Susannah Heschel on Rethinking Religious Boundaries and Returning to HDS
Visiting Professor Susannah Heschel reflects on the courses and conversations that shaped her scholarship, the relationships among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the meaning of tikkun olam.
Susannah Heschel, MTS ’76, has returned to Harvard Divinity School (HDS) as Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies for the 2026–27 academic year. Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, where she chairs the Jewish Studies Program and is a member of the Religion Department.
Heschel’s scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship and antisemitism. Her books include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, and she edited On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader.
This fall, Heschel is teaching “The Religious Triangle: Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Dispute, Dialogue and Envy,” a course examining how the three traditions have defined themselves in relation to one another.
In the conversation below, she discusses her return to HDS, the development of her scholarship, the porous boundaries among religious traditions, and the obligations she associates with tikkun olam.
You earned your MTS at HDS. What has it been like to return, and what feels different?
It was a fantastic experience to be here as a student. I learned so much, and it was very intense. The courses were amazing, the professors were fantastic, and the conversations with other students were wonderful. I love being here at the Divinity School. It is different. There are certainly more Jewish students, as well as a greater sense of religious pluralism and a stronger presence of international students than when I was here.
The community is really something special. The tradition of Noon Service is part of a commitment by students, faculty, and administrators to create a certain kind of environment and to bring what we create here out into the world—to make the world a better place by drawing on the experience of being here. That is a very special thing.
Is there a course or memory from your time at HDS that was especially influential?
Probably the most important course I ever took was George Rupp’s course on 19th-century theology. It was extraordinary. I took several courses with Caroline Bynum, who was also extraordinary, and Gordon Kaufman was amazing. I also took a fascinating class on pilgrimage with John Carman at the Center for the Study of World Religions. It allowed me to move outside the framework of Judaism and Christianity.
But it was not just the courses and lectures; it was also the discussions with students in the evenings in Divinity Hall, where I lived. I had a room with a working fireplace, though I never used it, and I brought my cello and we would play chamber music in the first-floor lounge. Raymond Yee was the resident advisor and a strong intellectual and musical influence on my life. Students would gather in the common areas and have serious discussions about the classes we had taken that morning and sometimes invite our professors to join us. It was remarkable. Life here was not just about going to class and doing homework. It was all-encompassing in the most wonderful way.
How have your research interests developed over the course of your career?
My father was involved in the civil rights movement, and as I grew up, I met many civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They inspired me to fall in love with the Hebrew Bible, especially the prophets. In college, I thought I would pursue a PhD in Hebrew Bible. Then I realized that I did not like the kinds of questions scholars were asking. I thought they failed to capture what makes the Bible so powerful. So instead, I became interested in the pathology of biblical scholarship.
That meant studying 19th-century German thought. While I was a student here, I kept hearing resonances of Protestant theological issues within Jewish thought. I realized how deeply 19th-century Jewish thinkers were immersed in the larger German intellectual culture, including its Protestant theological culture.
The pivotal figure for me was Abraham Geiger, a neglected but brilliant scholar in his day. Geiger argued that Jesus was a Jew. I wondered, what happened to this discussion? When I looked at the next generation, at the beginning of the 20th century, I saw racial theory entering Protestant theology as scholars tried to distinguish Jesus from Judaism. He may have said Jewish things, they argued, but racially he was not a Jew.
When I researched antisemitic literature from the Nazi period, I found that the perceived danger of the Jew was not the hair, the nose, or the skin. It was the belief that the Jewish body contained a morally and spiritually dangerous spirit. This moral and spiritual danger characterized the racism. That was striking to me because it was not how the racism was understood.
Life at HDS was not just about going to class and doing homework. It was all-encompassing in the most wonderful way."
This fall, you are teaching “The Religious Triangle: Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Dispute, Dialogue and Envy.” What led you to frame the relationship among these traditions as a “religious triangle”?
My interest in this course has three dimensions. First, I want to look at Christian and Islamic influences in Judaism, as well as Jewish influences in Christianity and Islam. Second, I want to consider how historians conceptualize influence—the metaphors they use to describe relationships, influence, or coproduction. Third, I want to think about the limits of historical explanation. Historical study can reveal, but it can also conceal. What do we fail to see when we think in terms of influence or coproduction?
We examine religious polemics in the class and ask what gives rise to them: a desire to have what another religion has, envy, or even a wish to be envied or desired. We also talk about interfaith dialogue and what we want it to accomplish. Sometimes other religions can see something in us that we cannot see in ourselves.
We often think of the boundaries around religions as sharp, but they are quite porous. What we see as sharp differences may be shared concerns expressed in different ways.
You are closely associated with introducing an orange to the seder plate. What is the story behind it?
There was a story told at Oberlin about a girl who asks a rabbi, “What room is there, Rabbi, for a lesbian in Judaism?” The rabbi is furious. He says, “There is as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate.” At Oberlin, a feminist rabbi said, “That is why we have a crust of bread on the seder plate.”
At the time, I had a friend in California whose brother was gay. This was in the 1980s, and he would call to talk about this horrible disease affecting his gay friends. They were dying, and we did not yet have the word AIDS. Reagan was president and refused to give money to study the disease, and some clergy were saying it was God’s punishment for being gay. I felt that a crust of bread on the seder plate was wrong because it violates Passover and I do not think being gay or lesbian violates Judaism. Because of what was happening to gay men in this country, I wanted to do something. I decided to put an orange on the seder plate.
I used an orange because when you peel one, all the segments are there. There is never a gap, and the segments all stick together, which is what people should do: stick together. Everyone would eat a segment of the orange and spit out the seeds to repudiate homophobia.
What does tikkun olam mean to you?
I feel that tikkun olam is very much what Harvard Divinity School is about: a community of people deeply concerned about the state of our world at every level—the individual, the family, society, religious communities, politics, and international affairs. It is a drive toward redemption from injustice, evil, mendacity, war, and cruelty, and from turning away because we feel overwhelmed and do not know what to do. We are here to figure out what to do and what resources we can offer others.
I think constantly about what is called ICE and about the imprisonment of people for not having what authorities call the right visa. How do I cope? How do I live my daily life when I am so horrified by what is being done by my government in my name? What do I do? Tikkun olam is an answer to that.
What books would you recommend to readers?
Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly was very formative for me, though it may not speak to everyone today. I now have Jonathan Kaufman’s new book, When America Roared, about the 1980s, and I am very much looking forward to reading it. A novel I loved and strongly recommend—though nobody reads it anymore—is Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is 1,800 pages, but once you read the first page, you cannot stop. I loved it.
Certain academic books change the way we think. In my class this fall we are reading two of them: Two Nations in Your Womb by Israel Yuval, which argues that Judaism as we practice it today came into being in response to Christianity. For Yuval, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is one of siblings—“two nations in your womb,” as the biblical verse says. The other book is Joan Copjec, Read My Desire, a Lacanian critique of Foucault and historicism that makes us think more deeply about the nature of academic scholarship.
Photos by Azhmeer Jesani.