Allan Nadler

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American rabbi and academic

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Allan L. Nadler (born May 8, 1954) is Wallerstein Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Former Director of the Jewish Studies Program atDrew University inMadison, New Jersey.

Biography

Nadler was born inMontreal,Quebec, and was educated atMcGill andHarvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1988.

He was initially ordained as anOrthodox rabbi by RabbiAryeh Leib Baron (1911–2011) of Yeshiva Merkaz ha-Talmud in Montreal, and received a second ordination from the late rabbinical scholar, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Tennenbaum, Chief Justice, or Dayan of the Orthodox Rabbinical Court of Justice (which authorizes the "KVH" Kosher Supervision) in Boston. He studied Talmud and Rabbinical Codes for in the Rabbinical Program at Jews' College in London, England, under the tutelage of Rabbi Dr. Nachum Rabinovitch, and also studied privately for five years with Montreal's Chief RabbiPinchas Hirschsprung.

Nadler was the Rabbi of The Charles River Park Synagogues inBoston, at the time an ostensibly Orthodox congregation, with a mixed seating section, and was a member of the Boston Vaad HaRabonim, serving as a Dayan, or judge, on its Rabbinical Court from 1980 to 1982.

During the period 1984–1992, Nadler became Rabbi of CongregationShaar Hashomayim in Montreal, Quebec, Canada's oldest, most prestigious and largest Traditional Jewish congregation. Nadler was the first Orthodox-ordained rabbi at this formerly Conservative congregation, which left the Conservative Movement during his tenure. During that time he was adjunct professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University. After resigning from the Shaar Hashomayim, he served as Director of Research of theYIVO Institute inNew York City (1992–1999), which holds the world's largestYiddish and Holocaust Archives and Library.

While at YIVO he served as Rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center in New York City, an independent Traditional synagogue, and was a visiting professor of Jewish Studies at New York University (1992–1995) and Cornell University (1995–1998).

Also while at YIVO, Nadler led international Jewish efforts to repatriate libraries, archives andTorah scrolls inLithuania that had been plundered and confiscated by theNazis, and later held bySoviet authorities.^[1] His direct negotiations with then-President of Lithuania,Algirdas Brazauskas, led to the release in 1993, to theNew York City offices of YIVO for reproduction and cataloguing, of almost 100 crates of archives that had belonged to YIVO in pre-war Vilna (today,Vilnius, Lithuania), after extensive international coverage of the story.

While on a Sabbatical from Drew University during the 2011–2012 academic year, Nadler was appointed distinguished Visiting Professor at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina,^[2] a post which he left after the Fall semester to take a visiting professorship at McGill in January, 2012.^[1]

Rabbi Nadler retired from Drew University in 2018 and was named Wallerstein Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies.

Criticism of Chabad-Lubavitch movement

Nadler has been a public critic of theChabad-Lubavitch movement, and of the lateLubavitcher Rebbe,Menachem Mendel Schneerson. His criticisms of Schneerson inThe New York Times, and his subsequent negative assessment ofLubavitch Messianism in a series of articles forThe New Republic, were denounced by manyOrthodox Canadian and American Rabbis. This was one of many factors that ultimately led Nadler to leave the Orthodox Rabbinate. His evolving theological and historical perspectives, evident in his writings, were however the major reason for his having turned away from Orthodox Judaism, as he articulated in a personal piece in the Baltimore Jewish News.^{[citation needed]} At the same time, Nadler has been an outspoken defendant of, and has published numerous articles championing, some of the world's most distinguished Orthodox rabbis,who were either on the liberal part of the Orthodox religious spectrum, or who had departed Orthodoxy to create new movements of Traditional, or "Halakhic" Judaism. These included Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, President of Yeshiva University, Rabbi David Weiss-Halivni, senior Talmudist at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Professor of Talmud at Columbia University, and Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs, who founded the Masorti (Traditional) Movement in the United Kingdom. Nadler was a disciple of Rabbi Weiss-Halivni in New York, before he immigrated to Israel.

Criticism of Hasidism

Nadler has been a frequent critic ofHaredi rabbis and institutions, including the Dean of one of America's most prominentYeshivas (Rabbinical schools),Lakewood,New Jersey'sBeth Medrash Govoha, Rabbi AryehMalkiel Kotler, whom he accused, inThe Forward, of approving a racist, anti-Gentile book, "Sefer Romemut Yisrael", written by one of the Yeshiva's students.^[3] At the same time, Nadler has published scholarly studies of some of the major sects of Hasidism, such asSatmar,Munkatch andSlonim, in addition to a widely noted analysis of the culinary habits of the Hasidim on theShabbat andJewish holidays ("Holy Kugel") was initially been mistaken for and criticized as an anti-Hasidic satire.

As author

Nadler's 1997 book,The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture,^[2] to date the definitive scholarly study of the Jewish antagonists of Hasidic Judaism, commonly known as Misnagdim, is an investigation of the theology of the rabbis who opposed the Hasidic movement in late 18th–early 19th centuryEastern Europe.