Neusner, Famed Scholar, <br>Remembered at Bard <br>For Life of Jewish Learning

Jacob Neusner wrote, in his report to his Harvard classmates for his 30th college reunion, “When I came to Harvard in 1950, I was so enthralled with this new world…that I just did not want to go home. I stayed at the college the entire year and did not take any of the vacations. I had the odd fear that if I left that enchanted place, it might not be there when I got back.”That was read Monday at the memorial service for Neusner, who died Saturday at the age of 84. The service was at Bard College, where he taught for a generation of students. It was a spectacular autumn day, with leaves in blazing color on the campus, which overlooks the Hudson River.Among the Harvard teachers whose brilliance so impressed Neusner was Thomas Kuhn. When Neusner encountered him, Kuhn was in his late 20s, and it would be another dozen years before he published the book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” that made him famous. But as revolutionaries, or Kuhnian paradigm-shifters, go, Neusner, who died over the weekend, was right up there in the tradition of Galileo and Copernicus, a pioneering intellect, ferocious both in the volume and quality of his output and his ability to prevail in academic debates.This was true in religious studies, where Neusner took the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Mishna and the Talmud, translated them into English, and explained how they functioned to sustain rabbinic Judaism and influence and interact with early Christianity. A recent biography called him “the most important American-born Jewish thinker this country has produced,” a conclusion that Shaul Magid, writing in Tablet, described as “actually quite reasonable.”One example of his work was Neusner’s 1993 book “A Rabbi Talks With Jesus.” Neusner always said a book had a way of eventually finding its way to the right audience. This one found its way to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger wrote of the book’s “absolute honesty, the precision of analysis, the union of respect for the other party with carefully grounded loyalty to one’s own position.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called it “a tour de force.”Neusner’s trendsetting was also on display in American Judaism, where he was one of the first to warn, accurately, that Israel and the Holocaust would be inadequate as pillars to sustain American Jewish identity. He was also in the forefront of what might be called a turn to tradition from secularism, studying at the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem in the late 1950s, as another Tablet piece recalled.(The man who is now the editor of The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky, first met Neusner and his wife, Suzanne, at a Shabbat dinner at their home in Providence. When the then-Brown professor heard of Mr. Lipsky’s dream to bring out in English a new edition of the famed Jewish Forward, he suggested Mr. Lipsky phone one of his former students, Tom Tisch. For Mr. Lipsky, it was the beginning of a long friendship with both of them.)In an affectionate eulogy, one of Neusner’s sons, Noam, who served in the George W. Bush administration, recalled his father forbidding his children from participating in high school sports because the games conflicted with Shabbat dinner. And he was also on the vanguard in politics, where Neusner’s turn to the right — he was a Reagan appointee to the National Endowment for the Arts during the culture wars — foreshadowed a broader shift by a significant number of American Jewish intellectuals.For all his accomplishments — he held honorary doctorates, and his books numbered more than 900 (by one count even 1,000) — Neusner remained remarkably grounded and humble, engaged with his wife, children, and grandchildren. Over the summer, he sent an email praising the new occupant of Bard College’s Jacob Neusner chair in the history and theology of Judaism, Shai Secunda, as having “already surpassed my work” on the history of Jews in Babylonia.Bard itself bears mentioning as an important part of Neusner’s story, with that college’s president, Leon Botstein, hiring Neusner in 1994. He stayed for 20 years, collaborating productively with a Christian scholar, Bruce Chilton, at Bard’s Institute of Advanced Theology. At the memorial service Monday, Botstein spoke of Neusner’s collegiality and of the importance of the humanities, a point underscored by some of the speakers who followed.One former student, Jewelnel Davis, told of how she showed up at Brown as a first-generation college student, the daughter of parents who had completed third and fifth grade. Neusner helped her understand how to meet the academic expectations. Eventually he recommended that she pursue a career as a university chaplain. She replied, “How many African-American university chaplains do you think there are?” Neusner said she shouldn’t let that stop her. And she’s been the university chaplain at Columbia for the past 20 years.Among Neusner’s many unwritten legacies is a generation of students for whom he was their version of the brilliant and inspiring teachers that he himself encountered at Harvard in the 1950s. “The name of the university means little, the name of the professor much,” Neusner wrote.The headlines are full of bad news from our campuses — speech suppression, doctrinaire leftism, rape. Neusner’s career, in contrast, is vital, consequential, romantic. It is a reminder of the best of the academy, its creativity and its heterodoxy, there to be discovered in the study of ancient Jewish texts just as much in computer science or environmental and gender studies. One wishes for today’s undergraduates — whether at Harvard, at Bard, or somewhere else — that they are blessed to encounter teachers as open-minded, dedicated, challenging, humble, and rigorous as Neusner.Mr. Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com.

Neusner, Famed Scholar, <br>Remembered at Bard <br>For Life of Jewish Learning

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