Professor Adam S. Ferziger
Professor Adam S. Ferziger holds the Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah and Derekh Erez Movement in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. He is co-convener of the annual Oxford Summer Institute for Modern and Contemporary Judaism, University of Oxford, UK, and a senior associate of the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. An intellectual and social historian, Ferziger’s research focuses on Jewish religious movements, religious leadership, and religious responses to secularization and assimilation in modern and contemporary North America, Europe and Israel. He is the author or editor of six books including: Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Orthodox Judaism – New Perspectives, edited with Aviezer Ravitzky and Yoseph Salmon (Magnes Press, 2006); Jewish Denominations: Addressing the Challenges of Modernity (Melton Institute/The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2012); and most recently Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (Wayne State University Press, 2015), which was accorded the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies.
Ferziger was the recipient of Bar-Ilan's "Outstanding Lecturer" award for 2011. He has served as a visiting scholar/fellow in Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK (2013), University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (2012), and University of Shandong, Jinan, China (2005).
A native of Riverdale, New York, he attended the SAR Academy and the Ramaz Upper School. After graduation from Ramaz, he studied Torah at Beit Midrash l'Torah (BMT) in Jerusalem and 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. Prior to embarking on a full-time academic career, he was the founding director of Bar-Ilan's Mechina for New Immigrants and rabbi of the Beit Binyamin Synagogue in Kfar-Sava. He and his wife Dr. Naomi (nee Weiss) Ferziger moved to Israel in 1987. They live in Kfar-Sava and are the parents of six children.