Sanford L. Drob is Director of Psychological Assessment and the Senior Forensic Psychologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He holds doctorate degrees in Philosophy from Boston University and in Clinical Psychology from Long Island University. In 1987 he co-founded, and for several years served as editor-in-chief of the New York Jewish Review, a publication addressing the interface between traditional Judaism and contemporary thought, and which featured interviews and debates amongst leading rabbis, including Adin Steinsaltz, Moshe Tendler, David Bleich, and Norman Lamm, articles on Jewish art, culture and cinema, guidelines for respectiful dialog between the various movements in American Jewry, and Dr. Drob's early essays on Kabbalah and Hasidism. In addition to numerous publications in clinical, forensic and philosophical psychology, Sanford Drob's articles on Jewish philosophy have appeared in such journals as Tradition, The Reconstructionist and Cross Currents. Dr. Drob is the grandson of Rabbi Max Drob, a disciple of Solomon Schechter and one of the early leaders of the Conservative movement. In 1987 Dr. Drob published a brief biography of his grandfather based upon archival materials at the Jewish Theological Seminary and interviews with his grandfather's contemporaries, including Rabbis Louis Finklestein, Simon Greenberg and Mordecai Kaplan.

Sanford Drob has a long-standing interest in the psychological, social and spiritual roots of criminality, and is known for his work with violent offenders on Bellevue¹s Psychiatric Prison Ward and throughout the criminal justice system. He specializes in assessing the state of mind of offenders at the time of their criminal acts, and has testified in numerous homicide and other criminal trials.

Dr. Drob's philosophical and psychological interests originally led him to the study of contemporary theology with Thomas J.J. Altizer at Stony Brook and analytic philosophy and phenomenology at Cornell and Boston University. His philosophy dissertation, which was written under the guidance of the Neo -Platonic philosopher J.N. Findlay, was a study and critique of the philosophical psychology of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Dr. Drob later went on to analyze the spirituality of halakhic Judaism in Wittgensteinian terms. As a doctoral student in clinical psychology he developed interests in the philosophical foundations of the various psychotherapeutic schools, and took a special interest in psychoanalytic and Jungian thought.

As a member of Brooklyn's Park Slope Jewish Center and Congregation B'nai Jacob in the 1980s Dr. Drob became attracted to the study of Hasidism. He studied Tanya with Rabbi Shimon Hecht and developed an interest in the living spirit of Jewish mysticism as it is expressed in the Chabad (Lubavitch) movement. For the past fifteen years he has engaged in intensive study of the Kabbalah, the problems of God, Mind and Evil, and the relationship between Jewish Mysticism and other traditions in the history of Western and Eastern thought. His books, Symbols of the Kabbalah: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, and Kabbalistic Metaphors: Jewish Mystical Themes in Ancient and Modern Thought, were published by Jason Aronson in 2000 and are available at www.aronson.com (or see "Books" on this website). Dr. Drob is currently completing a book on the psychologist Carl Jung's intimate but highly ambivalent relationship with Jews, Judaism and Jewish mysticism, working on a study on the Kabbalah and Postmodern thought, and writing a novel about the insanity defense, Jewish identity, and mystical theology. Dr. Drob is married to Liliana Rusansky Drob and is the father of Elliot Max, Robin Daniel , Amarilla Cielo and Martín Abraham.

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Sanford Drob's books are Symbols of the Kabbalah and Kabbalistic Metaphors .

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