Richard L. Rubenstein is President Emeritus and Distinguished
Professor of Religion at the University
of Bridgeport. He served
as President of the University from January 1, 1995 until December 31, 1999 having previously served as Chairman
of the University’s Board of Trustees. Dr. Rubenstein is a Life Member
of the Board.
Dr. Rubenstein is also Lawton Distinguished Professor Emeritus
of Religion at Florida
State
University.
From 1970 to 1995 Rubenstein was a member of the faculty of Florida
State
University,
serving since 1977 as Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion.
He began his studies at the Hebrew
Union
College,
the theological seminary for Reform Judaism, and the University
of Cincinnati, from
which he received the A.B. degree. He received the Master of Hebrew
Literature and rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary
(Conservative), the Master of Theology (S.T.M) from Harvard
Divinity
School,
and the Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Religion from Harvard.
Rubenstein was a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute at Yale
University
(‘76-’'77). In 1977 Florida
State
University
named Rubenstein "Distinguished Professor of the Year," the
university's highest academic honor. In February 2001 the University
created the Richard L. Rubenstein Professorship of Religion. In 1987
the Jewish Theological Seminary conferred the degree of Doctor of Hebrew
Letters, honoris causa, upon him at its Centennial
Convocation. In 1999 Grand Valley State University Conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.
Rubenstein is a columnist for Sekai Nippo,
a Tokyo
daily newspaper, where is column on international
affairs appears reguilarly in Japanese.
He is a member of the Executive
Steering Committee and a Fellow of the Aegis Trust, a U.K.-based public
policy foundation dedicated to the worldwide prevention of genocide.
He also serves as a Director and member of the Executive
Committee of the U.K.-based Beth Shalom-Holocaust Memorial Centre. He
is a member of the Cosmos Club in Washington, the Harvard Club of New
York City, and Bridgeport Rotary. He has recently been named a Paul
Harris Fellow by Rotary International. He is a member of the Board of
Trustees of the United
Way of Eastern
Fairfield
County
(Connecticut)
and the Greater Bridgeport Public Educational Fund.
Rubenstein's books and articles have appeared in French, German,
Russian, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Swedish, Polish
and Hebrew. Among the countries in which he has lectured are France,
England,
Scotland,
Italy,
Federal Republic of Germany, the former German Democratic Republic,
Japan,
Korea,
the Philippines,
Poland,
Czechoslovakia,
Bulgaria,
Russia,
Canada
and Israel.
Among the doctoral
dissertations devoted to Rubenstein’s work are those of Didier Pollefeyt of Leuwen
University
in Belgium,
Dr. Klaus Rohmann of Germany
and Jocelyn Hellig of South
Africa. Rubenstein's contributions
to religious thought and the study of the Holocaust were the subject of a special session at the Annual Meeting
of the American Academic of Religion in New
Orleans, November 1990. Six
scholars presented papers dealing with different facets of his work
and he offered a response. Rubenstein’s contributions to theology have
recently been examined in depth by Zachary Braiterman of Syracuse
University
in (God) After Auschwitz
(Princeton University Press: 1999) and by Michael Morgan in Beyond
Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Thought in America (Oxford University
Press, 2001).
On January 8 and 9, 1994 Florida
State
University
sponsored a scholars conference on Rubenstein’s
work and a banquet in honor of his seventieth birthday. At the banquet
Rubenstein was presented with the manuscript of a Festschrift
in his honor to which 29 scholars from the United
States, England,
Germany,
and Israel
contributed. The Festschrift was published under the title What Kind of God? by the University Press
of America
in September 1995.
There is general agreement among theologians that Rubenstein’s
first book, After Auschwitz, (Bobbs-Merrill:1966) initiated the contemporary debate on the meaning of
the Holocaust in religious thought, both Jewish and Christian. A revised,
expanded edition was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in
1992. Among his other books are The
Cunning of History (Harper and Row: 1975), The
Age of Triage (Beacon Press: 1983), and Approaches
to Auschwitz (1986), co-authored
with John K. Roth.
An enlarged second edition will be published in June 2003 by Westminster/John
Knox Press and in England
by SCM Press. Writing in The New
York Review of Books (June 28, 1978) about The
Cunning of History, novelist William Styron commented: "Few
books possess the power to leave the reader with that feeling of awareness
which we call a sense of revelation. Richard L. Rubenstein's The Cunning of History seems to me to be one of these."
In addition to his historical and theological studies on the
Holocaust, Rubenstein has explored the psychological interpretation
of Judaism and Christianity in The Religious Imagination (Bobbs-Merrill: 1968; Beacon Press paperback) and My Brother Paul (Harper and Row: 1972),
a psychoanalytic study of Paul of Tarsus. The
Religious Imagination has been translated into French (Gallimard) and Italian (Ubaldini Editore). The Italian translation
won the Portico d'Ottavia Literary Prize in 1977.
Rubenstein is married to Dr. Betty Rogers Rubenstein, an art
historian and make their home in Fairfield,
Connecticut.