He’s @rabbidan on Twitter, where more than 32,000 people follow his 140-character rabbinic words of wisdom. Ain, 36, is Director of Tradition and Innovation at the 92nd Street Y, and his popular Shabbat dinner events have featured the likes of actor Gilbert Gottfried and author Shalom Auslander.
The rabbi of Ohev Sholom—The National Synagogue in Washington, D.C., Herzfeld, 38, is cut from an unabashedly activist mold. He has called for a full and transparent investigation of claims of sexual abuse at Yeshiva University’s high school for boys, and for the firing of a Congressional staffer who is refusing to give his wife a Jewish divorce decree.
Naomi Balto
As co-director of the Reform movement’s community organizing arm, Just Congregations, and the group’s lead California organizer, Kolin, 34, fights in the public sphere on behalf of various progressive causes: improving public education, expanding healthcare access and reforming immigration policy, among them.
Kushner, 42, last year founded The Kitchen, an “irreverently reverent” independent Shabbat community that meets in a former Levi Strauss denim factory in San Francisco. Its unconventional offerings — prayer books replete with stickers, sukkahs outfitted by the home furnishings store Serena & Lily —have become wildly popular with the Bay Area’s otherwise unaffiliated Jews.
Ruttenberg, 38, the campus rabbi at Northwestern University, is liberal Judaism’s resident sexpert. She has edited two provocative anthologies on Judaism and sex, another on Jewish feminism’s new wave, and she wrote a memoir chronicling her own untraditional path to the rabbinate.
After working as pulpit rabbi and for a think tank devoted to women’s advancement in the Jewish communal workforce, Samuels, 42, was recently named executive director of the Educational Alliance’s ambitious new Lower East Side community center.
Soffer, 32, directs Temple Israel of Boston’s Riverway Project, which reaches unaffiliated 20- and 30-something Jews through worship services (sometimes held in trendy bars), educational programming and social justice work.
Soloveichik, 35, delivered the opening prayer at the Republican National Convention last summer in Tampa, Fla. The director of Yeshiva University’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, Soloveichik — who hails from a legendary rabbinic dynasty — was briefly considered for Britain’s chief rabbi post.
Harry E. Walker
Since moving to Upstate New York and becoming rabbi of the Beacon Hebrew Alliance in the summer of 2011, Spodek, 37, has energized Jewish life in the picturesque Hudson Valley. He has grown BHA membership some 40 percent, and his leadership inspired an anonymous $250,000 challenge grant.
Zion, 32, is co-director of the prestigious Bronfman Youth Fellowships program and its vast alumni network. He is also a leader in partnership minyanim movement, which is devoted to the expansion of women’s roles within Orthodox prayer services.
