Susannah Heschel
Chair, Jewish Studies ProgramEli Black Professorship of Jewish Studies
Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press). She has also taught at Southern Methodist University and Case Western Reserve University.
Heschel has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Frankfurt and Cape Town as well as Princeton, and she is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, and a yearlong Rockefeller fellowship at the National Humanities Center. In 2011-12 she held a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. She has received four honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, and Germany. Currently she is a Guggenheim Fellow and is writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam. In 2015 she was elected a member of the American Society for the Study of Religion.
The author of over one hundred articles, she has also edited several books, including Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel; Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (with Robert P. Ericksen); Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism(with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky). She serves on the academic advisory council of the Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin and on the Board of Trustees of Trinity College.
Selected Publications
“The Slippery yet Tenacious Nature of Racism: New Developments in Critical Race Theory and Their Implications for the Study of Religion and Ethics,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 35:1 (Spring/Summer 2015), 3-27.
“Jewish and Muslim Feminist Theologies in Dialogue: Discourses of Difference,” in: Gender in Judaism and Islam: Common Lives, Uncommon Heritage, ed. Beth Wenger and Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet (Philadelphia: NYU Press, November 2014), 17-45.
“Constructions of Jewish Identity through Reflections on Islam,” in: Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religions, and the Challenge of Objectivity, ed. Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk (Cornell University Press, 2014), 169-184.
“German-Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Tool of De-Orientalization,” New German Critique 117 (Fall 2012), 91-117.
“Jesus in Modern Jewish Thought,” in: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 582-585.
Works in Progress
The Jewish Fascination with Islam: The History of Jewish Scholarship on Islam and its Impact on Modern Jewish Self-Understanding (under preparation); Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations, ed. Christopher Browning, Susannah Heschel, Michael R. Marrus and Milton Shain, to be published by Berghahn Books (New York: Berghahn Books, forthcoming in 2014); “Human Dignity in Judaism: Divinely Bestowed, Humanly Performed,” Human Dignity, ed. Alexandra Kemmerer (forthcoming in 2015).