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Hillel Levine

Boston University, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Emeritus

Boston University, Department of Religion College of Arts and Science, Emeritus

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For more than 40 years, Professor Hillel Levine has been devoted to undergraduate, graduate, professional, and adult non-professional education at Harvard, Yale, and now as Professor of Sociology and Religion at Boston University. He has held visiting professorships in Japan, China, Poland, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and Israel, and enjoys the friendship of several generations of accomplished former students.Professor Levine has written five books and many articles on ethnic violence, normative conflict and how they may be resolved. His research provided the basis for an Oscar-winning documentary and two of his books are being made into documentaries and a feature-length dramatization. He is a popular lecturer, guest-columnist in newspapers, and makes frequent radio and television appearances. He is also the President of the International Center for Conciliation, an NGO organized to reduce "shame and blame," and to resolve violent conflicts that are made all the more volatile by disputed histories and memories of past injuries.

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Papers by Hillel Levine

Hillel Zeitlin and Jewish Mysticism in P (1)

Kelman, Ilan. Acting on Disaster Diplomacy

RabbiYosesLaundry (1)

The History of a Flagrant Voice and the History of an Idea MY DIALOGUE WITH Elie Wiesel began in ... more The History of a Flagrant Voice and the History of an Idea MY DIALOGUE WITH Elie Wiesel began in the mid-1960s. Entering his solitary garret, perched over New York's Riverside Drive, was entering a garden of enchantment as much as it was experiencing that shock of ultimate reality. Legend and quotidian existence abided. Telephone calls from distressed people in distant lands, sudden appearances of semi-mythical characters at the door provided interludes to conversation spanning the personal and the cosmic. Piles of books and manuscripts obscured lower parts of windows overlooking the Hudson River. It was a time of reflection and activism and a few young Jews, as Jews, wanted to be involved ill both. We were shaped by what might be described as a golden age of American Jewish security and achievement. Americans, it seemed, had learned one most important lesson of the Holocaust-the dangers of antisemi-tism-though American Jews themselves would partake in the collective forgetting and repression of the details. The doors to the suburbs, the academy, the professions were largely open even as the windows of memory were closed. Some of us had that uncomfortable feeling that not everything truly was getting "bigger and better." The man whose writing and inexhaustable lecturing were beginning to stir a much delayed confrontation with the Holocaust, who was presenting the first reports that elegies for an additional three million Jews behind the Iron Curtain work altogether premature, who was challenging Jews and their neighbors to engage Israel with more than charity and political support was himself never too busy to be with those in search and to share his inimitable melancholy mirth. The Jewish sacred festivals in Hebrew arc identified with feet. Yet, in the spiritual ascent to Jerusalem or, as associated centuries later with the visit to the Hasidic Master, feet indeed would be an unnecessary apparatus of conveyance. I would enter and leave the presence of a teacher with that floating sensation. Those visits transformed my life. More than anyone in our times, on several continents and among people of different religions and backgrounds, Elie Wiesel helped sundry 'Jews of Silence" explore the depth of their silence and thereby discover their truest voices. He adjured us to "hear the voice of the oppressed" while teaching us the language of the oppressors. His intellectual and moral leadership are unique. With more gratitude than I could possibly express in decades of inspired friendship, I offer thoughts about a worthy antecessor. Rabbi Yose, the son of Halafta, lived in the middle of the second century, CE, in a time that succeeded a major catastrophe, a time not unlike ours. This was the generation that witnessed the abortive Bar Kokhba rebellion ending in mass destruction. Yose's beloved teacher, Akiva, and other rabbis chose martyrdom. During the relatively calm period that followed the abrogation of the Hadrianic decrees of the Roman Emperor, Rabbi Yose and his colleagues fostered a renaissance which mightily shaped nearly two millennia of diaspora Judaism. 5. This again was the situation in medieval Ashkenaz when the rabbis expressed reticence towards martyrdom.

