Jacob Neusner
By Jacob Neusner
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Opinion Jewish Studies Rises, but We Pay the Price
The flourishing of Jewish studies at secular American universities in recent decades is a remarkable and profoundly important development. As students return to their campuses, it is not only those who attend Yeshiva University, Hebrew Union College or the Jewish Theological Seminary who will have access to high-level teaching and scholarship on Jewish topics. Secular…
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Opinion Meeting Benedict: A Rabbi Talks With the Pope
The walk through the papal apartments led through several long rooms, each richly decorated in antiques and hangings and paved with marble. My journey to the heart of Catholic Christianity might have been expected to have precipitated long thoughts on history and family: What would the first Jacob Neusner, my grandfather from the town of…
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Opinion Returning to Reform
Once upon a time, there was a young man, a third-generation American who was raised in a classical Reform temple, who in the Reform manner celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah and who was confirmed in the Reform rite. He was inspired by his temple’s rabbi to himself become a Reform rabbi. He held national office…
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Opinion Catholics Have a Right To Pray for Us
Israel prays for gentiles, so the other monotheists, the Catholic Church included, have the right to do the same — and no one should feel offended, as many have by Pope Benedict XVI’s recent revision of the Tridentine Mass. Any other policy toward gentiles would deny their access to the one God whom Israel knows…
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Opinion The Pope and I: A Debate With Jesus Is Joined By Benedict XVI
I made up an imaginary conversation with Jesus and wound up debating the real-life Bishop of Rome, the pope. In my 1993 book “A Rabbi Talks With Jesus,” I imagined being present at the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus taught Torah like Moses on Sinai. I explained why, for good and substantial reasons based…
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Opinion The Making of a Leader
The Catholics got it right. They choose a pope in secret. They mourn the last pope, collect the cardinals in seclusion, and poof — black smoke, black smoke, white smoke. Then everyone goes back to work. But choosing a pope for a billion Catholics is one thing; choosing a chancellor for a million and a…
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Opinion A Threat to the Academy
It has been 40 years since universities began to make faculty appointments in Jewish subjects in their departments of religious studies, history, literature and language. In the decades that followed, the field of Jewish studies has flourished on campus. The latest testament to this fact is the recently released finding by the National Jewish Population…
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