A Symposium on the Work of Zev Garber: Reviews of Maven in Blue Jeans

Zev Garber, Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at Los Angeles Valley College, has made critical contributions to the academy through his scholarship, teaching, and leadership. The significance and range of his scholarly writings, that cover such fields as Holocaust Studies, Jewish theology, and American Jewish studies, are best underscored by the over five hundred page festschrift published in his honor in 2009, Maven in Blue Jeans: A Festschrift in Honor of Zev Garber, edited by Steven Jacobs. Garber’s leadership in the academy includes longstanding and ongoing roles in the National Association of Professors of Hebrew, the sponsor of this journal. He has served as its treasurer, secretary, vice president, and president, editor of its newsletter, Iggeret, and has organized regional and national meetings. The publication of the following essays in Hebrew Studies, which were presented at a joint session of the meetings of the Western region of the American Academy of Religion and the Western Jewish Studies Association on March 14, 2010, is an additional fitting tribute to Zev’s scholarly endeavors.

The papers analyze Garber’s own work directly or situate it in relationship to some of the essays in Maven in Blue Jeans. Gereboff deciphers the hermeneutics of Garber’s use of biblical and rabbinic sources in his various essays. Sabbath employs in a very novel way notions of types of speech in an examination of Garber’s writings and academic efforts. Jacobs and Greenspoon take up respectively essays in the festschrift on Jewish Christian relations and biblical studies. Silverman advances an argument regarding the Jewishness of Edith Stein, a person on whom Garber has also written. The symposium concludes with a response by Zev Garber to these papers. Together these essays offer further insights into the work of Zev Garber and some of the critical issues of his scholarship.