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Rabbi David Ellenson

Teaches at 92nd Street Y

David Ellenson currently serves as Chancellor Emeritus as well as I.H. and Anna Grancell Professor Emeritus of Jewish Religious Thought at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He served as Director of the Schusterman Center of Israel Studies at Brandeis University from 2015-2018 and is currently Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis. From 2001-2013 Ellenson was President of HUC-JIR, and in 2018-2019, following the tragic death of Rabbi Aaron Panken, Ellenson was called upon to be Interim President of HUC-JIR.

Rabbi Ellenson received his PhD from Columbia University in 1981 and was ordained by HUC-JIR in 1977. He also holds an M.Phil. degree from Columbia University as well as an M.A. degree from HUC-JIR and the University of Virginia. He received his B.A. degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1969. A member of HUC-JIR’s faculty since 1979, he also held the post of Director of the Jerome H. Louchheim School of Judaic Studies at HUC-JIR’s Jack H. Skirball Campus in Los Angeles, which provides the undergraduate Judaic Studies program for USC. Ellenson also has been a Visiting Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary and UCLA, as well as Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies and a Lady Davis Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2015, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at New York University in the Skirball Department of Judaic Studies. Colgate University, The College of William and Mary, Hebrew College of Boston, and the Jewish Theological Seminary have all awarded him honorary doctoral degrees.

Rabbi Ellenson's extensive publications include Tradition in Transition: Orthodoxy, Halakhah and the Boundaries of Modern Jewish History (1989), Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (1990) (nominated for the National Jewish Book Council's award for outstanding book in Jewish History, 1990), Between Tradition and Culture: The Dialectics of Jewish Religion and Identity in the Modern World (1994), and After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity, which won the National Jewish Book Council's Award as the outstanding book in Jewish Thought in 2005. Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policymaking in 19th- and 20th-Century Orthodox Responsa, co-authored with Daniel Gordis (2012), was named a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Council’s Award in Scholarship in 2012. His Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice was published in the Jewish Publication Society-University of Nebraska Scholar of Distinction Series in 2014. He has written hundreds of articles and his colleagues honored him with a Festschrift edited by David Myers and Michael Meyer, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity. His newest book, American Jewish Thought Since 1934, co-authored with Michael Marmur, was published by Brandeis University Press in 2020.

Classes taught by Rabbi David Ellenson

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