Chaplains and Religious Life

Rabbi Jason Gary Klein is a graduate of Columbia University and of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He has served Jewish communities in a variety of capacities from UMBC Hillel outside Baltimore to JCP Downtown in Lower Manhattan. He comes to Brown University and Brown-RISD Hillel after overseeing the education team at Temple Israel in Minneapolis.

Rabbi Jason was born in New York City and grew up in Montclair, NJ. While he started college as a science scholar, he ultimately majored in religion with a focus on Orthodox Christianity. During rabbinical school, he spent a year in Jerusalem studying at Elul, Hebrew University, and Pardes. He is a past president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association (RRA) and has been involved in communities with a variety of movement affiliations or none at all.

Rabbi Jason has a passion for Jewish prayer, the diversity of Jewish traditions across Jewish communities, ancient and contemporary midrash, feminist, and queer readings of Jewish texts, modern Orthodox approaches to Jewish law, and strives to be an advocate for racial equity and for lasting justice and peace for Israelis and Palestinians. His writing has appeared in Torah Queeries (Drinkwater et al.), A Guide to Jewish Practice (Teutsch), and ritualwell.org.

Rabbi Jason enjoys spending time with his family and friends in and around New York City, languages, cooking & baking tasty food that happens to be vegan, riding a bicycle, theatre, music, good and bad television, and travel. Besides home to Providence, his favorite places to fly are San Francisco and Tel Aviv. He moved to the Mount Hope neighborhood of Providence this spring.