About me
I’m Yakir Englander- a community builder, researcher, and student of contradictions.
All my life I have navigated between worlds: ultra-Orthodox and secular, Israeli and Palestinian, the Middle East and America, academia and activism, ancient wisdom and contemporary struggle. It’s not just about what I study; it’s how I live.
We all embody profound contradictions reflecting events that shaped us, personal stories and communal narratives, our fears and traumas, and our deepest desires. We can learn to live with these, not by “resolving” them, but by choosing our responses. Viktor Frankl taught, that while we cannot always choose what happens to us, we can choose how we respond. I know, in my body and soul, how hard this is. Still, it is my path.
The official line
For the past eight years, I’ve served as Senior Director of Leadership Programs at the Israeli-American Council (IAC), working with 3,000+ community leaders across North America. I teach rabbinical students and Jewish leaders at the Academy for Jewish Religion. I hold a Ph.D. in Jewish Philosophy and Gender Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and have been a Fulbright-Rabin postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, Northwestern, Rutgers, and the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’ve published two books and twenty-two peer-reviewed articles on Jewish thought, gender and sexuality, and ethics.
For fourteen years, I worked with Kids4Peace, an interfaith dialogue youth movement in Jerusalem, including three years as vice president of the board.
My more personal version
I grew up in a Hasidic family in Israel, largely disconnected from Western culture, yet deeply rooted in generations of Jewish mystical life. I didn’t attend “normal” schools; concepts like democracy, equality, or national identity weren’t part of my language. But I inhabited a world of prayer, music and movement, of community and intergenerational storytelling. A world where every action carried weight, where ancient texts were living voices, where the boundary between the natural and the miraculous was thin.
I also need to acknowledge, that for five years in religious institutions, from age thirteen to nineteen, like many of my peers, I suffered profound psychological abuse. From age fourteen to forty, I woke up every morning wanting to die.
At twenty-two, I left the ultra-Orthodox community and enlisted in the Israeli military. I served for three years, plus another decade in the reserves. My unit identified the bodies of victims – Israeli and Palestinian – often at scenes of terror attacks and extreme violence. My experiences in service made the cost of national and religious conflict undeniably real. I encountered human beings at their finest and at their most cruel.
After the army, I chose two parallel paths.
For fourteen years, I worked in peace-building, facilitating dialogue among Jewish, Muslim, and Christian youth – Palestinians and Israelis – in the Jerusalem area. This work required me to hold multiple truths simultaneously: to love the Israeli-Zionist narrative and to love the Palestinian story; to contain the fears of all sides while knowing when to demand change. During those years, I witnessed the trauma, pain, love, and humanity of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis. I also chose to become intimately familiar, not only with my Jewish heritage, but also with Christian and Muslim life in Israel, Palestine, and America. I learned to pray in Catholic monasteries, Black churches, mosques, and at Sufi gatherings. I learned that religions are genuinely different from one another, and that each has spent hundreds of generations refining tools with which to touch life and create intimacy with the sacred.
My second path was academia. I focused on the intersection of religion with gender, sexuality, and the body. Every book and article I’ve written emerged from critical thinking, accompanied by years of volunteer work in areas I was drawn to. Growing up in the Hasidic world, I needed to understand my own relationship with my body, shaped through experience from my earliest years. This research led to my book, The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology. I also wanted to understand how male rabbis have shaped women’s experience of their own bodies and sexuality, a dynamic that strikes me as deeply problematic. The result was a book I co-authored with Professor Avi Sagi, which became a foundational text for thousands who navigate questions of sexuality within religious life. The more the rabbis criticized this book, the wider its influence spread.
A few more things about myself
When people ask about my religious or spiritual identity, I feel awkward. The most honest answer is that I try to live a mystical life, shaped primarily by Jewish tradition but interwoven with other narratives and cultures. My identity expresses itself most clearly in this: I love to pray and to converse with my ancient ancestors – even though I have no idea whether God exists.
I love practicing karate, watching world cinema, creating and listening to podcasts, and being close to the people I love. I’ve lived in intentional community for a decade. At forty-nine, I’ve recently moved, with my wife and some of those dear to me, to a mountainside in Vermont, close to nature. I was blessed with the courage to become a father. Life gave us a child with a brain injury – a journey of its own.
That's how the light gets in.