March 18, 2003

Contact: Sarah Ray

802-443-5794

sray@middlebury.edu

Posted: March 18, 2003

MIDDLEBURY,

VT - Michael Fishbane, the Nathan Cummings Professor of Jewish Studies

at the University of Chicago, will give a lecture titled “Rabbinic

Myth and Mythmaking” on Thursday, April 3, at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium

of Middlebury College’s Twilight Hall on College Street (Route 125). Fishbane’s

talk is the 15th annual Hannah A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies, and

is free and open to the public.

Fishbane, who is also the chair of the University of Chicago Committee

on Jewish Studies, is the author or editor of 16 books and hundreds of

articles and reviews in scholarly journals and encyclopedias. Among his

works are “Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel,” “Garments

of Torah Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics,” “The Kiss of God,”

“Spiritual Death and Dying in Judaism,” and “The Exegetical

Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology.” “Biblical Interpretation

in Ancient Israel” and “The Kiss of God” won the National

Jewish Book Award in 1985 and 1994, respectively.

Fishbane

is the editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society Bible Commentary,

and is on the editorial board of several scholarly journals and book series.

The

recipient of many scholarly awards, Fishbane has been a Guggenheim Fellow

and twice a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University.

He is also an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Fishbane

received his doctorate from Brandeis University, where he taught for 20

years before moving to the University of Chicago. He has been a visiting

professor at Harvard, Stanford and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Hannah A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies was established in 1987

by Hannah A. Quint and her son Eliot Levinson of the Middlebury class

of 1964. The mandate of the lectureship is to provoke thought in the College,

the Middlebury community and the region on issues of the moment in Jewish

history, religion and culture. The event is sponsored by the Middlebury

College Religion Department.

For

more information, contact Charlene Barrett in the Middlebury College Religion

Department at cmbarret@middlebury.edu

or 802-443-5289.