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.