Ruth Gay (born Ruth Slotkin) in New York in 1922, was a Jewish writer who wrote about Jewish life and won the 1997 National Jewish Book Award for nonfiction for Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America.
Ruth Gay attended Queens College in 1943 and received a master’s in library science from Columbia University in 1969. From 1948 to 1950 she was the editor of the JDC Review of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.