, went to summer camps and on tours of Israel as a teenager, and became president of Hillel during her college years. “I was Jewish, I was born Jewish and I was raised with Judaism and a connection to it,” she told Netflix in 2023, explaining that she later chose to live her Judaism fully, from Shabbat and keeping kosher to prayer, until people began to call her Orthodox.

Work and career

She took a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and after college she met her husband, who was also newly religious, at a Jewish retreat; a rabbi served as their matchmaker and they married within months. She began matchmaking online as a volunteer and in 2012 founded Marriage Minded Mentor, a service that offers matchmaking and dating coaching to Jewish singles and trains new matchmakers and coaches.

She published Get Real, Get Married in 2013 and, in 2020, Virtual Dating, a guide for singles looking for a partner in a socially distanced world. On 3 May 2023 Netflix released all eight episodes of Jewish Matchmaking, in which she guides Jewish singles in the United States and Israel, from the secular to the Orthodox, towards a life partner. “There's 15 million Jews in the world, and there's about 15 million ways to be Jewish,” she says at the start of the series, and by then she had helped more than two hundred couples on their way to the wedding canopy.

She and her husband made their home in Israel in February 2021, in Pardes Hanna, with their five children, and in 2025 she published Matchmaker, Matchmaker: Find Me a Love That Lasts. The Jerusalem Post named her in 2023 among its fifty most influential Jews, alongside Fran Drescher, for winning people over with a combination of chutzpah and heart.