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Alan T. Levenson considers the fundamental issue of what one can and cannot achieve in a semester’s introduction to Jews and/or Judaism. He offers a minimalist, pedagogically driven compromise between coverage and concept, that is, a course that provides both historical development and Jewish concepts, practices, and doctrines. He discusses the assigments and organization of his survey course, which is divided into the four basic eras of Jewish history as defined by the first couple of generations of Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars. A syllabus is included.

This article explores the dissonance between the radicalism of Ahad Ha'am's essays such as “Ancestor Worship” (1897) and “Moses” (1904), and his defense of the Masoretic Text as the starting point for teaching the Bible and rejection of source criticism as a pedagogic tool in the Herzliya Gymnasium debate. While Ahad Ha'am consistently deployed the Bible as a tool for promoting national revival, his polemics against Yosef Haim Brenner's attempt to divorce national identity from cultural allegiance to the Bible, and against Claude G. Montefiore's attempt to place the New Testament on a Jewish pedestal, drove him to a more conservative position.

Levenson presents Nehama Leibowitz (1903–1997) as a principal figure in making the Bible a centerpiece of modern Jewish intellectual life. Complementing the already impressive literature on Leibowitz's pedagogical techniques, Levenson emphasizes the interdependence of Leibowitz's historical context, biography, and exegetical stance. Leibowitz's encounter with German intellectual life 1919–1930 gave her a means of synthesizing their early traditional upbringing with her later encounter with modernized culture in Israel. Leibowitz's inclusion of German commentators such as Hirsch, Buber-Rosenzweig, and Jacob mark her as a conscious modernist. The New Literary Criticism's focus on the received text allowed her to deploy heterodox and non-Zionist commentators with whom she was ideologically at odds.

The views of Jewish education articulated by Rosenzweig in his essays “It is Time” and in “The Opening of the Lehrhaus” are quite different. So different, in fact, that an account of how one mind can produce such different accounts is necessary. Following the lead of a 1950’s popular television quiz show, the authors ask “Will the Real Franz Rosenzweig Please Stand Up?” The authors end by exploring how the tensions within Rosenzweig's educational thinking can yield new insights into the contemporary challenges of Jewish education.

Franz Delitzsch (1812-1890) and Hermann Strack (1848-1922) were two missionary Protestants who were also leaders in the fight against antisemitism. Well-known figures in their own day, Strack and Delitzsch have been marginalized in studies of Protestant missionary efforts to convert Jews and also in the histories of anti-antisemitism in Imperial Germany. This essay argues that Jews and Judaism presented a difficult crux for both men, who were deeply involved in the world of Wissenschaft des Judenthums , personally and professionally. On the one hand, missionary Protestants upheld the physical and spiritual descent of Jesus from Judaism, rejected the antisemitic caricatures of Judaism found in both propagandists and scholarly literature of the period and evinced a genuine affection for rabbinic literature. Strack, in particular, played a unique role as someone who defended Judaism not from the secular Enlightenment perspective of universal tolerance, but from the perspective of a committed Christian who was also an expert on Jews and Judaism. On the other hand, Delitzsch and Strack held very conservative views regarding a wide range of Christian dogmas. They regarded Jewish (and Christian) scholarly speculation about the comparative truth-claims of Judaism and Christianity as offensive and were profoundly supersessionist in orientation. Strack's Einleitung in den Talmud offered an accurate and sympathetic characterization of rabbinic literature; his Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch offered a massive "demonstration" of the superiority of the New Testament material to the same. Both works became standards. Delitzsch and Strack represent a case study in ideational compartmentalization and constitute a parade example of what the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann has termed allosemitism.

"The Posen Factor" calls attention to the disproportionate and prominent role played in Jewish life during the Imperial period by Jews from the most "Jewish" part of the German Empire. Posen Jewry, in between German and Austro-Hungarian models, gave a special flavor to the community and proved a potent mixture of Jewish leadership.