The Women and Men of American Religion. Story 6: Abraham Joshua Heschel

In this sub-series “The Women and Men of American Religion” we explore the women and men who, fueled in large part by their religion, have made significant and broad contributions to the American tapestry. This helps immensely in understanding better what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion. Previous episodes include Billy Graham, Elizabeth Seton, Joseph Smith, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Today we will get to know the life and times of Abraham Joshua Heschel, perhaps best known by the American public as the rabbi who walked alongside Rev. Martin Luther King in the famous protest march in the spring of 1965. One renown scholar of American religion wrote this: “On college and university campuses, at Christian seminaries as well as Jewish rabbinical assemblies, at colloquies on race relations and in the corridors of power, he spoke on the sensitive and difficult problems of the day in the best tradition of the Western conscience and of its biblical roots.”

To help us do this, we have with us Susannah Heschel, the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and chair of the Jewish Studies Program and a faculty member of the Religion Department.

Dr. Heschel received her A.B. at Trinity College and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Islam, and the history of anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, which won a National Jewish Book Award, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. 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. She has received many honors, including the Mendelssohn Prize of the Leo Baeck Institute, and five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. Currently she is a Guggenheim Fellow and is writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam. She is an elected member of the American Society for the Study of Religion and the American Academy for Jewish Research. 

And, importantly, Susannah is the daughter of our subject - Abraham Joshua Heschel.