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. While at Oxford, he was a member of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society.