Daniel Gordis

Daniel Gordis is Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center and a writer on Zionism, national identity, currents in Israel, Jewish identity in Israel and the Diaspora and biblical political thought.

Alan Dershowitz has called him “one of Israel’s most thoughtful observers"..

Leonard Fein has described him as “perhaps the single most popular speaker on Israel to American Jewish audiences.”

Activities

His writing has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, The New Republic, Moment, Tikkun, Azure, Commentary, and Conservative Judaism. Gordis also writes a regular column — “A Dose of Nuance” — for the Jerusalem Post..

His book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End was awarded the National Jewish Book Award. His next book on Israel, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness is Actually Its Greatest Strength, will be published in August 2012. His biography of Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, will be published in spring 2014.

History

He received his BA from Columbia University, his M.A. and Rabbinic Ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and his Ph.D from the University of Southern California.

Gordis was the founding dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism, the first rabbinical college on the West Coast of the United States.

In 1998 he emigrated to Israel and worked at the Mandel Foundation in Israel for nine years as vice president and director of its Leadership Institute.

In 2007 he joined the Shalem Center where he is currently senior vice president and the Koret Distinguished Fellow.

Views

The Bible as a political arguments against multiculturalism

Gordis has written that Hebrew Bible can be interpreted as "an eloquent argument in favor of the ethnic-cultural commonwealth — a precursor of sorts to the modern nation-state — as an indispensable condition for human freedom and self-realization", and "advocates not only the concept of ethnic and cultural heterogeneity (expressed here as the “dispersion” of different peoples), but also the formation of political entities that can promote the flourishing of those ethnicities and cultures—what is known today as the nation-state".

He has also argued against the Goldstone report into Israel's 2008-9 bombing of Gaza

Affiliations

• Shalem Center and Shalem College

Publications

• God Was Not in the Fire: The Search for a Spiritual Judaism (Scribner, 1995)
• Does the World Need the Jews: Rethinking Chosenness and American Jewish Identity (Scribner, 1997)
• Becoming a Jewish Parent: How to Explore Spirituality and Tradition with Your Children (Random House, 1999)
• If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State (Crown/Random House, 2002)
• Home to Stay: One American Family's Chronicle of Miracles and Struggles in Contemporary Israel (Random House, 2003)
• Coming Together, Coming Apart: A Memoir of Heartbreak and Promise in Israel (Wiley, 2006)
• Saving Israel: How the Jewish State Can Win a War That May Never End (Wiley, 2009)
• Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law and Policy-Making in 19th and 20th Century Orthodox Responsa, with David Ellenson (Stanford University Press, 2012)

Resources

• Daniel Gordis webinar, "A State Unto the Nations: A New Vision of Israel for a New Generation of Leaders", Shalem Dialogues, recorded 7 December 2011
• DanielGordis.org, Daniel Gordis's website
• Daniel Gordis, A Dose of Nuance: Our hope (for what?) is not yet lost, Jerusalm Post, May 17, 2012
• Leonard Fein, Will the Real Daniel Gordis Please Stand Up?, The Jewish Daily Forward, June 23, 2011
• Daniel Gordis, Emails from an Anxious State, New York Times, accessed June 25, 2012</ref>