Shammai Engelmayer

Website: www.shammai.org
Residence : Teaneck, New Jersey

Biographical information

Shammai Engelmayer wears several hats. He is a full-time pulpit rabbi (Temple Israel Community Center, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue in Cliffside Park, NJ); he writes an award-winning column (Keeping the Faith) for the local weekly newspaper The Jewish Standard, in which he discusses current issues through the prism of Jewish law; he is a popular adult Jewish education teacher in northern New Jersey; and he is editor of Judaism: A quarterly journal of Jewish life and thought.

Although he was ordained in 1967, Shammai chose not to become a journalist instead. Almost as quickly, he became an associate editor with the North American Newspaper Alliance, a major supplementary news service. Given NANA’s history — among other things, Ernest Hemingway had covered the Spanish Civil War for it and Ian Fleming once served as its British bureau chief — when Shammai was promoted to editor at age 25, it brought him a great deal of attention.

Concurrently, Shammai was the first editor of the late Jack Anderson’s Washington Merry-Go-Round column. He played an important role in Anderson’s winning of the Pulitzer Prize and was himself nominated three times for the award. In 1975, he won the Washington Journalism Center’s Thomas L. Stokes Award for National Reporting.

In the mid-1980s, Shammai continued to garner awards as executive editor of the New York weekly newspaper The Jewish Week; he continues to do so still as a columnist for the Jewish Standard.

He is the author of eight books, most on secular topics, and is working on two more at the moment.

Shammai credits his current successes as a rabbi, educator and lecturer to the communications skills he honed over his quarter century in journalism.

He has three children and 10 grandchildren.

Shammai and his wife, the journalist Marilyn Henry, live in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Discussion topics

• Evolution vs. Creationism and Intelligent Design
  Believe it or not, the Bible supports science, not fundamentalism.
• Bloody sin: The case in Jewish law for disengagement
  Forget what you’ve heard; Jewish law actually forbids Jews from remaining in the administered territories under current conditions.
• The Exodus in history: The truth is out there
  The scholars insist the Exodus never happened, but Egyptian history seems to support the biblical story.
• The birth of Christianity and the roots of Christian anti-Semitism
  Using Christian biblical texts, this talk argues that Paul, not Jesus, founded Christianity and that he deliberately built anti-Semitism into it all.
• Who really wrote the bible? A new approach to an eternal question
  The rabbis gave one answer, but believed another. Scholars have their “truth.” They are both a little right and a lot wrong.

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