Bogdanow Lectures 2026

16 & 17 February 2026, 5.30pm Samuel Alexander SG.16.

Professor Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College)

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, and currently is the Gerard Weinstock Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish thought in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of antisemitism. Her books include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany; Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung; Jewish Studies and the Woman Question, written with Sarah Imhoff, and several edited and coedited books, including Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel; Insider/Outsider: Multiculturalism and American Jews; Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust; The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism; and, forthcoming, The Hasidic Sermon. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has received research grants from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and residential fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and the Maimonides Institute in Hamburg. She has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Cape Town, Frankfurt, Edinburgh, Princeton, and Lucerne, and she is the recipient of five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland.

Lecture 1: The Yellow Star in Church: Baptized Jews in Nazi Germany

In the autumn of 1941 in the Nazi Reich, a group of Christians suddenly became Jews. Baptized as children or adults and members of Protestant or Catholic churches, they were now required to wear a yellow star denoting their racial status as Jews. Complaints came from some parishioners who did not want a Jew next to them at Communion or singing with them in the church choir. Bishops convened meetings to discuss holding separate Christian worship, uncertain if these were Christians or Jews. The reactions were racial but also theological: what is the relationship between the sacrament of baptism and the immutability race? This lecture will describe the fate of these converts and the crisis sparked by their baptism that illustrates the complex relationship between Christianity and Judaism. 

Lecture 2: It's Happening Here: Antisemitism in the United States

Rising antisemitism challenges the assumption that America is different: a land of tolerance and freedom. While nineteenth-century European antisemitism sought to contain Jews, keeping them apart from Christians, twentieth-century antisemitism is broad and inclusive, attacking Jews as capitalists, communists, liberals, sexually abnormal, politically radical, and engaged in conspiracy against the United States. The State of Israel and Zionism have become particular targets, with antisemitic demagoguery spreading from fringe social media to the center of the cultural mainstream, shattering older alliances. The rise of MAGA politics and the polarization of American society have created a political culture with sadistic overtones in which anti-Zionism, defined in different ways, has become one of the only unifying cultural markers.