Going on Faith : Writing as a Spiritual Quest

Marlowe, 1999

Grand Delusions: The Cosmic Career of John De Lorean

The Kronika-on Jacob frank and the Frankist movement/ edited and translated by Hillel Levine

The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions

History: Reviews of New Books, 1993

In search of Sugihara: the elusive Japanese diplomat who risked his life to rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust

Choice Reviews Online

On August 2, 1940, as on every other morning for weeks before, a long line of Jewish refugees wai... more On August 2, 1940, as on every other morning for weeks before, a long line of Jewish refugees waited outside the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. Many had already witnessed Nazi atrocities in Poland and other Axis-occupied lands, and they were desperate to escape. To leave Europe they needed foreign transit visas. And at the window, the smiling Japanese consul was issuing them. Before his government closed down the consulate and reassigned him to Berlin, he would issue thousands of such visas. This is the story of Chiune Sugihara, a diplomat and spy who saved as many as 10,000 Jews from deportation to concentration camps and almost certain death, Because of his extreme modesty, Sugihara's tremendous act of moral courage is only now beginning to become widely known. Unlike Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat whose government sent him to Hungary with the express purpose of saving Jews, and Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who at least initially had a vested economic interest in protecting the lives of "his Jews," Sugihara had no apparent reason to perform his acts of rescue. Indeed, he acted in direct violation of official Japanese policy, which directed all government and military personnel to cooperate with the murderous policies of their Nazi allies. Examining Sugihara's education and background -- a background shared with the colonial administrators and military men who committed "the rape of Nanjing" -- author Hillel Levine finds nothing that explains his extraordinary behavior. Levine's search has taken him from the old Japanese consul building in Kaunas (now Kovno), Lithuania, to the Australian outback; across Japan from the rice fields ofSugihara's native town to the boardrooms of conglomerates where his younger schoolmates still hold power. But the more Levine sought answers to Sugihara's puzzling behavior, the more he encountered questions. Remarkably, Chiune Sugihara was not the only Japanese official to save Jews. Yet none was ever punished for insubordination. Was there a secret Japanese plan to save Jews from Nazi genocide? Much Holocaust scholarship focuses on the perpetrators of evil, trying to illuminate what drove ordinary men and women to commit horrifying and murderous acts. But perhaps as difficult to understand is the phenomenon of rescue: what inspired courageous individuals to swim against the tide of cruelty and indifference. This sensitive and nuanced biography concludes that there is no link between a person's background and his moral inclinations. Mercy remains a divine mystery despite our human craving to reduce it to behavioristic formulas. This book does not attempt to explain "man's humanity to man." Instead Levine has woven a fascinating narrative of one man's heroic efforts to save lives, in the midst of so many seeking to destroy them.

Maimonides and the Sciences

Page 1. Maimonides and the Sciences Edited by Robert S. Cohen and Hillel Levine Page 2. Page 3. M... more

On Nations and Nationalities

Worldview

We Were Like Dreamers

Worldview

Soviet Jews and Middle-Aged Zionism

Worldview

Ideology is a discredited term in some circles. The geopolitical map of the twentieth century is ... more Ideology is a discredited term in some circles. The geopolitical map of the twentieth century is pockmarked with ideologies gone bad. With the Utopian thinking of the Enlightenment came the conviction that “Ideals can transform reality.” But ideologies that undermined one repressive order in the name of progress became the zealous gods of another. Ideologists credit their Idea with omnipotence, borrowing the techniques of medieval casuistry) to reduce the more blatant discrepancies between the ideal and real.It is true, streets plastered with slogans and millions of people waving little red books are frightening. But the possibility that the technocrats shall inherit the earth is also somewhat disconcerting. The excesses to which “total” ideologies lend themselves should not blind us to other aspects of the ideological enterprise; bloody revolutions and totalitarian regimes do not exhaust the possibilities.

American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937-1969 by Alfred O. HeroJr. , (Duke University Press; 552 pp.; $9.75)

Worldview

Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period

The American Historical Review, 1992

An Open Letter to Father Daniel Berrigan

Worldview

Sugihara's List

The New York times OP-ED, 1994

How a Japanese diplomat saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis

Between Social Legitimation and Moral Legitimacy in Military Commitment

Legitimacy and Commitment in the Military, 1990

Memories of Mandarin Rabbis

The Jerusalem Post , 1989

"WHODUNIT?" : RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE AND THE SECULARIZATION OF LAW

HUMANITIES IN SOCIETY, VOL. 2 NO. 2, 1979

Milano interview on natural disasters and reconciliation 04 2015 copy

Hillel Zeitlin and Jewish Mysticism in P (1)

Kelman, Ilan. Acting on Disaster Diplomacy

RabbiYosesLaundry (1)

