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Susannah Heschel to lecture This Week at Creighton University April 12, 2013 2 Iyar 5773 Vol. 93 | No. 30
by LEONARD GREENSPOON What happened when the German Christian supporters of the Nazis confronted the fact that their savior, Jesus, was Jewish? This is one of the fascinating questions that historian Susannah Heschel will address when she appears in Omaha on Tuesday, April 23, at Creighton University’s Harper Center, room 3023. Heschel’s lecture, titled The Aryan Jesus in Nazi Germany: The Bible and the Holocaust, begins at 7 p.m. Susannah Heschel is one of the world’s leading scholars on JewishChristian relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of antisemitism. She effectively combined all of these interests in her recent book, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, which was published by Princeton University Press. An earlier work, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, published by University of Chicago Press, won a prestigious
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Susannah Heschel National Jewish Book Award. Heschel is the author of over a hundred books and has edited or co-edited
several books, including On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader. In commenting on the significance of Susannah Heschel’s work, Dr. Gerald Steinacher, Hymen Rosenberg Professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of History at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, observed: “Susannah Heschel’s research on the role of Judaism in Western civilization presents a ‘counter history’ to the gentile mainstream narrative of other historians. In her latest book, The Aryan Jesus, she sheds light on a little known case of Christian anti-Semitism: the lives
and teachings of a group of German Lutheran theologians, who proclaimed Jesus the savior of the ‘Aryans’ and supported Hitler’s war against the Jews wholeheartedly. Hers is a disturbing, but important, book, based on thorough archival research.” Susannah Heschel teaches at Dartmouth College, where she holds the Eli Black Professorship in Jewish Studies. She has also been a visiting professor at Princeton University, the University of Cape Town, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Frankfurt. The high regard in which she is held by academic colleagues is further evident in the honorary doctorates she has received from Colorado College, Trinity College, the University of St. Michael’s College (part of the University of Toronto), and the Augustana Theologische Hochschule in Bavaria. From 1999-2008, Heschel served on the Academic Advisory Committee of the Research Center of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Continued on page 2
Schwalb Center A Mission hosts talk by Israeli to the Jews of Cuba scientist Gilad Barnea Will Obama spend his political capital? Page 16
Inside Point of view Synagogues In memoriam
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Jerusalem who completed his Ph.D. by DR. CURTIS HUTT Special Program Coordinator, Schwalb at New York University. As a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia UniCenter for Israel and Jewish Studies Israeli scientist Dr. Gilad Barnea is versity, Dr. Barnea worked with the visiting Omaha. On April 16 at 7 Nobel Laureate Richard Axel. In 2009, he received the p.m., at UNO, in the prestigious EUArts and Sciences REKA grant from Hall, Room 306, he the National Instiwill give a talk titled tute of Health. The Academics Without focus of his research Borders: Israeli Sciis how the olfactory entists in the United system detects and States. The talk is oridentifies odor stimganized by the uli and how this inSchwalb Center for formation is Israel and Jewish translated into bestudies. It is free and havioral outputs. open to the public. The topic of Dr. Dr. Barnea is a Barnea’s talk is Ismolecular and celluraeli scientists in the lar neurobiologist Dr. Gilad Barnea United States. Twowith a research laboratory at Brown University. He is a thirds of all Israeli scientists live and graduate of Hebrew University in work abroad. There are many Israeli scientists in academic institutions throughout the United States. This is by no means unusual, as scientists from around the world are trained and find employment in United States’ research institutions. Dr. Barnea will be speaking as an Israeli whose universities have produced groundbreaking scholars across a wide number of fields, but also as a member of an international research Continued on page 2
Synagogue Yad El in Guantanamo by RICHARD FELLMAN Bev and Dick Fellman were among the 30 participants on the Mission to the Jewish community of Cuba sponsored by Temple Concord of Syracuse where their son, Daniel Fellman, is the Senior Rabbi. This is part four in a series of articles about their trip. Jews of Guantanamo Today Mention of the word “Guantanamo” today, especially to Americans, instantly produces a picture of a prison on what looks like a desert island with barbed wire fences, guards, prisoners with Muslim names and stories starting with the events of 9/11 and trailing off to terrible events in our own not-sodistant past. In fact, all of those images have
some truth, but visiting Guantanamo, as we did on our recent Mission to the Jews of Cuba, produced a totally different experience. The “prison” of Guantanamo exists inside the U.S. Naval Base located on the far eastern tip of Cuba, on the island’s south side facing the Caribbean Sea. The base itself fronts a natural port on the Bay of Guantanamo, which became U.S. territory as a result of the U.S. victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War. The United States freed Cuba but kept the port and actually pays rent annually to Cuba, even to this day. It is said that Castro refused to cash either the first or all of the rental checks. But the Guantanamo we visited, and the Jewish community of Continued on page 2