Deborah Forger

Deborah Forger is an American scholar, at Dartmouth College (USA).

Biography

A postdoctoral scholar (2018–2021) in the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College, Forger is a scholar of Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament, with an additional focus in early Jewish-Christian relations. She was a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic studies and received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where she was awarded the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship, a multi-year national dissertation award. Though later polemics suggest that Jews and Christians differentiated themselves based on their view of God’s body, her work complicates this picture by analyzing how first-century Jews envisioned God in corporeal form and humans as divine. She is also interested in questions of where, how, and when the ways parted between Jews and Christians, and how scriptural hermeneutics impacted, complicated, impinged upon, and fortified those separations.

Works

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

• "Hearing God's Word(s): Aurality, Epistemology, and Embodiment in the Gospel of John." Journal for the Study of the New Testament 42.3 (2020): 274-302.

• "God Made Manifest: Josephus, Idolatry, and Divine Images in Flavian Rome." Journal for the Study of Judaism 51 (2020): 231-260.

• “Divine Embodiment in Philo of Alexandria.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 49.2 (2018): 223–262.

• “Interpreting the Syrophoenician Woman to Construct Jewish-Christian Fault Lines: John Chrysostom and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilist in Chrono-Locational Perspective.” Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting 3 (2016): 132–166.

Chapters

• "The Pharisees in Modern Scholarship," with Susannah Heschel. In The Pharisees and Their History of Interpretation, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Joseph Sievers, Eerdmans, in preparation.

• “Christian Antisemitism," with Susannah Heschel. In The History of Antisemitism ed. Weitzman, Routledge, forthcoming.

• “Bodies,” in Jews and the Material in Antiquity, eds. C. Mike Chin, Chaya Halberstam, and R. Neis. Frankel Institute Annual. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2018): 13–15.

• “Shifting Views of Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife in the Second Century CE,” in Heaven, Hell, and Afterlife: Eternity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and Other Interesting Traditions, vol. 2. Ed. J. Harold Ellens; Westport, CT: ABC-CLIO Praeger (2013): 61–81.