Daniel Gordis’s Book on Jewish Law and Conversion Selected as Finalist for 2012 National Jewish Book Award

The Jewish Book Council has selected Pledges of Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policymaking in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Orthodox Responsa (Stanford, 2011),co-authored by Shalem Senior Vice President and Koret Distinguished Fellow Daniel Gordis and Hebrew Union College President Rabbi David Ellenson, as a finalist in the Scholarship category of the 2012 National Jewish Book Awards. Recognized as the most prestigious award of its kind in the field of Jewish literature, the National Jewish Book Award features a long list of notable honorees, including Chaim Grade, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, and Elie Wiesel.

Pledges of Allegiance, praised by lawyer and Columbia University Law School adjunct professor Jay Lefkowitz as “an important book about conversion law and its ramifications for the Jewish community” in the Wall Street Journal, surveys the most influential rabbinical legal opinions about conversion by Orthodox rabbis in Europe, the U.S., and Israel over the past 200 years.  Beginning with an analysis of the classical Jewish sources on conversion, the book presents the complex facts and circumstances that occasioned each opinion under discussion. Concluding that it is susceptible to multiple interpretations, Gordis and Ellenson demonstrate that, contrary to popular assumptions, Jewish law is indeed broad enough to adapt to a changing world, and to provide a genuinely inclusive answer to the charged question of “who is a Jew.”

Gordis is most recently the author of The Promise of Israel: Why Israel’s Seemingly Greatest Weakness is Actually its Greatest Strength (Wiley, 2012), selected by D.G. Myers as one of the best nonfiction Jewish books of 2011 in Jewish Ideas Daily. He also received the National Jewish Book Award in 2009 for his Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End (Wiley, 2008). Gordis’s eloquent and unapologetic defense of Israel, combined with a willingness to tackle—and often concede—the most controversial criticisms waged against it, have prompted Alan Dershowitz to hail him as “one of Israel’s most thoughtful observers.”