Dan Cohn-Sherbok

Dan Cohn-Sherbok is a Reform rabbi, theologian, and professor emeritus of Judaism whose career spans five decades of prolific scholarship at the intersection of Jewish thought, interfaith dialogue, and the contested edges of religious identity.

He was born on February 1, 1945, in Denver, Colorado, the son of Bernard Sherbok, an orthopedic surgeon, and Ruth Sherbok, née Goldstein. The family’s roots stretched back to New York City and Hungary. Postwar Denver had a clear social geography: certain residential streets didn’t sell to Jews or African Americans, and both the Country Club and the University Club kept their doors shut to Jewish members. Cohn-Sherbok has recalled that whatever his family’s standing, he understood early that the door to the Gentile world was firmly shut. His parents were listed in Denver’s social register; the underlying arithmetic didn’t change. That experience of being simultaneously inside and outside a society, accomplished and still marginalised, runs beneath much of his later intellectual preoccupation with Jewish survival, antisemitism, and the paradoxes of assimilation.

He attended East High School in Denver and then went to Williams College in Massachusetts, a small, selective, at the time all-male institution that he has described as alienating and which left him with a sense of displacement. During his junior year he studied abroad in Athens, Greece, a formative detour that put him at an early distance from both the American campus culture he’d found hostile and the Reform Jewish milieu in which he’d grown up. After Williams he trained for the rabbinate at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the flagship institution of American Reform Judaism, where he was ordained. He later enrolled at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and completed a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. It was at Cambridge that he met Lavinia, who would become his wife and frequent co-author. She later became headmistress of West Heath School in Kent, the school Princess Diana attended, and from 1980 to 1987 she taught Religious Studies at King’s School, Canterbury, where she was the only full-time female member of the teaching staff.

There is a biographical thread that Cohn-Sherbok has addressed publicly and without apparent shame. He was conceived through sperm donation at the University of Chicago Medical School in 1945, when donor insemination was a new and largely undisclosed medical technique. A medical student at the university donated his sperm anonymously; Cohn-Sherbok has never sought to identify him. His parents didn’t tell him how he was conceived. He found out in his twenties, and his first response was, as he later put it, complicated. He has described the discovery as “traumatic” in some accounts, and in others as something closer to liberation: it explained what had puzzled him throughout childhood, that he and the man he’d thought was his father were simply different people, different in temperament, in interests, in appearance, with little between them to explain. Once he knew, he has written, it was as though a missing piece had finally slotted into place. He has since written publicly about donor conception, arguing that secrecy is a mistake and that the truth is not a nasty secret but, as he has put it, “a cause for gratitude”: “I literally owe my life to them.” His perspective on his own origins has shaped his view of Jewish identity more broadly. Identity, for Cohn-Sherbok, isn’t simply inherited; it’s chosen, cultivated, sometimes surprising.

He served as a rabbi in the United States before moving abroad, and over the following decades he held congregational and chaplaincy positions in England, Australia, and South Africa. For a period he was Chaplain to the Colorado House of Representatives, and he also held the honorary title of Colonel Aide-de-Camp of New Mexico. In 1975 he joined the University of Kent at Canterbury as a lecturer in theology, and he and Lavinia settled in Kent, where they remained for more than two decades. At Kent he chaired the Board of Theology and Religious Studies from 1980 to 1982, then directed the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society from 1982 to 1990, and later convened the Canterbury Theological Network from 1992. He also broadcast on television and radio during this period, reaching audiences well outside the seminar room.

Love, sex and marriage

insights from Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Dan Cohn-Sherbok

2013 | 262 pages

Jewish mysticism

an anthology

Dan Cohn-Sherbok

1995 | 210 pages

Judaism and other faiths

Dan Cohn-Sherbok

1994 | 186 pages

In 1997 he was appointed Professor of Judaism at the University of Wales, Lampeter, and he and Lavinia moved from Kent to a farmhouse in the Welsh countryside, their nearest neighbours, as one interviewer memorably observed, being sheep. The Lampeter years were academically productive and institutionally stable. He subsequently received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. He held visiting professorships at a remarkable range of institutions: University of Essex, Middlesex University, St Andrews, Durham, Vilnius University in Lithuania, Charles University in Prague, York St John University, and St Mary’s University, Twickenham, among others. That breadth of institutional presence, across Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, reflects something deliberate: a commitment to carrying Jewish studies into corners of European academic life where it had little foothold.

The bibliography is staggering, and worth sitting with for a moment.

By the early 2000s Cohn-Sherbok had authored or edited more than eighty books. They cover an enormous range: Holocaust theology, Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah, medieval and modern Jewish philosophy, the Palestine-Israel conflict, messianic Judaism, interfaith theology, Jewish petitionary prayer, and Jewish-Christian relations. He also produced the reference works that practitioners and students actually reach for. A Dictionary of Judaica appeared in 1992, alongside A Dictionary of Judaism and Christianity the same year. The Atlas of Jewish History followed in 1993. 50 Key Jewish Thinkers appeared in 1997, and A Short History of Judaism was also published in 1994 alongside A Popular Dictionary of Judaism. He has written for general readers and specialist scholars simultaneously, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Holocaust Theology, first published in 1989 and revisited in a 2002 edition, engages seriously with the theological rupture the Shoah poses for Jewish belief without tidying it away. The Jewish Messiah (1997) traces messianic expectation across centuries. Interfaith Theology (2001) makes the case that serious theological engagement across traditions isn’t a compromise but a necessity. Modern Jewish Philosophy (1996) and its companion volume Medieval Jewish Philosophy (1996) together form a systematic survey of the intellectual tradition. God and the Holocaust (1996) returned to questions he’d first raised in Holocaust Theology, pressing them further. He also co-authored After Noah (1996) with Andrew Linzey, the theologian of animal ethics, extending his range into questions of environmental and creaturely responsibility.

His edited volumes are, if anything, even more indicative of where his energies lay. The Salman Rushdie Controversy in Interreligious Perspective (1990) put Jewish, Christian, and Muslim voices into dialogue on a crisis that exposed the fault lines of liberal pluralism. The World’s Religions and Human Liberation (1992) brought together thinkers from across the tradition map. Islam in a World of Diverse Faiths (1991) did similar work for Islamic thought in particular. Many Mansions: Interfaith and Religious Intolerance (1992) named the problem directly. He also edited collections honouring specific figures: Tradition and Unity: Sermons in Honour of Robert Runcie (1990), paying tribute to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, and A Traditional Quest: Essays in Honour of Louis Jacobs (1991), honouring the British rabbi and theologian who had been at the centre of one of Anglo-Jewry’s most significant doctrinal disputes. That he chose to mark Jacobs specifically says something: Jacobs had argued for a historically grounded, intellectually honest approach to Jewish law that the Orthodox establishment found threatening. Cohn-Sherbok’s alignment with that project wasn’t incidental.

Among his more contested contributions is The Paradox of Anti-Semitism, published by Continuum, in which he argues that antisemitism has paradoxically served as a mechanism of Jewish survival. The thesis is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Ghetto conditions enforced Talmud study and commandment-keeping; persecution drove communities inward toward their own traditions; emancipation, by contrast, opened doors that many Jews walked through and never came back from. He has said this bluntly in interviews: “When we were hated, we thrived. When we’re loved, and opportunities are offered us, what happens? We forsake our tradition.” He is careful to insist he hates antisemitism, that the argument isn’t a brief for persecution. But the recognition of a historical pattern stands: the majority culture exerts an overwhelming gravitational pull on minorities, and Judaism isn’t immune. It’s a provocation that has made some readers furious and others quietly uncomfortable, which is probably the intended effect. His own family history is a miniature version of the larger argument: his great-grandfather arrived in New York from Hungary as an Orthodox kosher butcher, wearing a yarmulke and tzitzit and speaking Yiddish, and within a generation the family had melted into American Reform life in Denver.

His intellectual friendships cross boundaries that more cautious scholars observe carefully. He has counted Sherwin Wine, the founder of Humanistic Judaism, among his friends. Humanistic Judaism dispenses with God as a meaningful category entirely, which puts it at the far edge of what most would recognise as Jewish theology. That Cohn-Sherbok can maintain collegial warmth across that gap says something about his instinct that the borders of a tradition are less fixed than its guardians prefer to believe.

His interfaith work has been consistent and serious across four decades. Judaism and Other Faiths (1994), Interfaith Theology (2001), and Jews, Christians and Religious Pluralism (1999) all insist that Jewish thought has something to gain from genuine engagement with other traditions, not through doctrinal blurring but through honest contact. Jewish and Christian Mysticism (1994) and The Wisdom of the Kabbalah (2002) reach toward the contemplative dimensions of Jewish tradition that often receive less attention than law and ethics. Rabbinic Perspectives on the New Testament (1990) is an example of his willingness to read across a boundary that many Jewish scholars treat as a wall: the Christian scriptures examined through rabbinic eyes, the insights that come from standing in more than one tradition at once. His three books for the FireSoul list, Arguing about Judaism, Interfaith Worship and Prayer, and Scripture, belong to this same sustained project, approaching Jewish identity and practice through the lens of constructive comparison and honest argument rather than defensive self-definition.

There is something in Cohn-Sherbok’s work, taken whole, that resists the tidy arrangement of traditions into separate boxes. Different visions of God, revelation, and the good life are not competitors so much as angles on something none of them can fully hold. A rabbi who has worked on four continents, who counts a Humanistic Jewish atheist among his friends, who writes about Kabbalah and Holocaust theology and the New Testament with equal seriousness, who argues that Jewish survival can’t be disentangled from Jewish suffering: this is someone who has spent a career at the seams of things, where the cloth of one tradition meets another and neither stays quite intact. The seams are where the interesting questions live. They’re also where real understanding between people tends to happen, not in the clean centres but in the uncomfortable edges.

Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok has been a genuine intellectual partner throughout. She co-authored several books with Dan, and her novel A Campus Conspiracy drew, by her own account, on how she and Dan have been perceived by colleagues over the years. The farmhouse in Wales, the joint writing projects, the shared decades in British academic theology: theirs is a working partnership as much as a domestic one. Lavinia’s distinct voice occasionally surfaces in the public record, as when she described the Chief Rabbi in a newspaper review as “all mouth and no trousers,” a line that tells you something about the household’s appetite for the decorous.

Among his co-edited volumes is Using the Bible Today (1991) and Torah and Revelation (1992), both of which reflect his interest in how sacred texts function across shifting historical and communal contexts. Problems in Contemporary Jewish Theology (1992) gathered scholarly responses to questions that liberal Judaism was struggling to answer in the aftermath of the Shoah and amid the pressures of secularisation. The Future of Judaism (1994) asked bluntly what the tradition would become. Messianic Judaism (2001) examined the movement sitting uneasily between Jewish and Christian identities. The Palestine-Israel Conflict (2001) addressed, in more explicitly political terms than most of his books, a set of questions he’d circled throughout his career: what it means for a people’s survival and identity to be bound to a territory, and what happens when that claim collides with another people’s equivalent claim.

By 2016, when he appeared in a published birthday list as “Professor Emeritus of Judaism, University of Wales, Lampeter,” at age seventy-one, Cohn-Sherbok had been shaping British Jewish studies for more than four decades. His reference works remained on university shelves. He was still publishing. The Canterbury years, the Welsh farmhouse, the eighty-plus volumes, the visiting chairs in Vilnius and Prague and Twickenham: all of it adds up to something genuinely unusual, a scholar who treated the whole Jewish intellectual tradition as his proper subject and never stopped arguing about it.