In Israel, religious affairs are mostly dominated by staunchly conservative Orthodox groups.

From the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, several American immigrants to Israel founded or took the lead in various religious educational institutions. As discussed in Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism by Professor Adam S. Ferziger (New York University Press, 2025), these schools trained thousands of advanced students and played a key role in laying the ideological groundwork for a new direction in religious thought and practice, particularly within the Religious Zionist world.

Ferziger, an American immigrant to Israel, holds the Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair in Bar-Ilan University’s Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department, and is co-convener of the

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