August 28, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, will speak on “From Theory to Reality: Implications of Feminism for Judaism” at 3:15 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 6, in the McCaffrey Room in the Keefe Campus Center at Amherst College. Sponsored by the Willis D. Wood Fund and the department of religion at Amherst, Heschel’s talk is free and open to the public.

Heschel, whose scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, received her Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. Her publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (1998), which won a National Jewish Book Award, and a forthcoming book, The Aryan Jesus: Christians, Nazis and the Bible. She has also edited several volumes, most recently Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (1999, with Robert P. Ericksen) and Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (1998, with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky). She also published a volume of her father’s writings, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1997), with a biographical introduction. Susannah Heschel has also written extensively on feminist issues related to Jewish studies and edited the collection On Being a Jewish Feminist (1983.)

Heschel has taught at Princeton University, the University of Cape Town and the University of Frankfort. She has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center, and has served since 1999 on the academic advisory committee of the research center of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. She spoke on Judaism and the environment at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro United Nations Earth Summit and at the 1994 Cairo United Nations conference on Population and Development. A frequent commentator on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Heschel also contributes to The Nation, Dissent, Commentary and Tikkun magazines.

In addition to her academic work, she has written and lectured frequently on Jewish issues, served for several years, with Michael Lerner and Cornel West, as the co-chairs of Tikkun, sits on the advisory board of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom and is an enthusiastic member of the National Council of Jewish Women.

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