Professor Adam S. Ferziger is director-designate of the Bar-Ilan University Impact Center for Research on Judaism in Israel and North America. He described the mission of the center to Jerusalem Post: “Our mission is to utilize the rigorous tools we possess in order to rethink the dynamics between Israeli and North American Judaism, refine the connection, and contribute profoundly toward a strengthened relationship. This relationship will be based upon mutual appreciation for both what is shared between the two communities and the distinctive features that divide them. Our prominent standing within academic Jewish studies, coupled with our strong credibility in the religious world, places us in a unique position to bring together representatives of a diverse range of contemporary Jewish thinking and practice for dialogue that will effect positive change.”
Ferziger holds the Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah with Derekh Erez Movement in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. He is a senior associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and is co-convener of the annual Oxford Summer Institute for Modern and Contemporary Judaism. He has served as a visiting professor/fellow at College of Charleston, South Carolina (2017), Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK (2013), University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (2012), and University of Shandong, Jinan, China (2005). In 2011, he received Bar-Ilan’s “Outstanding Lecturer” award.
Ferziger is the author or editor of six books, including: Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Orthodox Judaism – New Perspectives, edited with Aviezer Ravitzky and Yoseph Salmon (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006); and most recently Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), which was the winner of a 2015 National Jewish Book Award.
