Does Christianity Matter for Judaism — and Vice Versa?

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What can Christians learn from Judaism, and what can Jews learn from Christianity? What do we have to gain from inter-religious dialogue, and what challenges can such conversations pose? To what extent does a commitment to Judaism or Christianity benefit from – or even require – an engagement with the other tradition, and what sorts of risks might arise from these encounters? We will explore diverse answers to these questions, wrestling with sources from the New Testament to works of post-Holocaust theology.

ABOUT THIS SPEAKER: Elias Sacks is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Associate Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. After receiving his B.A. from Harvard University and studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he earned an M.A. in Religion from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University. His research focuses on Jewish thought, Jewish-Christian relations, philosophy of religion, religion and politics, and religious ethics, with a particular interest in the modern period. He is the author of Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017), as well as articles on medieval and modern thinkers such as Moses Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza, Nachman Krochmal, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Jacob Taubes. Sacks also published some of the first English translations of Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings in Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible (Brandeis University Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.

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