Dartmouth College professor to discuss women in Hitler’s regime

CONTACT: Ellen Chang
PHONE:
(713) 348-6777
EMAIL: ellenc@rice.edu

DARTMOUTH
COLLEGE PROFESSOR TO DISCUSS WOMEN IN HITLER’S REGIME

A Dartmouth College
professor will examine if and how feminist theory is successful in explaining
the participation of women in the most elite and loyal shock troops of Hitler’s
murderous regime at Rice University on Nov. 5.

Susannah Heschel, an
associate professor of Jewish Studies and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at
Dartmouth College, will give a talk entitled “Women in the SS: Feminist Theory
and the Perpetrators” from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Humanities Building, Room 117. The
lecture is sponsored by the Center for Study of Cultures.

Heschel is the author of
numerous studies of modern Jewish thought, including “Abraham Geiger and the
Jewish Jesus,” which won the National Jewish Book Award and an award from the
University of Potsdam, and has been translated into German. She also is
co-editor of “Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism,” with David
Biale and Michael Galchinsky. Together with Robert Ericksen, she has edited a
volume of essays, “Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust.”

“Heschel’s ‘Abraham
Geiger and the Jewish Jesus’ is a ground-breaking and penetrating study of the
foremost 19th-century German Reform Jewish historian and theologian,” said
Gregory Kaplan, assistant professor of religious studies at Rice. ” The study
focuses on a decisive contribution that Geiger made in the study of religion by
igniting a scholarly controversy, which rages until this day, with his assertion
that the historical Jesus was a Jewish sage who addressed Jewish themes to a
Jewish audience.”

Her book makes a major
contribution to the neglected yet rich and varied origin of a contemporary
dilemma in the history of religions and theology of culture: Was Jesus a messiah
or a rabbi? Was Jesus a Christian or a Jew? She situates this question at a
distinctive moment of liberal Western thought, Kaplan said.

She is the editor of a
classic collection of essays, “On Being a Jewish Feminist,” and in 1996 she
published an anthology of her father’s writings, “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual
Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel.”

Heschel served as a
visiting professor of Jewish religious philosophy at the University of Frankfurt
in 1992-93 and has taught seminars at the Humboldt University in Berlin and at
the University of Basel. She spent the 1997-98 academic year as a Rockefeller
fellow at the National Humanities Center, where she began writing a book on a
group of pro-Nazi German theologians who sought to create a synthesis of
Christianity and National Socialism by declaring Jesus an Aryan.

Her research is based on
hitherto unknown archival materials she uncovered in the former East Germany.
Since 1999, she has served on the Academic Advisory Committee of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum.

She was invited to speak
at the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and at the 1994 UN Conference on
Population and Development in Cairo. Since 1999, she has served on the Academic
Advisory Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

She has published essays
in Tikkun, Dissent, The Nation and The New York Times Book Review and has
appeared as a commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.