ZOOM Lecture with KARMA BEN-YOHANAN, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In 2000, in preparation for John Paul II's visit to the Holy Land, a surprising amount of religious Zionist theological works on Christianity flooded Israel. Unlike many other inter-faith books of that time, which were published mainly in North America and Europe and pushed towards a conciliatory approach to Jewish-Christian relations, this large corpus of literature was intensely polemical and combative. Why was that so, and why precisely at that time? The lecture will delineate the historical development of a religious Zionist theology of Christianity, and locate it within the turbulent history of Jewish-Christian relations and the tradition of anti-Christian polemics. 

Karma Ben Johanan is an assistant professor at the Department for Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and a postdoctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. In 2019, Karma was appointed the first chair of Jewish–Christian relations in the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she served until the summer of 2022. 

Karma's book, A Pottage of Lentils: Mutual Perceptions of Christians and Jews in the Age of Reconciliation (Tel Aviv University Press, 2020), won the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History in 2021. The updated and revised English version, Jacob's Younger Brother (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022) was awarded the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines, and was a finalist of both the National Jewish Book Award and the Association of American Publishers Prose Awards in 2023.

ZOOM March 14, 2023 at 12:15 EST