logo bottom
staff
board
homevisionprogramsstaffaffiliatessupport
welcome
Adam B. Seligman, Director
David W. Montgomery, Coordinator
Rahel Wasserfall, Evaluator
Saul Schapiro, Facilitator

 

seligman   Adam B. Seligman, Seligman@issrpl.org

Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University and Research Associate at the Institute for Culture, Religion and World Affairs there. He has lived and taught at universities in the United States, in Israel and in Hungary where he was a Fulbright Fellow from 1990-1992. He lived close to twenty years in Israel where he was a member of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the early 1970s. His books include The Idea of Civil Society (Free Press, 1992), Inner-worldly Individualism (Transaction Press, 1994), The Problem of Trust (Princeton University Press, 1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (Princeton University Press, 2000) with Mark Lichbach Market and Community (Penn State University Press, 2000), Modest Claims: Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition (Notre Dame University Press, 2004) and with Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford University Press, 2008). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.


david montgomery   David W. Montgomery, Montgomery@issrpl.org

Montgomery has conducted long-term anthropological field research in the Kyrgyz Republic, Uzbekistan and Albania, and his work focuses on the transmission of religious and cultural knowledge, expressions of everyday religious life, and social aspects of religious change in Central Asia and the Balkans. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh; has held Postdoctoral Fellowships in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding at Emory University and the University of Notre Dame; worked as a Legislative Assistant for the U.S. House of Representatives; and served as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer.


wasserfall   Rahel Wasserfall, Wasserfall@issrpl.org

Wasserfall is the newly appointed Director of Evaluation and Liaison to Schools of The Center for the Advancement of Hebrew Teaching and Learning Inc. She is leaving her position as a Senior Research Associate with Education Matters Inc. She is an anthropologist with a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has wide experience in three different continents. For many years her work focused on gender and ethnic studies in Israel, and in the Jewish world. She taught gender studies and qualitative methodology classes at the Hebrew University, Duke University, Chapel Hill (NC), University of Colorado, Boulder and Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. She has been a Fulbright fellow as well as a beneficiary of Ford Foundation grants. She has widely published in the area of gender and is the editor of Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law (UPNE, 1999). With her move to Boston, Wasserfall shifted her interest to Jewish education. She was the Special Coordinator at JCDS (Boston Jewish Community Day School) in which capacity she directed the AISNE accreditation process. She also co-authored (with Susan Sevitz) a study on Jewish pluralism in a local Day School. She has wide experience in qualitative evaluation and is the yearly evaluator of the ISSRPL. At Education Matters, Wasserfall co-led the Special Education Initiative and contributed to the Peerless Initiative and other projects. In her newly appointed position she will focus on internal evaluation and be part of the senior leadership at the Center for the Advancement of Hebrew teaching and Learning, Inc. She is also a committed yoga practitioner and teacher, having completed teacher training in the Iyengar tradition.


shapiro   Saul Schapiro, Schapiro@issrpl.org

Schapiro has been an attorney in Boston, Massachusetts, for over 35 years, representing individual clients and governmental agencies in particular in the field of housing and urban development. He had also served as a Board Member for 20 years and President of the Board of Camp Ramah in New England for 7 years - a Jewish educational institution under the supervision of the Jewish Theological Seminary. For the last four years his firm has served as the corporate attorney for the ISSRPL. He has recently taken the position of the General Counsel for a mutual fund located in Washington, DC, that invest union pension funds and pension monies from public employee pension plans in housing projects across the United States. The program has multiple objectives notably including securing a competitive return on investment, facilitating the construction and/or rehabilitation of affordable housing for low and moderate income and middle class working families and creating jobs for union workers. Since 2007 he has worked with the ISSRPL in developing the facilitation components of the school.