Rabbi Dr. Adam S. Ferziger

Dr. Adam S. Ferziger is the Gwendolyn and Joseph Straus Fellow in Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University , where he teaches and serves as associate director in the Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry.  He has lectured and published extensively on Jewish religious denominations and their ideologies, modern Jewish identity formation, the history of the modern rabbinate, American Orthodoxy and the encounter between halakhah and contemporary social realities.  His first book, Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in June 2005.  Together with Professor Avi Ravitzky and Professor Yoseph Salmon, he is the editor of Orthodox Judaism - New Perspectives ( Jerusalem : Magnes Press, 2006).  In his capacity as a senior research fellow at Bar-Ilan's Rappaport Center for Assimilation Research , he has authored major studies on the role of rabbis in confronting assimilation and on the community kollel as a cutting-edge framework in American Jewish life.  Prior to embarking on a full-time academic career, he served for seven years as founding director of Bar-Ilan's Mechina for New Immigrants and as rabbi of the Beit Binyamin Synagogue in Kfar-Sava.  A native of Riverdale, New York, he was graduated from the S.A.R. Academy and the Ramaz Upper School and studied Beit Midrash l'Torah (BMT) in Jerusalem, Yeshivat Har-Etzion (Gush).  He received his B.A., M.A. and rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University (RIETS) and his Ph.D. Summa Cum Laude from Bar-Ilan. He and his wife, Naomi (nee Weiss) moved to Israel in 1987. They live with their six children in Kfar-Sava, where they are involved in activities aimed at providing religious and educational services to Jews from a broad spectrum of backgrounds.