Yehuda Sarna
Faculty Co-Director of Dual Degree Program (MPA-MA in Hebrew and Judaic Studies); Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Service
Yehuda Sarna serves as Executive Director of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at New York University, where he is also University Chaplain. He co-directs the Dual Degree Program (MPA-MA in Hebrew and Judaic Studies) and is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Service at the Robert F. Wagner School for Public Service. He is a Senior Fellow at the Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership at NYU, where he designs educational experiences and curricula to train the next generation in interfaith action.
Since 2019, Rabbi Sarna has served as the Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Council of the Emirates, a representative body of Jews living in the UAE since the turn of the 21st century. Before the community named him Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Sarnaministered to the synagogue of the first new Jewish congregation to be established in the Arab world in centuries that was located in an undisclosed villa in Dubai,. Today, he advises the Abrahamic Family House, a multifaith complex under construction in Abu Dhabi that hosts a mosque, church and synagogue, on matters of Jewish ritual law and multifaith space management. He teaches and lectures at NYU Abu Dhabi and regularly attends the Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace. In 2021, he contributed to the curation of the first permanent Holocaust exhibit in the Arab world at the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum in Dubai. An award-winning documentary, titled Amen-Amen-Amen, chronicles his work and the history of the Jewish community in the UAE, and aired on PBS in December 2021.
Rabbi Sarna was one of the principal subjects of Chelsea Clinton's 2014 documentary, Of Many, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired nationally on ABC in 2017. The documentary is utilized nationwide as a teaching tool for universities and high schools that seek to establish norms of religious and spiritual diversity within their institutions. The Of Many Institute designed an award-winning training module, “Faith Zone,” to train university students, staff and administrators in religious literacy.
In 2016, Rabbi Sarna was appointed to the Muslim Jewish Advisory Council, a project of the American Jewish Committee and the Islamic Society of North America, which successfully lobbied for tougher legislation to address the underreporting of hate crimes. Rabbi Sarna has led or participated in numerous research groups, including Mapping Jewish Chaplaincy Strategic Planning Group (Brandeis University), The Warm Peace Institute (New York University), Countering Violent Extremism Through Arts and Culture (UAE Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development), The Orthodox Forum Steering Committee (Yeshiva University), The Applied Research Collective for American Jewry (New York University) and the Community Relations Working Group (UJA Federation of New York).
In 2007, he founded the Jewish Learning Fellowship, a ten-week course in Jewish thought for college students, which now enrolls thousands of students through local Hillels on hundreds of university campuses. Rabbi Sarna is a member of the Council of European Rabbis, the Rabbinical Council of America, and the International Rabbinic Fellowship. He spearheaded the campaign to build an Eruv in Lower Manhattan and founded the Downtown Va’ad.
He is the editor of The Koren Shabbat Evening Siddur (2011) and the Orthodox Forum Series: Toward a Jewish Perspective on Culture (2013). Rabbi Sarna is married to Dr. Michelle Waldman Sarna, a psychologist, and they have six children.
In the context of an increasingly polarized American society, this course seeks to train students to mobilize diverse faith communities together for the greater good. Unleashing the power of their own story, students will articulate their values and explore the ways it can be shared. The course will draw on case studies from historical and contemporary faith leaders who have achieved success in creating sustainable change, as well as interrogating relevant current affairs as they arise. Students will learn to recognize how stories are used to motivate action, to recognize the ways that race, power and privilege play a role in elevating and downplaying stories and to identify the role values play in motivating action.
We enter any subject of investigation filled with learned viewpoints, opinions, and select facts that we choose to employ. This helps to make the task of uncovering what we mean by Jewish and Jewish community fraught with unusual difficulty. Whatever our background, it will be hard to shake preconceived positions. In addition, the Jewish community seeks to nurture purely voluntary association at a time of little support in the popular culture for sustaining communal norms, existing institutions or unenforceable obligations. Our study must also then be understood within the larger American context of voluntary associations.
The Taub seminar will wrestle with such issues as identity, communal organization, core and fringe, and the indices and litmus tests of institutionalized belonging. We will explore how power is defined, how leaders are selected and consensus determined. We will examine the wide range of communal institutions and organizations – philanthropic, educational, social, religious and social service – that place themselves within the orbit of the Jewish community to uncover how they define their missions, establish authority, make decisions, recruit involvement and gain (or lose) loyalty and affiliation. As important, we will test the capacities of these institutions and their leaders to address the many challenges they face in an environment of waning allegiance and obligation.
In the context of an increasingly polarized American society, this course seeks to train students to mobilize diverse faith communities together for the greater good. Unleashing the power of their own story, students will articulate their values and explore the ways it can be shared. The course will draw on case studies from historical and contemporary faith leaders who have achieved success in creating sustainable change, as well as interrogating relevant current affairs as they arise. Students will learn to recognize how stories are used to motivate action, to recognize the ways that race, power and privilege play a role in elevating and downplaying stories and to identify the role values play in motivating action.
In the context of an increasingly polarized American society, this course seeks to train students to mobilize diverse faith communities together for the greater good. Unleashing the power of their own story, students will articulate their values and explore the ways it can be shared. The course will draw on case studies from historical and contemporary faith leaders who have achieved success in creating sustainable change, as well as interrogating relevant current affairs as they arise. Students will learn to recognize how stories are used to motivate action, to recognize the ways that race, power and privilege play a role in elevating and downplaying stories and to identify the role values play in motivating action.
In study after study, people lying on their deathbeds overwhelmingly say they regret five things at their end of their life: 1. Not living a life of authenticity 2. Working too hard at the expense of their relationships 3. Not having the courage to express their feelings 4. Not staying in touch with friends. 5. Not letting themselves be happier. For leaders, it's not any different. This course unpacks each of these "regrets" with readings, exercises, meditation, deep listening, skill development and leadership theory, examining historical and contemporary answers to the question of what really matters in life, and providing the space for students to grapple with the question themselves.
In the context of an increasingly polarized American society, this course seeks to train students to mobilize diverse faith communities together for the greater good. Unleashing the power of their own story, students will articulate their values and explore the ways it can be shared. The course will draw on case studies from historical and contemporary faith leaders who have achieved success in creating sustainable change, as well as interrogating relevant current affairs as they arise. Students will learn to recognize how stories are used to motivate action, to recognize the ways that race, power and privilege play a role in elevating and downplaying stories and to identify the role values play in motivating action.