Susannah Heschel
“Turning Inter-Religious Dialogue Into Prayer:
Transformations of Abraham Joshua Heschel”
Tuesday | 7:30 p.m.
$25 | Quick Member: $25
FREE for Fairfield University Students/Faculty/Staff (Registration Requested)
Heschel taught us how to ask questions. Heschel taught us how important questions are, how they open us up to new understandings, to another reality. Heschel taught us how important it is to ask the right questions.
—Alon Goshen-Gottstein
Susannah Heschel, PhD, the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, pays tribute to her father Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most eminent rabbinical scholars and humanists of our time. A famed rabbi who stood arm-in-arm with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1965 during his voter rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Rabbi Heschel often spoke with Dr. King on civil and human rights issues. His philosophical journey, after being deported from Poland by the Nazis in 1938 and immigrating to the U.S., brought Heschel to the world of social and economic justice, fighting for the rights of oppressed minorities in the United States and beyond.
A current Guggenheim Fellow writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam, Susannah Heschel is chair of the Jewish Studies program at Dartmouth College. 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. The author of more than 100 articles, she has also edited several books, including Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award.
[Heschel’s] personality, which expressed an enormous depth of empathy and sensitivity, and his way of thinking, which placed conventional approaches to religion upside down… gave a unique voice to religious experience.
—Susannah Heschel describing her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel
