Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, a resident of Jerusalem, is a rabbi, writer and lecturer. He is active with Israel365, and previously spent several decades at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the global Jewish human rights organization, in extensive advocacy for Jews and for Israel.

Until his move to Jerusalem he held the Sydney M Irmas Adjunct Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics at Loyola Law School. He taught honors halacha to seniors at YULA, and served on the board of AJOP, the Association of Jewish Outreach Professionals, as part of his decades-long involvement with kiruv.

He has published two seforim on the Nesivos Shalom of the Slonimer Rebbe, and one on the Be’er Hagolah of the Maharal, and served as a regular dayan on the geirus beis din of the Rabbinical Council of California. He maintains Cross-Currents, a blog and online journal of the intersection between Torah thought and current affairs, and cohosts the podcast Two Rabbis, Three Opinions.

Dozens of his essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the National Law Journal, FoxNews and a host of Jewish and general media, in print and online. He serves on the editorial board of the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Action, and previously of Klal Perspectives, an online journal of community responsibility that was unique in presenting different points of view on critical communal issues. He is a veteran of the lecture circuit on four continents, and fully at home with television, radio and podcast participation.

Before moving to the West Coast he grew up in New York, where he received his semicha from the Rabbinical Seminary of America and his BA, summa cum laude, from Queens College, at which he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.