Allan Nadler

Rabbi Dr. Allan Nadler (born May 8, 1954 in Montreal, Canada) was educated at McGill and Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1988. He is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

Nadler was ordained as an Orthodox Rabbi by Rabbis Aryeh Leib Baron of Yeshiva Merkaz ha-Talmud in Montreal, and received a second ordination from Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Tennenbaum of the Orthodox Rabbinical Court of Justice in Boston. He studied Talmud and Rabbinical Codes for two years in the Rabbinical Program at Jews' College in London, England, and also studied privately for many years with Montreal's Chief Rabbi Pinhas Hirschprung. In 1982, Nadler became Rabbi of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal, Canada's oldest, wealthiest and largest traditional conservative Jewish Congregation from 1984-1992. Nadler was the first Orthodox-ordained rabbi at this conservative congregation. After resigning from that congregation, he served as Director of Research of the YIVO Institute in New York City (1992-1999), which includes the world's largest Yiddish Archives and Library.

While at YIVO, Nadler led international Jewish efforts to repatriate libraries, archives and Torah scrolls in Lithuania that had been plundered and confiscated by the Nazis, and later held by Soviet authorities. His direct negotiations with then-President of Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas, led to the release, to the New York offices of YIVO for reproduction and cataloguing, of archives that had belonged to YIVO in pre-war Vilna (today, Vilnius, Lithuania), after extensive international coverage of the story.

Nadler has been a public critic of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, and of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. His criticisms of Schneerson in "The New York Times", and his subsequent negative assessment of Lubavitch Messianism in a series of articles for "The New Republic", were denounced by many Orthodox Canadian and American Rabbis and ultimately led to his decision to leave the Orthodox Rabbinate, and quit the Rabbinical Council of America.

Prior to his appointment at Shaar Hashomayim, Nadler had been the Rabbi of The Charles River Park Synagogues in Boston, at the time a so-called Orthodox congregation, with a mixed seating section, and was a member of the Boston Vaad HaRabonim, serving as a Dayyan, or judge, on its Rabbinical Court from 1980-1982. While at YIVO he also served as Rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center in New York City, a conservative synagogue. Nadler has been a frequent critic of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbis and institutions, including the Dean of one of America's most prominent Yeshivas (Rabbinical schools), Lakewood New Jersey's Beth Medrash Govoha, Rabbi Aryeh Malkiel Kotler, whom he accused, in "The Forward", of approving a racist, anti-Gentile book, "Sefer Romemut Yisrael," written by one of the Yeshiva's students. At the same time, Nadler has published scholarly studies of some of the major sects of Hasidism, such as Satmar, Munkatch and Slonim, in addition to a widely noted analysis of the culinary habits of the Hasidim on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays ("Holy Kugel") that has been widely mistaken for an anti-Hasidic satire. In 2007, however, Nadler published two articles that strongly defended the Orthodox Jewish community: one in response to Noah Feldman's negative expose of Modern Orthodoxy in the New York Times magazine, and the other -- published in the Montreal English daily newspaper, "The Gazette", in defense of that city's large Hasidic community that has been frequently criticized for uncivil behavior towards their French neighbors.

Nadler's book, "The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture", which developped out of his Ph.D. thesis, "A Religion of Limits: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Pinchas of Polotsk" from Harvard University under Rabbi Isadore Twersky, the Talner Rebbe, is an investigation of the theology of the rabbis who opposed the Hasidic movement in late 18th-early 19th century Eastern Europe. Nadler is a regular book critic for the Forward, an American national Jewish newspaper, to which he has contributed more than fifty article, essays and reviews.

External links

* http://depts.drew.edu/rel/ANadler.html
* [http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/j/jews_and_judaism/index.html?query=NADLER,%20ALLAN&field=per&match=exact "New York Times news" about Allan Nadler]
* http://www.forward.com/articles/charedi-rabbis-rush-to-disavow-anti-gentile-book/
* http://www.forward.com/articles/ultra-orthodox-officials-go-to-bat-for-anti-gentil/

Bibliography

*Nadler, Allan, "The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)www.amazon.com/Faith-Mithnagdim-Rabbinic-Responses-Hasidic/dp/0801861829

Meir ben Elijah's Milhamot Ado-nai: A Late anti-Hasidic Polemic (Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy, vol. 1:1992)

Soloveitchik's Halakhic Man: Not a Mitnagged (Modern Judaism, Vol.13: 1993)

The War on Modernity of the Munkaczer Rebbe (Modern Judaism, Vol. 14: 1994)

Rabbis Rebbes Rationalism & Romanticism (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Monograph, 1992)

Romancing Spinoza (Commentary, December 2006) http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?article=com.commentarymagazine.content.Article::10797&search=1

Maimonides' Radical Rationalism (Forward) http://www.forward.com/articles/the-radical-rationalism-of-maimonides/

Springtime for Spinoza (Forward)
* http://www.forward.com/articles/springtime-for-spinoza/

"Holy Kugel: The Sanctification of Ashkenzaic Ethnic Food in Hasidism"

Last Exit to Brooklyn: On Lubavitch Messianism (The New Republic: May, 1992)

"King of Kings County": The Lubavitcher Rebbe Dies...And Lives ! (The New Republic: July 1994)

The Darker Side of Hasidism: On David Assaf's Neehaz Basvakh (Forward)
* http://www.forward.com/articles/new-book-reveals-darker-chapters-in-hasidic-histor/

On David Assaf's The Regal Way (Slavic Review)

Piety and Politics: The Satmar Rebbe (Judaism)

Piety and Power, by David Landau; Defenders of the Faith, by Samuel Heilman; Hasidic People, by Jerome R. Mintz - Reviewed by Allan Nadler (Commentary; August 1993) http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?article=com.commentarymagazine.content.Article::8141&search=1

On Yeshayahu Leibowitz (Commentary) http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?article=com.commentarymagazine.content.Article::8037&search=1

The Value of Torah Study in Slonimer Hasidism [Hebrew] published in Immanuel Etkes, ed. "Yeshivot u-Vatei Midrashot", Jerusalem:Merkaz Shazar, 2006.

The Practice of Judaism in Eastern Europe

In Praise of Bialik

Enlightened anti-Semitism from Voltaire to Edward Said
* http://www.forward.com/articles/the-barbed-embrace/

Who Owns Leo Strauss ?

Springtime for Spinoza

The Rambam Revival: Maskilim, Mitnaggedim and Hasidim on Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed (Queens University Press, 2005)

That Other Preacher from Galilee (Forward) http://www.forward.com/articles/the-other-preacher-from-the-galilee/

The Fraud of "Jewish Renewal" (Forward)
* http://www.forward.com/articles/can-new-agers-channel-the-old-rebbes-spirit/

A New Take on Old Ethics: The Revival of Mussar (Forward) http://www.forward.com/articles/a-new-take-on-old-ethics/

On Izbica-Radzyn Hasidism: On Shaul Magid's 'Hasidism on the Margins' (Jewish Quarterly Review, 96:2: Spring, 2006

On Ruth Wisse's Modern Jewish Canon (Forward)

On "Born to Kvetch" http://www.forward.com/articles/a-new-book-examines-how-yiddish-became-the-languag/

On The Diaries of Yankev Zipper (Forward) http://www.forward.com/articles/the-work-of-a-worthy-diarist/

A Murder in Lemberg (Forward) http://www.forward.com/articles/law-and-order-special-galitsianer-unit/