IJCR Upcoming Events

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 5:00 - 6:30 pm 

Teletorium in Mandeville Hall (campus map)  

Relations between Christians and Jews are experiencing unprecedented stresses. Wars and mass violence around the world are unfolding at the intersection of the crisis of liberalism and the rise of authoritarianism, the shift of Christianity to the Global South, and the differences between Israeli and Diasporic Judaism. Even finding the right language to speak together under such circumstances is challenging. Join us as a leading scholar of religions, society, and politics considers interreligious relations in the present climate.  

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Karma Ben-Johanan is an associate professor in the faculty of the Department
of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she teaches the history of religions in modernity, contemporary Christianity, history and theory of secularism, and Jewish-Christian relations. She is the author of, Jacob's Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Harvard University Press, 2022), and the recipient of the Dan David Prize for the study of the past (2023), and the Mount Zion Award for promoting Catholic-Jewish relations (2025). 

Monday, October 5, 2026, 5:00 - 6:30 pm

Teletorium in Mandeville Hall (campus map) [tentative]

Scriptural interpretation has always had a significant part to play in Jewish-Christian relations: interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, obviously, inasmuch as it is regarded as scripture by both Jews and Christians; but also the New Testament, which is regarded as scripture by Christians only but nevertheless has a lot to do with Judaism, in regard to both provenance and subject matter. Twenty-first-century New Testament studies have directed a lot of scholarly energy to the Jewish context of the New Testament, which has so far proved both a boon and an obstacle to constructive Jewish-Christian relations, as this program will demonstrate.  

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Matthew Novenson is the Helen H. P. Manson Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of Christ among the Messiahs, The Grammar of Messianism, Paul, Then and Now, and Paul and Judaism at the End of History, among other works. 

Tuesday, November 17, 2026, 5:00-6:30 PM 

Teletorium in Mandeville Hall (campus map) 

The fact of Jesus’s Jewishness should be so obvious as to need no discussion. Despite the clear statements in the New Testament, there have been many people, from the second century to the present, who have denied and/or qualified Jesus’ Jewishness, and others for whom his Jewish identity comes as a surprise. 

This program will trace the development of these perspectives, from the unequivocally Jewish Jesus of the Gospels, to the “baptism” of Jesus as a Christian at the hands of the Church Fathers and later theologians, to the Nazi “Aryan Jesus,” and to Jesus’s “reconversion” to Judaism in the 20th century. It will suggest that uneasiness about Jesus’ Jewishness, while shaped primarily by historical and social factors over the millennia, can be detected even in the Gospels themselves, as the evangelists, like later theologians, were trying to square Jesus’ Jewish identity with the increasingly Gentile composition of the Jesus movement. 

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Dr. Adele Reinhartz is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. Her main research areas are the Gospel of John, ancient Jewish/Christian relations, and Bible and Film. In 2021 she won the Konrad Adenauer Prize, awarded to one Canadian annually by the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Her most recent book is Ethics in the Fourth Gospel (2025).