Our topic for this year is:

As many of you may have seen "Dabru Emet" appeared as a full page NY Times ad on September 10th of this year. It was composed by four members of STR: David Novak, Peter Ochs, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, and Michael Signer, as later accompanied by David Sandmel. The ad was also signed by 150 rabbis, scholars, and Jewish leaders. A scholarly book, CHRISTIANITY IN JEWISH TERMS (Westview, 2000), appeared at the same time to explore of the issues of the statement in greater detail.

The co-chairs of this year's TR meeting, Aryeh Cohen and Nancy Levene, invited Peter Ochs and Steven Kepnes to co-chair our session this year on the text of the "Dabru Emet" Statement. So, we invite you all to examine the "Dabru Emet" statement beforehand as a text that we will then study in common in the fashion of our textual reasoning gatherings. The text may be examined online at its home on the ICJS website (Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies) :

http://www.icjs.org/what/njsp/dabruemet.html

We have also invited all of the thirty contributing authors of the Christianity In Jewish Terms book to join our discussion if they plan to be in Nashville.

As you will note, we have not attempted in this letter to characterize the goals and purposes of "Dabru Emet" for you, lest we interfere with your sense of the "plain sense" of this text as you read it.

Here is the general program information as it appears in the AAR program book:

AM147

Textual Reasoning Reception and Study Session

Sunday, November 19, 2000

7:00 pm-8:30 pm, in Jackson B

Textual Reasoning is an email discussion and journal dedicated to the investigation of Jewish texts from postmodern perspectives. The aim is to foster conversation between text scholars (i.e. "text" as Bible and post-biblical literature) and philosophically trained scholars (whose "texts" include modern and post-modern Jewish, Christian, and secular thought). Members of both the AAR and SBL are invited to attend. Refreshments will be served, and a business meeting will follow the study session.

For more information, please email Aryeh Cohen aryeh@uj.edu.

Looking forward to seeing you! Peter Ochs and Steven Kepnes