Who Is Noah Feldman’s Wife?

On December 4, 2019, Feldman—alongside law professors Pamela Karlan, Michael Gerhardt, and Jonathan Turley—testified before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.

During the Amish “beard-cutting” attacks trial of 2012, Feldman argued against applying the Federal hate-crimes law in the case. He argued in a Bloomberg View column that strife amongst co-religionists, including for example “two gangs of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic teenagers from competing sects,” could be brought under the law. Any dispute that takes place in the context of a church, mosque, or synagogue would be ripe for federal intervention. Over time, a hate-crimes law designed as a shield to protect religious groups against bias could easily become a sword with which to prosecute them, he then concluded. Subsequently, the sixteen Amish men and women in the 2012 case were found guilty.

In 2011, Noah Feldman appeared in all three episodes in the Ken Burns PBS series, Prohibition, as a legal commentator.

Feldman was a featured speaker, alongside noted Islamic authority Hamza Yusuf, in the lecture Islam & Democracy: Is a clash of civilizations inevitable?, which was subsequently released on DVD. An excerpt from Feldman’s 2008 book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and was attacked by Leon Wieseltier for “promoting” Islamic law as a “swell basis” for a political order. This, according to Wieseltier, amounts to “shilling for soft theocracy,” and is hypocritical, since Wieseltier presumes that neither he nor Feldman would choose to rear their own children in such a system.

In 2008, he was among the names topping Esquire magazine’s list of the “most influential people of the 21st century”. The magazine called him “a public intellectual of our time.”

In 2005, The New York Observer called Feldman “one of a handful of earnest, platinum-résumé’d law geeks whose prospects for the Big Bench are the source of constant speculation among friends and colleagues.”

Feldman also argued pro bono in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals against the efforts of a Jewish group in Tenafly, New Jersey, the Tenafly Eruv Association, to erect an eruv. However, his arguments were rejected in 2003 and the eruv was permitted.

In a New York Times Magazine article, “Orthodox Paradox”, Feldman recounted his experiences of the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion of the Modern Orthodox Jewish community in which he was raised, specifically at his high school alma mater, the Maimonides School. He contended that his choice to marry a non-Jew led to ostracism by the school, in which he and his then-wife were allegedly removed from the 1998 photograph of his class reunion published in the school newsletter. His marriage to a non-Jew is contrary to orthodox Jewish law, although he and his family had been active members of the Harvard Hillel Orthodox minyan. The photographer’s account of an over-crowded photograph was used to accuse Feldman of misrepresenting a fundamental fact in the story, namely whether he was purposefully cropped out of the picture, as many other class members were also cropped from the newsletter photograph due to space limitations. His supporters noted that Feldman’s claim in the article was that he and his wife were “nowhere to be found” and not that they were cropped or deleted out of the photograph. Yet others view this claim by Feldman’s supporters as disingenuous, noting that elsewhere Feldman had publicly encouraged the suggestion of air-brushing. Leon Wieseltier attacked Feldman for the dishonesty of “exposing the depredations” of Orthodox Jewish law while praising sharia as “bold and noble,” and called Feldman’s essay a “pathetic whine.”

In 1992, Feldman received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard College, where he was awarded the Sophia Freund Prize (awarded to the highest-ranked summa cum laude graduate) and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year. He was also the 1990 Truman Scholar from Massachusetts. He then earned a Rhodes Scholarship to the Christ Church, Oxford, where he earned a DPhil in Islamic Thought in 1994. Upon his return from Oxford, he received his J.D., in 1997, from Yale Law School, where he was the book review editor of the Yale Law Journal. He later served as a law clerk for Associate Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2001, he joined the faculty of New York University Law School (NYU), leaving for Harvard Law School in 2007. In 2008, he was appointed the Bemis Professor of International Law.

Noah R. Feldman (born May 20, 1970) is an American author and Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Much of his work is devoted to analysis of law and religion.