God in Search of Highway

Props to Missouri for deciding to rename the stretch of highway cleaned up for adoption purposes by neo-Nazis after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian who famously marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. Heschel, who had a nice feel for divine irony, would have been amused. The renaming is to take place this summer, […]

heschelking.jpgProps to Missouri for deciding to rename the stretch of highway cleaned up for adoption purposes by neo-Nazis after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian who famously marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. Heschel, who had a nice feel for divine irony, would have been amused. The renaming is to take place this summer, after the governor signs the big transportation bill of which it is a part. I suggest that, to mark the occasion, an invitation be extended to Heschel’s daughter Susannah (Trinity ’73), who teaches Jewish studies at Dartmouth. Last year she published a magnum opus, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, which deals with a group of German Protestant theologians who in 1939 established an Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. She has also edited a book of her father’s essays, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity. She’d do that highway proud.

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