Can religion be defined? Join our award-winning scholars — Jack Miles, Susannah Heschel and Professor David Biale — as they tell a new story: traveling from prehistory to the present day illuminating how world religions came to be acknowledged and studied, with a focus on Judaism. How has this great civilization and religion been absorbed and altered, understood and misunderstood?
Jack Miles
Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy, Jack Miles is a writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and has been translated into sixteen languages, including Hebrew and (twice) Chinese. A sequel to that book entitled CHRIST: A Crisis in the Life of God—published simultaneously in 2001 in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France—was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and led to Miles being named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002.
Susannah Heschel
Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award and Germany's Geiger Prize, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press). She is the author of over seventy articles and has edited several books, including Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel; Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (with Robert P. Ericksen); Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky).
David Biale
David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of five books: Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History and Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians, and Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought. He is also the editor of Cultures of the Jews: A New History. His books have won the National Jewish Book Award three times and he has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lady Davis Foundation. Most recently, he won the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. He is currently the Project Director of an international team writing a History of Hasidism.