Prof. Adam Ferziger, a historian in Bar-Ilan University’s Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, has been named co-winner of the 2026 Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies for his book Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism (New York University Press, 2025).
Presented annually by the Association for Israel Studies, the award recognizes the best book in the field published during the previous calendar year.
While much public discussion has focused on growing divisions between American and Israeli Jews, Ferziger’s award-winning book offers a different perspective, arguing that a relatively small group of American Orthodox rabbis and educators who immigrated to Israel quietly helped reshape the country’s religious landscape over several decades.
Rather than emphasizing ideological rifts between the world’s two largest Jewish communities, Ferziger examines how these immigrants helped shape what he describes as Israeli Moderate Orthodoxy.
The book traces how they established institutions and advanced religious approaches that offered alternatives to both ultra-Orthodox and hardline Religious Zionist models, addressing issues including women’s leadership, pluralism, LGBTQ engagement and academic Jewish studies.
According to Ferziger, the movement’s broader influence became fully apparent only in the 21st century, when Israeli-born students and protégés of those American immigrants emerged as leaders in their own right.
“I am grateful and honored by the recognition that the book has received,” Ferziger said. “The rich and mutually beneficial interfaces between American and Israeli Jewries chronicled in the work offer novel insights that move beyond divisive political and ideological binaries.”
In an interview with JNS in November 2025, after the publication of Agents of Change, he said, “The key to my book is not that the American immigrants transformed Israeli society immediately or directly … The phenomenon I observed is how their impact emerged from an indirect path.
“First, they attracted Israelis to the institutions that they established or led. The Israeli students, in turn, internalized the novel ‘imported’ ideas but then reformulated them, considering their local sensibilities.”
In announcing the award, Association for Israel Studies officials praised the book’s broad historical perspective.
“By following individuals from their educational and religious background and upbringing in the United States through their re-settlement and activities in Israel, as well as placing a plethora of cases and a polyphony of voices, [Prof. Ferziger] provides a persuasive account of a broad, nuanced and multifaceted set of influences over several decades,” the judges wrote.
“This all leads to a convincing case with much potential for further exploring and understanding various long-standing undercurrents in Israeli society, culture and Jewish identity, topics that any student of Israel Studies might find relevant.”
Ferziger is a social and intellectual historian whose research focuses on Jewish religious movements and religious responses to secularization and assimilation in modern and contemporary North America, Europe and Israel. He holds the Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah with Derekh Erez Movement at Bar-Ilan University. He is also a senior associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and co-convener of the annual Oxford Summer Institute for Modern and Contemporary Judaism.
The 2026 Shapiro Award was shared with Dr. Elizabeth Imber of Clark University for her book Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism (Stanford University Press, 2025).
The Shapiro Award honors the memory of Israeli sociologist Yonathan Shapiro (1929–1997), one of Israel’s most influential scholars of Israeli society.
