You Tube Theology

“I would like to see Christians and Jews having a conversation about how we can stop hurting one another…”

Today’s topic is on Anti-Semitic (Anti-Jewish) sentiment or theology in Christianity. We discuss how defining antisemitism is difficult, how understanding Jesus’s Jewish context is imperative to understanding Jesus, we touch on Jesus’ relationships with women and how the “feminist Jesus” came about, and finally we hear AJ’s vision for how Jews and Christians can relate to one another.

I have been sitting on this episode since July of 2023 (nearly two years). Part of why I haven’t released it sooner was because the timing didn’t feel right with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I didn’t want to give the impression that by doing an episode on antisemitism that I was pro-the state of Israel’s actions of apartheid and genocide against Palestinians. Then I came to the realization that not releasing this episode holds up a false dichotomy that you can’t at one time, be against Palestinian suffering and Jewish suffering. Ironically there is a lot of Zionist rhetoric in fundamentalist Christianity that operates alongside anti semitic theology. And, as Christians (not just fundamentalist Christians) it is important to take a look at how the way we talk about Jesus is implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish. AJ talks about simply naming Jesus and his actions as radical can be problematic.

If you are looking for a Palestinian voice on the podcast, in season four you will get to hear a profound conversation I had with Issa Amro, a 2025 Nobel peace prize nominee who is a Palestinian Muslim working for nonviolent action and protest against the Israeli military and settlers.

Full bio:
Dr. Amy-Jill Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace.

Professor Levine has been awarded grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition to receiving three audiences with Pope Francis, in Spring 2019 she was the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. In 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held office in the Society of Biblical Literature, the Catholic Biblical Association, and the Association for Jewish Studies. She served as Alexander Robertson Fellow (University of Glasgow), the Catholic Biblical Association Scholar to the Philippines, and is a member of the Woolf Institute, Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations, at Cambridge University, UK. She has given close to 1000 lectures on the Bible, Christian-Jewish relations, and Religion, Gender, and Sexuality across the globe.

Her books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus; Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi; The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (with Douglas Knight); The New Testament, Methods and Meanings (with Warren Carter); and The Gospel of Luke (with Ben Witherington III; the first full-length biblical commentary co-authored by a Jew and an Evangelical). Her most recent books include The Bible With and Without Jesus, co-authored with Marc Z. Brettler, and The Pharisees (co-edited with Joseph Sievers), to which Pope Francis contributed an essay.

With Marc Brettler, she co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament; she is also the editor of the 13-volume Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings, and The Historical Jesus in Context. Presently she is editing several volumes in the Wisdom Commentary series, and she is the New Testament editor of the new Oxford Biblical Commentary Series. Along with several children’s books on biblical stories co-authored with Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, she has written six “beginner’s guides” to the Gospels.

Resources:

AJ’s email: [email protected]

https://www.hartfordinternational.edu/faculty/amy-jill-levine

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