Daniel Gordis

Gordis was born on July 5, 1959, in New York City, and was raised in Baltimore where he attended public high school. His father was Leon Gordis, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. His mother, Hadassah Gordis, was a clinical social worker. His grandfather was Rabbi Robert Gordis,[1] a noted biblical scholar and one of the leaders of the Conservative Movement. His uncle (his mother's brother) was Professor Gerson D. Cohen, who served as Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Gordis himself was once recognized as a leading Conservative rabbi, but is no longer publicly associated with that movement.

Gordis studied Political Science at Columbia University, and received a master's degree and rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Gordis and his wife moved to California in 1984, and while there, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. He immigrated to Israel in 1998. From 1998 to 2007, he worked at the Mandel Foundation and the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem. He joined the Shalem Center in 2007 as Senior Vice President and Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College.[2]

While living in Los Angeles, Gordis worked at the University of Judaism for almost fifteen years, and was the founding Dean of its Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, the first rabbinical college on the West Coast of the United States. He and his family moved to Israel in 1998. In 2007, after nine years as vice president of the Mandel Foundation and director of its Leadership Institute, Gordis joined the Shalem Center to join the team founding Israel's first liberal arts college.

Gordis has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Moment, Tikkun, the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and Conservative Judaism. He is now a regular columnist for the Jerusalem Post, for which he writes a regular column called "A Dose of Nuance," and for Bloomberg View.

Gordis has been harshly critical of American Jews who criticize Israeli government policies, sometimes publicly accusing them of either betraying Israel and the Jewish people (as in the case of Rabbi Sharon Brous[3]), having insufficient love for Israel (Rabbi Jill Jacobs[4]) or being a traitor to the Jewish people (Peter Beinart[5]). He has also extended this assessment to rabbinical seminaries and their students.[6] Slightly left of center when he arrived in Israel in 1998, his writings suggest a gradual move to the right. Most people now consider him a moderate conservative.

• Daniel Gordis: Dispatches from an Anxious State
• Indestructible - A Story of Survival
• Arianna in Israel