Adam Ferziger

Bar Ilan University | BIU · Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry

Alongside the ongoing dominance of Orthodox Judaism in Israel, novel liberal religious frameworks have emerged that seek to address the needs of various constituencies through innovative approaches to synagogue life. One of the most active and successful is the Reform "Beit-Daniel" in Tel- Aviv, Israel's urban epicenter. In this article, the instit...

Alongside the ongoing dominance of Orthodox Judaism in Israel, novel liberal religious frameworks have emerged that seek to address the needs of various constituencies through innovative approaches to synagogue life. One of the most active and successful is the Reform "Beit-Daniel" in Tel-Aviv, Israel's urban epicenter. In this article, the institu...

Alongside the ongoing dominance of Orthodox Judaism in Israel, novel liberal religious frameworks have emerged that seek to address the needs of various constituencies through innovative approaches to synagogue life. One of the most active and successful is the Reform “Beit-Daniel” in Tel- Aviv, Israel's urban epicenter. In this article, the instit...

Orthodox Jewish feminism arose in North America during the 1970s. In Israel, Torah study for women grew simultaneously, but more radical changes in the ritual and leadership realms only gained prominence in the twenty-first century. This chronology suggests that regarding Orthodox feminism, the gap between Orthodox life in these centres narrowed. T...

The article begins with an analysis of Yossi Shain, Ha-Me’ah ha-Yisraelit ve-ha-Yisraelizaziyah shel ha-Yahadut (The Israeli Century and the Israelization of Judaism) (2019), which puts forward a novel and enlightening revisionist view of the relationship between Israeli and American Jewries. The second part of the article reveals essential problem...

INTRODUCTION Contemporary Orthodox rabbis and educators have evinced an increasing degree of acceptance of critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible, including the possibility of multiple authorship. Considerable documentation for this phenomenon was collected by Marc Shapiro in an article that appeared in 2017.¹ A rigorous chronicler of the theologi...

On February 1, 2017, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the nation's largest Orthodox synagogue association, adopted a ruling that prohibits women from serving as clergy. The swift electronic dissemination of the ruling set off a wave of passionate protests along with vociferous expressions of support. The ruling encourages exte...

The distinctiveness and detachment of the Orthodox from the rest of American Jewry that is reflected in the Pew data on beliefs and behaviors and its accompanying analysis is the focus of this chapter. Based on this information alone, one may conclude that the very concept of defining American Jewry as one people is anachronistic. However, equally...

Amid the myriad Jewish efforts to accommodate modern Europe’s novel realities, Hungarian Orthodoxy stood out, according to Jacob Katz, in promoting “enhancement of the tradition…limitation of contact with the outside world…[and] exclusion of the recalcitrants.” Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent disciple...

The twentieth century witnessed an array of fresh models of Jewish women's educational and religious leadership. Quite understandably, the majority of the scholarly focus has been on burgeoning egalitarian trends featured in the new roles for women within liberal Jewish denominations and among the Modern Orthodox. Yet increased appreciation for gen...

The year 1941 witnessed the arrival in America of two Eastern European refugee rabbinical figures destined to reshape the landscape of American Judaism, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson1 and Rabbi Aharon Kotler.2 Within a decade both stood at the helms of their respective constituencies. Schneerson was formally chosen as the Rebbe (central spiritua...

Concern for the plight of Soviet Jewry grew steadily from the early 1950s. The rise of this issue to the forefront of American Jewish consciousness, however, was driven by the broader protest movement that emerged in the mid-1960s. Its central goal was to ensure civic and religious rights for Jewish residents of the Soviet Union, with a particular...

When Chief Rabbi Ḣayim (Vittorio) Castiglioni of Rome (b. 1840) passed away in 1911, he was cremated as per his request and his ashes were then buried in the Jewish cemetery of his native Trieste. One local Jewish newspaper pointed out that Castiglioni's position-cremation is permitted according to Jewish law and is even preferable to traditional b...

The article describes and analyzes the evolution of trips to Poland for post-high school American Orthodox young adults studying in Israel. It contends that beyond exposing the students to aspects of the Holocaust in an unusually visceral and intense manner, these excursions increasingly serve as “pilgrimages of particularistic Orthodox identity.”...

Throughout much of the twentieth century, non-Jewish family members of intermarried Jews were completely excluded from membership and active ritual life in American Conservative congregations. The unprecedented rise of intermarriage rates during the last decades of the twentieth century caused many within the movement to reconsider such policies. T...

The connection of women with heresy and deviance has a long history within religious traditions throughout the world. The following discussion uncovers a new chapter in this convention, by highlighting the efforts of a prominent rabbinical authority to reject attempts at upgrading the public religious roles available to women. The legal or "halakhi...

Over the past two centuries, Orthodox Judaism's attitude toward the Reform movement has been dominated by animosity and polemical efforts at delegitimization and demonization. In particular because of the Reform sanction of patrilineal descent as a basis for Jewish identity, the early 1980s was a period of acute tensions. Various Orthodox parties g...

This article introduces two national religious‐oriented (dati‐le’umi) organizations that have emerged within Israeli society since the 1990s. Neither has openly called for the dismantling of the state rabbinate. Nevertheless, they challenge central aspects of its hegemony over religious life. Both are independent initiatives whose main mandate is t...

The triumph of the Orthodox separatist forces at the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868-69 facilitated the swift integration of the ultra-Orthodox viewpoint into the mainstream and the simultaneous decline of the moderate Orthodox camp in numbers and influence. Nevertheless, the latter's members did not completely disappear. Some declared themselves...

RoemerNils. Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. x, 251 pp. - Volume 31 Issue 2 - Adam S. Ferziger

Modern Judaism 25.3 (2005) 237-263 Whom do I lead? Whom do I represent? Constituency definition has been a central issue for Orthodox rabbis since the emergence of modern, heterogeneous Jewish life in Europe. If the premodern community rabbi was automatically the religio-legal authority and spiritual leader of all local Jews, the same could not be...

The religious zealot has been described as possessing, among others, a "desire to expand the scope, detail and strictness of religious law." Such figures, then, assume for themselves the role of chief guardians of religious law against any challenges to its validity as God's word and to the basic legal principles upon which it rests. Despite claimi...

Without Abstract

Thesis (M.A.)--Yeshiva University. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-142).