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Susannah Heschel

b. May 15, 1956

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Susannah Heschel until we are able to commission a full entry.

Susannah Heschel.

As a scholar and author, Susannah Heschel has explored issues of Jewish feminism and 19th- and 20th-century German Jewish history. The daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College, where she chairs the Jewish Studies Program. Her 1983 edited book, On Being a Jewish Feminist, generated controversy and discussion both within the Jewish community and in the broader culture and was praised by many as their entry point into Jewish feminism. Her 1998 monograph Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus won both an award from the Abraham Geiger Rabbinical College of Berlin and a National Jewish Book Award. She has also written about Protestant theological antisemitism and support for Hitler in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (2008) and Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (1999), which she edited with Robert Ericksen. Forthcoming is a book written with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies. In 2018 she published Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung. In addition, she edited two collections of her father’s essays, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity and Essential Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel. She has received many honors, including five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. She has taught at Princeton, Edinburgh, and the University of Cape Town and was assistant professor at Southern Methodist University and associate professor at Case Western Reserve University before joining the faculty at Dartmouth College in 1998. In 2008 she received a Carnegie grant in Islamic Studies and in 2011-12 she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, an institute for advanced study. In 2013 she became a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2015 she was elected a member of the American Society for the Study of Religion and in 2023 to the American Academy of Jewish Research.

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Susannah Heschel." (Viewed on October 8, 2024) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/heschel-susannah>.