The History of a Flagrant Voice and the History of an Idea MY DIALOGUE WITH Elie Wiesel began in ... more The History of a Flagrant Voice and the History of an Idea MY DIALOGUE WITH Elie Wiesel began in the mid-1960s. Entering his solitary garret, perched over New York's Riverside Drive, was entering a garden of enchantment as much as it was experiencing that shock of ultimate reality. Legend and quotidian existence abided. Telephone calls from distressed people in distant lands, sudden appearances of semi-mythical characters at the door provided interludes to conversation spanning the personal and the cosmic. Piles of books and manuscripts obscured lower parts of windows overlooking the Hudson River. It was a time of reflection and activism and a few young Jews, as Jews, wanted to be involved ill both. We were shaped by what might be described as a golden age of American Jewish security and achievement. Americans, it seemed, had learned one most important lesson of the Holocaust-the dangers of antisemi-tism-though American Jews themselves would partake in the collective forgetting and repression of the details. The doors to the suburbs, the academy, the professions were largely open even as the windows of memory were closed. Some of us had that uncomfortable feeling that not everything truly was getting "bigger and better." The man whose writing and inexhaustable lecturing were beginning to stir a much delayed confrontation with the Holocaust, who was presenting the first reports that elegies for an additional three million Jews behind the Iron Curtain work altogether premature, who was challenging Jews and their neighbors to engage Israel with more than charity and political support was himself never too busy to be with those in search and to share his inimitable melancholy mirth. The Jewish sacred festivals in Hebrew arc identified with feet. Yet, in the spiritual ascent to Jerusalem or, as associated centuries later with the visit to the Hasidic Master, feet indeed would be an unnecessary apparatus of conveyance. I would enter and leave the presence of a teacher with that floating sensation. Those visits transformed my life. More than anyone in our times, on several continents and among people of different religions and backgrounds, Elie Wiesel helped sundry 'Jews of Silence" explore the depth of their silence and thereby discover their truest voices. He adjured us to "hear the voice of the oppressed" while teaching us the language of the oppressors. His intellectual and moral leadership are unique. With more gratitude than I could possibly express in decades of inspired friendship, I offer thoughts about a worthy antecessor. Rabbi Yose, the son of Halafta, lived in the middle of the second century, CE, in a time that succeeded a major catastrophe, a time not unlike ours. This was the generation that witnessed the abortive Bar Kokhba rebellion ending in mass destruction. Yose's beloved teacher, Akiva, and other rabbis chose martyrdom. During the relatively calm period that followed the abrogation of the Hadrianic decrees of the Roman Emperor, Rabbi Yose and his colleagues fostered a renaissance which mightily shaped nearly two millennia of diaspora Judaism. 5. This again was the situation in medieval Ashkenaz when the rabbis expressed reticence towards martyrdom.

Going on Faith : Writing as a Spiritual Quest

Marlowe, 1999

Grand Delusions: The Cosmic Career of John De Lorean

The Kronika-on Jacob frank and the Frankist movement/ edited and translated by Hillel Levine

The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions

History: Reviews of New Books, 1993

In search of Sugihara: the elusive Japanese diplomat who risked his life to rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust

Choice Reviews Online

On August 2, 1940, as on every other morning for weeks before, a long line of Jewish refugees wai... more On August 2, 1940, as on every other morning for weeks before, a long line of Jewish refugees waited outside the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. Many had already witnessed Nazi atrocities in Poland and other Axis-occupied lands, and they were desperate to escape. To leave Europe they needed foreign transit visas. And at the window, the smiling Japanese consul was issuing them. Before his government closed down the consulate and reassigned him to Berlin, he would issue thousands of such visas. This is the story of Chiune Sugihara, a diplomat and spy who saved as many as 10,000 Jews from deportation to concentration camps and almost certain death, Because of his extreme modesty, Sugihara's tremendous act of moral courage is only now beginning to become widely known. Unlike Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat whose government sent him to Hungary with the express purpose of saving Jews, and Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who at least initially had a vested economic interest in protecting the lives of "his Jews," Sugihara had no apparent reason to perform his acts of rescue. Indeed, he acted in direct violation of official Japanese policy, which directed all government and military personnel to cooperate with the murderous policies of their Nazi allies. Examining Sugihara's education and background -- a background shared with the colonial administrators and military men who committed "the rape of Nanjing" -- author Hillel Levine finds nothing that explains his extraordinary behavior. Levine's search has taken him from the old Japanese consul building in Kaunas (now Kovno), Lithuania, to the Australian outback; across Japan from the rice fields ofSugihara's native town to the boardrooms of conglomerates where his younger schoolmates still hold power. But the more Levine sought answers to Sugihara's puzzling behavior, the more he encountered questions. Remarkably, Chiune Sugihara was not the only Japanese official to save Jews. Yet none was ever punished for insubordination. Was there a secret Japanese plan to save Jews from Nazi genocide? Much Holocaust scholarship focuses on the perpetrators of evil, trying to illuminate what drove ordinary men and women to commit horrifying and murderous acts. But perhaps as difficult to understand is the phenomenon of rescue: what inspired courageous individuals to swim against the tide of cruelty and indifference. This sensitive and nuanced biography concludes that there is no link between a person's background and his moral inclinations. Mercy remains a divine mystery despite our human craving to reduce it to behavioristic formulas. This book does not attempt to explain "man's humanity to man." Instead Levine has woven a fascinating narrative of one man's heroic efforts to save lives, in the midst of so many seeking to destroy them.

