Jon D. Levenson

Formerly the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and now the Distinguished Professor of Hebrew Bible Emeritus at Vanderbilt Divinity School, James Barr is surely one of the leading biblical scholars of the twentieth century. His early work concentrated on linguistic issues, applying sophisticated . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1957, Louis Jacobs, a British Orthodox rabbi in good standing, published a book entitled We Have Reason to Believe , in which he argued that religious Jews needed to revise their traditional theology in light of the more assured conclusions of historical criticism of the Bible, in cluding the . . . . Continue Reading »

I wonder what my rebbe ancestors would think of me,” writes a young Unitarian Universalist minister in The Burning Bush, the newsletter of the Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness. “Would they be glad for me, proud of me, or shocked at me to hear me recite a bracha, a blessing on Friday . . . . Continue Reading »

Ten years ago I had an experience that made me vividly aware of the two worlds with which the practitioner of the critical study of the Bible inevitably deals. Reading applications for the doctoral program whose faculty I had only recently joined, I was struck by the frequency on the . . . . Continue Reading »

In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth by Tikva Frymer-Kensky Free Press, 292 pages, $24.95 It has been thousands of years since goddesses have been so much on people’s minds, at least in the West. What has brought them back with a . . . . Continue Reading »

Half a century ago, on March 9, 1940, with the world collapsing into a war that was to exceed the worst nightmare, the great German novelist Thomas Mann delivered a brief radio address entitled “The Dangers Facing Democracy.” “The streamlined, artificial anti-Semitism of our technical age,” . . . . Continue Reading »