David Katz: Jewish professor moves to Turkey to teach Muslims about Christianity
David S. Katz’s academic subfield is ambitious — and sparsely populated. How many other Jewish scholars, let alone retired Israeli military captains, make a second academic home for themselves in the educational heartland of one of the world’s most populous Muslim countries in order to teach Christianity?
Katz, an Oxford-trained director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization at Tel Aviv University (where he also teaches Christianity to some Jewish students), says he enjoys his unusual scholarly perch. But Turkey, where he also teaches every other semester, makes him something of an outsider, too, he admits, and it’s the way that outsiders view the country that provides both a focal point for his current scholarship and the theme for a book he is now completing.
The American-born professor, already the author of a half-dozen well-received volumes examining a variety of intersections between European history and the Christian and Jewish religions, is currently working on a new book looking at the history of Anglo-American perceptions of his intellectual home away from home. His research takes place at a fortuitous time when Turkey’s cultural credentials for joining the European Union remain a subject of considerable academic and political debate.
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
Katz, an Oxford-trained director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization at Tel Aviv University (where he also teaches Christianity to some Jewish students), says he enjoys his unusual scholarly perch. But Turkey, where he also teaches every other semester, makes him something of an outsider, too, he admits, and it’s the way that outsiders view the country that provides both a focal point for his current scholarship and the theme for a book he is now completing.
The American-born professor, already the author of a half-dozen well-received volumes examining a variety of intersections between European history and the Christian and Jewish religions, is currently working on a new book looking at the history of Anglo-American perceptions of his intellectual home away from home. His research takes place at a fortuitous time when Turkey’s cultural credentials for joining the European Union remain a subject of considerable academic and political debate.