Professor Marc Brettler
Marc Brettler is the Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies and former chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. He has taught at Brandeis University, Yale University, Brown University, Wellesley College, Middlebury College, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also taught in various adult Jewish education settings, including the Wexner Heritage Program and the innovative Me’ah program in Boston, and he has served as scholar-in-residence for the Foundation for Jewish Studies. He is actively involved in many aspects of Jewish communal life and has served on the board of Boston’s Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center and Gann Academy—the New Jewish High School.
A graduate of Brandeis University, he has published and lectured widely on metaphor and the Bible, the nature of biblical historical texts, and gender issues and the Bible. He is co-editor of The Jewish Study Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 2004. The book won a National Jewish Book Award and was called “a masterpiece” in a review in the Times Literary Supplement. In 2006, he published How to Read the Bible (Jewish Publication Society), which has been called “an eye-opening journey through a familiar text, a fresh look at an old story” and was the award winner in the Judaism category of the Best Books 2006 Book Awards. A slightly revised version was published in paperback by Oxford University Press in 2007 as How to Read the Jewish Bible. Most recently, he co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament with Amy-Jill Levine, which was released in 2011, and his newest book, The Bible and the Believer, is being released in August 2012.
Other books are Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Israeli Hebrew, published by Yale University Press, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel and Reading the Book of Judges, published by Routledge. He served as an associate editor of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, and has contributed to all ten volumes of My People's Prayer Book, a commentary on the siddur, which won a National Jewish Book Award in 2008. He also wrote the section on “Our Biblical Heritage” in My People’s Passover Haggadah. He has written for The Forward, has appeared on the television series "Mysteries of the Bible," was heard on the National Public Radio show "All Things Considered," and was interviewed on “Fresh Air” by Terry Gross. While serving as a senior research fellow at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem, he began writing a commentary on Psalms 91-119 for the Jewish Publication Society Bible Commentary.
He is committed to applying innovative methods to classroom teaching, including teaching via the Internet, and is the recipient of the Michael A. Walzer Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Keter Torah Award from the Boston Bureau of Jewish Education. He spent has spent sabbaticals studying, teaching, and lecturing in Israel, England, China, and Japan.
