Books

Abraham Joshua Heschel, edited by Susannah Heschel

Heschel was born and raised in Warsaw in a Hasidic family, studied in Berlin and then was deported to Poland in 1938. He left for England just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland and soon moved to the U.S. He taught at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, then at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. An advocate of interreligious relationships, he became friends with Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr., but was often snubbed by his own Jewish colleagues. Heschel urged Jews to reconnect with their own heritage. His teaching always had a subjective and a prophetic dimension: he didn't just want Jews to know about their prayerbook, he wanted them to know how to pray. He was a civil rights advocate and a public opponent of the Vietnam War. This superb anthology of Heschel's writings includes an introduction by his daughter Susannah,  professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth.