Longtime dean of Ziegler School retiring as Conservative seminary plots new course

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson joined Ziegler in 1999. Courtesy of American Jewish University

By Louis Keene January 22, 2026

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, the longtime dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, will retire at the end of the school year, the president of its parent institution said Wednesday, and bigger changes may be ahead at the Conservative seminary in Los Angeles.

Jay Sanderson, president of American Jewish University, which oversees Ziegler, confirmed the news in a phone interview with the Forward.

“He has served the Jewish world admirably, honorably for more than 25 years, leading an outstanding rabbinical school and making his mark on hundreds of Jewish leaders across the country,” Sanderson said.

Artson, who is also a vice president at AJU, is not leaving the school entirely. Sanderson said he will take on a “more senior role” in the administration of AJU, which in addition to Ziegler runs a graduate school for education and leadership and other adult education programs. Artson will also continue teaching as the newly inaugurated Mordecai Kaplan Distinguished Scholar.

Artson did not reply to inquiries Wednesday night.

Sanderson, who became president in May 2025, has been making noise recently about overhauling Ziegler, which like many rabbinical schools had seen enrollment decline over the past decade. In a Jan. 15 podcast appearance, he said he wanted AJU — which is nondenominational other than Ziegler — to be “less denominationally driven.”

Asked Wednesday to clarify the comment, Sanderson told the Forward he was alluding to “an idea that has been talked about in the Jewish world for 15 years, that no one, frankly, has the courage to do, which is to create a multidenominational rabbinical school: teaching 21st century skills as well as Torah and Talmud, and bringing people across denominations to learn together.” Trans-denominational seminaries do exist, including one in Los Angeles, the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, and Sanderson said he expected the idea to encounter resistance.

But the institution was undergoing a transition long before Sanderson arrived, beginning with the 2018 departure of former AJU President Robert Wexler, who had founded Ziegler in 1996.

In 2024, AJU sold its 22-acre hilltop campus in Bel Air prior to Sanderson’s arrival to a neighboring Jewish day school for terms that were undisclosed at the time. Sanderson said Wednesday that while he hadn’t seen the exact documentation, he thought the sale price was between $55 million and $60 million. He said AJU netted very little of that, however, because most of the proceeds went to pay off debt on the campus.

Ziegler has since moved into rented space on LA’s Westside, and AJU’s administration — which had planned to stay on campus until 2027 — moved out 18 months early.

Artson, a leading intellectual in the Conservative movement, helped spearhead the push to legalize gay marriage under halacha, or Jewish law. He argued that “committed, permanent, exclusive homosexual relationships between equals” could not have been biblically prohibited because they were unknown until the modern era. The responsa he published in the 1990s making that case is still taught in rabbinical schools today; the Conservative movement did not formally sanction gay marriage until 2012.

And at a time when Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative flagship, was seen as cloistered, his arrival at AJU in 1999 — it was then known as the University of Judaism — helped shape its brand of Conservative Judaism as a movement that could be both compassionate and capable of interfacing with the public.

In response to falling enrollment, Artson had tried to make the school more accessible in 2022 by slashing annual tuition from $30,000 to $7,000 and shortening the program from five or six years to four.

Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, head of Temple Beth Am, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, said hundreds of Ziegler-ordained rabbis and untold numbers of people in their communities have benefited from Artson’s “visionary leadership.”

“His impact is wide and deep and will be felt for a very long time,” Kligfeld said.

In 2024, Artson and Ziegler Vice Dean Rabbi Cheryl Peretz were investigated and cleared by the Conservative movement after they were accused by former students of enabling a toxic culture at the school. A letter from AJU responding to the complaint acknowledged it and pledged “to do better.”

Sanderson, who did not say what the plan was to replace Artson, said that Ziegler students’ response was mixed when he informed them Wednesday of the dean’s impending departure.

“I am signaling that we’re going to be looking at things and potentially changing things going forward,” Sanderson said. “So naturally, some of the students were excited, and some of the students were anxious.”