Rabbi Shai Held
President, Dean, and Chair
Hadar Institute
Held, one of the most influential Jewish thinkers in the world, is President and Dean of the Hadar Institute, which he co-founded in 2006. A philosopher, theologian, and Bible scholar, Rabbi Held received the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and has been named multiple times by Newsweek as one of the fifty most influential rabbis in America and by the Jewish Daily Forward as one of the fifty most prominent Jews in the world. Rabbi Held is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (2013) and The Heart of Torah (2017). His next book, Judaism is About Love, will be published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in 2024.