Susannah Heschel
Chair, Jewish Studies Program
Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies
Susannah Heschel is 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. 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 (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press), and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und Deutsch-Jüdische Selbstbestimmung (Mathes und Seitz). She has a forthcoming book, co-written with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton University Press. 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 and during the winter term of 2024 she held a research fellowship at the Maimonides Institute at the University of Hamburg. 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.
Contact
Department(s)
Religion
Education
- A.B. Trinity College
- M.T.S. Harvard Divinity School
- Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Selected Publications
Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2008; paperback 2010).
Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung, trans. Dirk Hartwig (Berlin: Mathes und Seitz, 2018).
The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism, ed. Susannah Heschel and Umar Ryad (New York: Routledge Press, 2018).
Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations, ed. Christopher Browning, Susannah Heschel, Michael R. Marrus and Milton Shain (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan Books, 2015).
Editor and Introductions, Essential Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2011).
Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders, co-edited with Fabian Udoh et. al. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).
Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, edited with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion, editor, sections on Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible, Judaism. Edited with Serinity Young, E. Ann Matter, et. al. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 1998)
Betrayal: The German Churches and the Holocaust, edited with Robert P. Ericksen (Minneapolis: Augsburg-Fortress Press, 1999)
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays by Abraham Joshua Heschel Edited and with Introduction. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)
On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader. Edited and with Introductions. (Schocken Books, 1983; second edition with new introduction, 1995)
"Being Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf as Antisemitic Bildungsroman," in: Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Holocaust: A Prelude to Genocide, ed. John J. Michalczyk, Michael S. Bryant and Susan A. Michalczyk (NY: Bloomsbury, 2022), 185-96.
"Sacrament versus Racism: Converted Jews in Nazi Germany," in: On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence, ed. Irene Kacandes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 136-172.
"What Manner of Man is the Prophet? Cornel West, Abraham Heschel, and the Hebrew Prophets" in: Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope: New Essays on the Work of Cornel West, ed. Barbara Will (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 107-134.
"Meir Kahane and Racism as Incarnational Theology," Journal of Religious Ethics (June 2022), 293-302.
"Das Studium der Vergangenheit kann die Zukunft inspirieren," Machloket (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2022), 51-69.
"Geleitwort," in: Berndt Schaller, Christlich-akademische Judentumsforschung im Dienst der NS-Rassenideologie und –Politik: Der Fall des Karl Georg Kuhn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), 13-27.
"Die Historiographie des Instituts zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben," in: Das Eisenacher 'Entjudungsinstitut'. Kirche und Antisemitismus in der NS-Zeit, ed. Christopher Spehr und Harry Oelke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), 331-358.
"The Pharisees in Historical Scholarship: The German Theological Tradition," with Deborah Forger, in: Jesus and the Pharisees: An Interdisciplinary Reappraisal, ed. Joseph Sievers and A.J. Levine (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans, 2021), 361-383.
"Race, Gender and the Constraints on Prophetic Poesis: A Response to George Shulman in Light of Jewish Thought," Political Theology Network: https://politicaltheology.com/response-to-george-shulman/
Susannah Heschel and Shannon Quigley, "The Fate of John's Gospel in Nazi Germany," in: Religion and Ethno-nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars, ed. Kevin Spicer and Rebecca Carter-Chand (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 121-50.
"Heschel and Niebuhr," The Oxford Handbook of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. Robin W. Lovin and Joshua Mauldin (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021), 199-216.
"Foreword," The New Diaspora and the Global Prophetic, ed. Susanne Scholz and Santiago Slabodsky (Landham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021)
"לקראת היסטוריוגרפיה ארוטית: חקר הממדים החושיים והרגשיים של האנטישמיות," ציון 85:1-4 (2020), 73-94.
["Erotohistoriography: Sensory and Emotional Dimensions in the Study of Antisemitism," Zion (Hebrew)]
"In the Color Line: The Tenacity of Racism and its Challenge to Ethicists," Judaism, Race and Ethics, ed. Jonathan K. Crane (Penn State University Press, 2020), 17-39.
"A Different Kind of Theo-Politics: Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Prophets and the Civil Rights Movement," Journal of Political Theology (Winter 2020)
"A Friendship in the Prophetic Tradition: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.," in: Friendship, ed. Lawrence Fine (Penn State University Press, 2021; revised version of article in Telos)
"The Novominsker Rebbe," Tablet (May 2020)
"A Wedding in a Cemetery: Judaism, Terror and Pandemic," Immanent Frame (June 2020)
"Zeit für eine Rückbesinnung auf die Propheten," Aufbau (June 2020)
"Introduction," Thunder in the Soul (London: Plough Publishing House, 2021), xxii-xxxiv.
"Ending Exile with the Prophetic Voice of the Diasporic Jew," Contending Modernities (September 2020)
"Theological Ghosts and Goblins: Martin Luther's Haunting of Liberal Judaism," Polyphonie der Theologie: Verantwortung und Widerstand in Kirche und Politik, ed. Matthias Grebe (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 2019)
"Ecstasy versus Ethics: The Impact of World War I on German Biblical Scholarship on the Hebrew Prophets," in: The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship, ed. Andrew Mein, Nathan MacDonald and Matthew A. Collins (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 187-206.