Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on November 7, 2014

November 4, 2014

Susannah Heschel comes from a long line of Jewish thinkers, teachers, scholars and rabbis. Her grandfather served the poor in Warsaw; her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, marched with Martin Luther King Jr.

She continues the family tradition as a scholar, focusing on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship and the history of anti-Semitism.

The Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, she is the author and editor of numerous books, including Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, which won a National Jewish Book Award and Germanys Geiger Prize, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.

She also edited a book of her fathers essays called Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Heschel spoke with Faith & Leadership while at Duke to give a talk on her fathers legacy as a human rights activist and his archives, which have recently opened in the universitys Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: Explain a little bit about the European Jewish tradition from which your family came.

My father was born in Warsaw to a Hasidic family, a pietistic family. He was the son of very distinguished Hasidic rebbes, who constituted a kind of royalty within Jewish life. Its a tradition of intense prayer and cultivation of the inner self, but also how you treat other people.

But my grandfather left that world and took a position in one of the most impoverished Jewish neighborhoods in Warsaw. I think that tells you something about the religious commitments of my family and the political commitments.

Its part of the family tradition: to be religious means to be open to human beings from all kinds of backgrounds, to be respectful of them and to care for them. To care for those who are impoverished, who are victims of injustice that pervades societies.

Read more:

Susannah Heschel: What Does It Mean to be Religious in an Age of Neoliberalism?

Category: Hasidic
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