Reuven Firestone Lecture: Savagery and the Sacred: The Rhetoric of Terror and the Scriptural Monotheisms

Professor Reuven Firestone was born in northern California and educated at Antioch College, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Hebrew Union College, where he received his M.A. in Hebrew literature in 1980 and Rabbinic Ordination in 1982, and New York University where he received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1988. For his research on holy war in Islam and in Judaism he was awarded the Yad Hanadiv Research Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since 1993 he has served as professor of Medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. His publications have been translated into German, French, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Indonesian and Urdu. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Holy War in Judaism: The Fall and Rise of a Controversial Idea (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies, the Department of Religion, and Charles P. Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Studies