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HOLY UNCERTAINTY AND THE PROMISE OF MORE INTERSECTIONAL ENGAGEMENTS: REFLECTIONS ON THE LEGACY OF DABRU EMET

LAURA LEVITT

I come to this discussion out of the religion department at Temple University, once a leading center for post-Holocaust Jewish–Christian exchange. While each were in graduate school, Katharina von Kellenbach and Susannah Heschel (then at the University of Pennsylvania) were both very much engaged in these conversations in Philadelphia.

I arrived at Temple just after those heady days and was not a part of those theological and ethical discussions. I came to post-Holocaust work following the literary turn in that scholarship, working more closely with scholars of literature than with theologians and ethicists. But traces of the Temple University legacy continued.

Some of my first graduate students were German exchange students who came to Temple out of the work of my predecessors. They, too, wanted to work across difference, but their work, like my own, was informed by feminist, literary, and critical theory, and Holocaust memory. Working with my womanist ethicist colleague Katie Geneva Cannon, those students came to ask ethical questions about gender, sexuality, and race. My own first doctoral student wrote about the literary turn in New Testament scholarship after the Holocaust with attention to parables. Later, in Switzerland for her second Ph.D. at Basel, she wrote a book about passion narratives after the Holocaust. These experiences and these commitments inform my engagement with this forum and the many powerful essays that it has occasioned.

To read more: https://www.american-religion.org/dabruemet/levitt?fbclid=IwAR1OBV5b-fACrTqfu85viSXaBTb_16a0BkAIg7KmacKwRAopQsvz2CvCiNc