Studies in Bible and Feminist Criticism (JPS Scholar of Distinction Series)

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments It is hard to know whom to acknowledge and thank for help in work that has spanned over thirty years. First, I would like to thank Judith Lawrence, my secretary at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and Manuel Cruz, a Ph.D. candidate at the Divinity School, for their extensive efforts in preparing this manuscript and correcting the bibliography. I have been blessed over the years with secretaries and librarians who have been eager to do whatever was needed—and I thank them all for their assistance and encouragement. I have been fortunate to have had the guidance of wonderful teachers, from my undergraduate Bible professors H. L. Ginsberg, Yohanan Muffs, Shalom Paul, Moshe Held, and A.S. Halkin, through my graduate professors in Semitics and Assyriology Franz Rosenthal, Marvin Pope, J.J. Finklestein, and William Hallo. My sincere thanks also to my “adopted” teachers Thorkild Jacobsen and Moshe Greenberg, who have given of their time freely and generously over the years to discuss their work and mine. In the final analysis writing is a lonely business; but it is not done in a vacuum . I am conscious of my readers and their questions—a consciousness that is not abstract. I would like to thank my students at Wayne State University, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and the University of Chicago, as well as the many participants in adult education courses and lectures that I have given over the years. Little by little their interests have become mine; their questions have shaped the way I look at scripture; and their intellectual needs have urged me to write—to go beyond the lecture or the class. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues at the places where I have been fortunate to teach and learn. The faculty at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College was eager to discuss all matters of Jewish learning, and I learned a great deal from them during the years that I taught there. I have been fortunate to have had two stays at the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, a place wholly devoted to facilitating the work of its professors. My sincere thanks to the Divinity School of the University of ix Chicago, with its superb professors eager to stretch the boundaries of their knowledge through interdisciplinary work and discussion. I can not imagine a better place for me to work and I am deeply grateful to be there. These people and places have nourished me through the years in which I produced the articles assembled here. I am thankful for them all. Above all, I have been blessed with a wonderful family. I am grateful for my husband, Allan Kensky, who has stood with me and encouraged me during the times when I felt unstoppable, as well as during the times when I felt ready to give up the difficult struggle. His love, his companionship, and his intellect have nourished me, challenged me, and enabled me to continue. And I am grateful for my children from whom I have learned so much. I have learned from the love that I felt and feel for them, and continue to learn from the questions they pose and the matters they teach me as they demonstrate their keen intellects and accumulated knowledge. They have become my friends and my colleagues. Which brings me full circle to this book. I would like to thank my congregation , Beth Israel Congregation B’nai Emunah of Wilmette, Illinois, who enthusiastically helped defray some of the expenses entailed in such a project. And I am deeply grateful to the wonderful people at The Jewish Publication Society, without whom this book would never have come into being. First of all, Ellen Frankel, Editor-in-Chief and CEO of JPS, who conceived of the project and, working with her board, named me as a JPS Scholar of Distinction—an honor for which I am sincerely grateful. I am honored and moved by the distinguished company I keep and am happily aware that not only am I the first woman to be so honored, but also the first of my generation of scholars. I now take my place among some of the great scholars who have taught me. Next, my thanks to my wonderful editor, Rena Potok, who collected and selected the articles to be included and who gently nudged me to finish writing the introduction and translating the “Theology of Catastrophe.” And finally, Janet Liss, who was in charge...