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Nanette Shaw
CUNY Graduate Center alumnus James L. Kugel has been named winner of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Religion for 2001. Currently on the faculty at Harvard, Professor Kugel received the award for his groundbreaking book The Bible As It Was (Harvard University Press, 1997). The award, which comes with a $200,000 prize, is given by the University of Louisville and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The Grawemeyer Award honors accomplishments that "help make the world a better place" in the fields of education, international affairs, music composition, and psychology. It was established in the 1980s by University of Louisville alumnus and philanthropist H. Charles Grawemeyer, who died in 1993. Professor Kugel received his Ph.D. from The CUNY Graduate Center’s Comparative Literature Program in 1977. Harry Starr Professor of Classical, Modern Jewish, and Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, he is recognized as one of America’s foremost biblical scholars. An orthodox Jew, he is director of the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, a member of the faculty at Harvard’s Divinity School, and visiting professor of Bible studies at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He earned his undergraduate degree in European poetry at Yale, worked as a journalist, including a stint as poetry editor at Harper’s magazine, joined Harvard’s Society of Fellows in 1972, and has taught at Harvard since 1982, following three years as assistant professor of religious studies and comparative literature at Yale. Professor Kugel has written dozens of scholarly articles and eight books including On Being a Jew and The Great Poems of the Bible; he has also worked extensively on the Dead Sea Scrolls and is currently co-editing a new edition of them. In The Bible As It Was, Professor Kugel examines the earliest interpretations of the Pentateuch (books Genesis through Deuteronomy) in order to uncover what have become, by our era, standard assumptions about the Hebrew Bible’s teachings. He demonstrates that certain understandings of the Bible were widespread among both early Christian and Jewish readers of the religious text. These interpretations, according to Kugel’s book, were the result of painstaking analysis and exegesis. In many cases, these interpretations live on in the form of unquestioned assumptions about the Bible, its meanings, and its intent. Furthermore, in The Bible As It Was, Professor Kugel demonstrates that both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism emerged from a "common mentality including... a common set of beliefs about the Bible." The Bible As It Was has been published in two editions. The shorter version is intended for the general reader as well as for introductory-level classes at colleges, universities, and seminaries. The longer version, Traditions of the Bible, is over 1,000 pages long, is heavily footnoted, and presents a far more complete and deep survey of materials. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York, the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, The Graduate Center draws its faculty of more than 1,600 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, The Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 32 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Graduate Center also houses 28 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its Web site at: www.gc.cuny.edu. |