Context Matters: Forming American Rabbinic Identity in Israel is an ethnographic investigation of thirty-eight American Reform and Conservative rabbinical students as they experience the Israel Year of rabbinic education, a defining feature of their training that distinguishes it from that of
American seminarians of other faith traditions. This study analyzes rabbinic identity formation through the students’ interactions with six contexts: their own identity journeys, educational institutions, Israel as a place, Jewish time, civil time, and the people they encounter. The students engage with these contexts in the student role and as someone who is both an insider and an outsider. More