Born in 1980 and raised in the Boston area, Sam graduated, cum laude, with a BA in Political Science from Columbia University and, cum laude, with a BA in Ancient Judaism from the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 2003, he was a Fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Jaipur, India, where he studied Hindi language and literature.
Sam has served as a Research Assistant at the Right Question Project, an educational development and technical assistance organization, and has interned at the Ziv Tzedakah Fund, Hazon, and Trembling Before God. Additionally, Sam is an accomplished writer, having won the New Voices Writing Fellowship, the JDC-Smolar Student Journalism Award and Spectrum Magazine's National Poetry Prize. While in India, Sam co-edited a journal called "Chaya," a bilingual Hindi-English literary journal that seeks to explore contemporary Indian literature in both languages, as well as the "conversation between them."
As a Dorot Fellow, Sam studied Talmud both at the Conservative Yeshiva and at the Hartman Institute, where he also pursued an independent research project on pre-modern concepts of race in Rabbinic literature. In addition, he studied Aramaic at the Hebrew University, and Arabic and Greek privately. He volunteered on a project of the Hebrew University's Truman Institute, which seeks to encourage student political activism at Israeli universities.