Maimonides and the Sciences

Page 1. Maimonides and the Sciences Edited by Robert S. Cohen and Hillel Levine Page 2. Page 3. M... more

On Nations and Nationalities

Worldview

We Were Like Dreamers

Worldview

Soviet Jews and Middle-Aged Zionism

Worldview

Ideology is a discredited term in some circles. The geopolitical map of the twentieth century is ... more Ideology is a discredited term in some circles. The geopolitical map of the twentieth century is pockmarked with ideologies gone bad. With the Utopian thinking of the Enlightenment came the conviction that “Ideals can transform reality.” But ideologies that undermined one repressive order in the name of progress became the zealous gods of another. Ideologists credit their Idea with omnipotence, borrowing the techniques of medieval casuistry) to reduce the more blatant discrepancies between the ideal and real.It is true, streets plastered with slogans and millions of people waving little red books are frightening. But the possibility that the technocrats shall inherit the earth is also somewhat disconcerting. The excesses to which “total” ideologies lend themselves should not blind us to other aspects of the ideological enterprise; bloody revolutions and totalitarian regimes do not exhaust the possibilities.

American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937-1969 by Alfred O. HeroJr. , (Duke University Press; 552 pp.; $9.75)

Worldview

Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period

The American Historical Review, 1992

An Open Letter to Father Daniel Berrigan

Worldview

Sugihara's List

The New York times OP-ED, 1994

How a Japanese diplomat saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis

Between Social Legitimation and Moral Legitimacy in Military Commitment

Legitimacy and Commitment in the Military, 1990

Memories of Mandarin Rabbis

The Jerusalem Post , 1989

"WHODUNIT?" : RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE AND THE SECULARIZATION OF LAW

HUMANITIES IN SOCIETY, VOL. 2 NO. 2, 1979

Milano interview on natural disasters and reconciliation 04 2015 copy

The New Jews, 1971

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, held in Jerusalem in 1961 and 1962.

THE KRONIKA - ON JACOB FRANK AND THE FRANKIST MOVEMENT

The Kronika - on Jacob Frank and Frankist movement, 1984

Frankism as Wordly Messianism

Gershom Scholem's Major trends in Jewish mysticism 50 years after : proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on the History of Jewish Mysticism, 1993

Evangelicals and Jews : Shared Nightmares and Common Cause

A time to speack, 1997

Paradise not Surrendered: Jewish Reactions to Copernicus and the Growth of Modern Science

Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences, 1983

This paper has examined a range of responses to Copernicus and the new cosmology within the Jewis... more

Jewish Literacy: Will More and More Be Known by Fewer and Fewer?

Chapter of the book "Imagining the Jewish Future: Essays and Responses," edited by David A. Teuts... more

Economic Origins of Antisemitism : Poland and its Jews in the Early Modern Period

Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and its Jews in the Early Modern Period, 1991

In this incisive examination of the economic roots of antisemitism, Hillel Levine traces the posi... more In this incisive examination of the economic roots of antisemitism, Hillel Levine traces the position of Jews in Poland from the end of the sixteenth century to the demise of the Polish state in 1795. Levine explains why Poland was not able to modernize its backward social, economic, and political system at a time when Western European countries were rapidly evolving, and he shows that Jews were blamed for this failure to modernize, fueling an economic antisemitism that contributed to the Holocaust and is with us still.