Shaul Magid

Shaul Magid (; born June 16, 1958 ) is a rabbi, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. From 2004 to 2018, he was a professor of religious studies and the Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Chair of Jewish Studies in Modern Judaism at Indiana University as well as a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. From 1996 to 2004, he was a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; he chaired the Department of Jewish Philosophy from 2000 to 2004.

Education Magid received his B.A. from Goddard College. He received his semicha (rabbinical ordination) in Jerusalem in 1984 from Rabbis Chaim Brovender, Yaacov Warhaftig, and Zalman Nechemia Goldberg. He became a candidate Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a graduate student in Medieval and Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, where he completed his MA in 1989. He obtained his Ph.D. in Jewish thought from Brandeis University in 1994.

Career Magid served as a visiting professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Clark University, and Boston University. He was the Anna Smith Fine Chair in Jewish Thought at Rice University from 1994 to 1996 and then joined the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America before leaving for Indiana University. In 2023-24, Magid was a Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the Harvard Divinity School.

Major research grants include a 2015-16 research fellowship at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and 2017-18 National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History for a book project on "American Jewish Survivalism: Meir Kahane and the Politics of Pride." He is an elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research.

Magid has served as the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue since 1997. He is a former contributing editor at Tablet Magazine and was the editor of Jewish Thought and Culture for Tikkun magazine.

From Metaphysics to Midrash received the 2008 American Academy of Religion Award for best book in religion in the textual studies category. Magid is the editor of God's Voice from the Void: Old and New Essays on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (SUNY Press, 2001) and co-editor of Beginning Again: Toward a Hermeneutic of Jewish Texts (Seven Bridges Press, 2002).

In his 2023 book The Necessity of Exile, Magid rethinks the role of Zionism in Jewish identity, recenters Judaism over nationalism, and calls for a return to religion to keep Jews together. Referencing Eugene Borowitz, he writes: "Anybody who cares seriously about being a Jew is in Exile and would be in Exile even if that person were in Jerusalem."

In May 2024, Magid and Terrence L. Johnson co-convened the academic conference "Jews and Black Theory: Conceptualizing Otherness in the Twenty-First Century". Magid gave opening remarks and chaired a session titled "Blackness, Whiteness, and Double Consciousness".