Nagen was born Yakov Genack on June 17, 1967, in Manhattan, to Azriel and Ahuva Genack — nephew to Rabbi Menachem Genack, head of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division. He later Hebraized the family name to Nagen after making aliyah in 1993, a small, practical adjustment for Israeli ears that would come to sit atop a very different kind of legacy: not kashrut certification, but the certification of trust between faiths.

From Yeshiva University to the Hebron Hills

His path was, at first, a conventional one for an American Orthodox scholar. After yeshiva study in Israel at Yeshivat Shaalvim, Nagen returned to the United States for Yeshiva University, earning a BA in Judaic studies, an MA in Jewish history, and rabbinic ordination from RIETS. He made aliyah in 1993, studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion, and in 1997 joined the faculty of the hesder yeshiva Yeshivat Otniel, in the Hebron Hills, where he taught Talmud, Halacha, Jewish thought, and Kabbalah for roughly twenty-five years. In 2004 he completed a PhD in Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, examining the interplay of Halacha, Aggada, Kabbalah, and philosophy through the lens of Sukkot.

It was a settlement deep in contested territory — not a cosmopolitan interfaith center — where his best-known work would take root.

Religion sits at the center of the Middle East’s conflicts — Nagen’s guiding conviction is that it must therefore sit at the center of any lasting solution. — Core thesis attributed to Nagen’s interfaith philosophy, shaped by the late Rabbi Menachem Froman of Tekoa

Two Decades of Walking Into the Room

Today Nagen directs Ohr Torah Stone’s Blickle Institute for Interfaith Dialogue, heads its Beit Midrash for Judaism and Humanity, and serves as Executive Director of the Ohr Torah Interfaith Center — known in some contexts as the Jerusalem Interfaith Center. Through the Interfaith Encounter Association, he coordinates meetings between West Bank rabbis and Muslim sheikhs and imams, largely from the Hebron and Ramallah areas. He has served as co-chairman of the board of the Abrahamic Reunion, a body spanning Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze, and has organized prayer vigils against religiously motivated violence, including after the 2015 Duma arson attack.

His most striking single trip may be the one closest to home: a 2016 visit to Al-Azhar University in Cairo — a rare and sensitive undertaking for a rabbi based in the West Bank — to discuss the terms of mutual respect between the faiths. His work has since carried well beyond the region: participation in the 2015 Parliament of the World’s Religions, lecture tours in Beijing and Shanghai with his writings translated into Chinese, and engagement in Indonesia, including a G20-linked interfaith forum held with Nahdlatul Ulama. He is also active in the N7 initiative supporting broader Israeli–Arab normalization, where he presses the case that normalization without an interfaith dimension is incomplete — and has called for a Jewish parallel to the Catholic Church’s Nostra Aetate in relations with Islam.

A Scholar’s Bibliography of Bridges

Nagen has written roughly ten books and numerous articles spanning Jewish spirituality, Talmud, philosophy, and interfaith relations. The Soul of the Mishna offers literary and philosophical readings that search for the Mishna’s inner spirit; Water, Creation and Revelation examines Sukkot within the philosophy of Halacha. Be, Become, Bless: Jewish Spirituality Between East and West, published in English by Maggid Books in 2019, integrates contemplative “being” with active “doing,” drawing on both Eastern and Western traditions. His most consequential recent work may be God Shall Be One: Reenvisioning Judaism’s Relation to Other Religions — released in Hebrew in 2022 and English in 2024, co-authored with colleagues from his Beit Midrash — which attempts to construct a systematically positive Jewish theological stance toward other faiths. A companion body of work, Jewish–Muslim Religious Fraternity, has appeared in multiple languages.

He is a member of the rabbinic organizations Tzohar and Beit Hillel, both of which work to bridge religious and secular Israeli society, and Tablet Magazine has named him among the ten “Israeli Rabbis You Should Know.” He also blogs regularly for The Times of Israel.

Survival Mode to Vision Mode

Nagen frames Jewish sovereignty and the return to Zion not as an endpoint but as a hinge — a shift from what he calls “survival mode,” the defensive posture of exile, to “vision mode,” in which Jews actively heal relations with humanity and treat a shared Abrahamic identity as grounds for partnership rather than division. It is a theology that reads sacred texts with fresh eyes while insisting it remains rooted in tradition — a balance that has made him a trusted interlocutor on both sides of Jerusalem’s oldest argument.

Married to Michal Nagen, head of the Tzahali pre-army seminary and daughter of Professor Uriel Simon, since 1993, Nagen is the father of seven children and has lived for decades in Otniel. Around the release of one of his interfaith books, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage requiring emergency surgery; interfaith communities across faith lines joined in prayer for his recovery, which was full — a moment, colleagues say, that only deepened the conviction his life’s work is built on.

The new co-chairmanship at The Abrahamic Movement does not mark a change of direction so much as a widening of the room. For a rabbi who has spent thirty years walking, uninvited by history, into mosques and lecture halls across three continents, it is simply the next door.