Dr. Adam S. Ferziger is the Gwendolyn and Joseph Straus Fellow in Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University and serves as lecturer and as associate director at the Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry. His first book, Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Boundaries of Jewish Identity was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (June 2005). In his capacity as a senior research fellow at Bar-Ilan's Rappaport Center for Assimilation Research, he authored studies of the role of rabbis in confronting assimilation, and on the community kollel as an innovative framework for cultivating Jewish identity. During the summer of 2005, Dr. Ferziger was a visiting professor at the University of Shandong, in Jinan, China. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Yeshiva University (RIETS) under the tutelage of Professor Jacob Katz and his Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan University.