In this special English-language episode, we speak with Professor Susannah Heschel about her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel — one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.
Most of us remember Heschel as the rabbi who marched beside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, and yet this conversation turns to a lesser-known dimension of his thought - his understanding of Zionism: What did Zionism mean to Heschel, and how did his vision reflect the complex relationship between American Jewry and the State of Israel?Join us as we explore how theology, morality, and politics intertwined in Heschel’s life — and what his legacy can still teach us about Jewish identity today.

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. Professor Heschel's scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Christianity and Islam, and the history of antisemitism. 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 The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton University Press), co-written with Sarah Imhoff.

Heschel is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and a yearlong Rockefeller fellowship at the National Humanities Center. She has received many honors, including the Moses Mendelssohn Prize of the Leo Baeck Institute, and she holds five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. She is also an elected member of the American Society for the Study of Religion and the American Academy for Jewish Research.