Publishers Weekly Looks at the ‘Genesis’ of Dr. Amy-Jill Levine’s Approach to the Bible

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at HIU, was recently featured in Publishers Weekly to discuss her new book “Genesis: A Beginner's Guide to the Beginning.” Prompted by the title, journalist Cathy Lynn Grossman asked Dr. Levine about her own beginnings, leading her to reflect on her early memories of interreligious dialogue.

Raised in a Jewish family in a predominantly Catholic Massachusetts town, seven-year-old Dr. Levine was riding the school bus when a little girl accused her of killing Jesus. Dr. Levine confronted her, telling her she would know she killed someone if she had done it. The girl, firm in her belief, responded that her priest had said so. Dr. Levine remembers weeping until her mother comforted her, telling her God was doing just fine. But a question lingered: why was that girl’s tradition saying horrible things about her? 

 “It was an early indication that, for Levine, raising challenging questions and driving for answers is an essential part of who she is,” Cathy Lynn Grossman wrote.

Searching for answers, Dr. Levine announced to her parents that she was going to go to after-school catechism class with her Catholic friends two days a week, in addition to her Hebrew school the other days. She wanted to find out where such hateful teaching came from and was determined to end antisemitism.

Through deliberate study, she learned where the teachings were parallel, and where they diverged. Based on this, she identified two key insights that sparked what ultimately became a career path.

According to Cathy Lynn Grossman, Amy-Jill Levine explained that the first insight she gained was that "we choose how to read."

"You can ask questions of the text, and you can come up with different answers," Dr. Levine told Publishers Weekly. "I realized one can read the New Testament and come out as an antisemite, or one can choose not to. I want to be able to teach this to other people so little Jewish kids don't get accused of killing God."

The second insight she got in classes with nuns was "everything that I was reading was Jewish history. The first person in literature ever called 'rabbi' is Jesus of Nazareth."

In the decades since, Dr. Levine has become a highly influential scholar and public intellectual, shaping interfaith relations and Christian-Jewish understanding worldwide while delivering close to 1,000 lectures on the Bible, religion, gender, and sexuality. This trajectory has made her a trusted authority on Biblical stories that puzzle readers, who frequently reach out to her or her publisher for clarification. As Dr. Levine explained in the Publishers Weekly interview, her new book, Genesis, is an answer to popular demand.

The book description reads: 

Genesis: A Beginner’s Guide to the Beginning invites readers into the foundational stories of the Old Testament with clarity, depth, and imagination. Amy-Jill Levine presents Genesis as a living text, one that continues to shape faith, identity, and our understanding of what it means to be human. These familiar stories are often heard in fragments; here, they are explored with care, curiosity, and theological insight. Read more or buy here.

Read the full Publishers Weekly article titled “The Genesis of Bible Scholar Amy-Jill Levine” here.