Are you jumping up and down with excitement? A little terrified? Getting prepared to have your mind blown? Good. That's how I feel.

The University Congregational United Church of Christ and Hillel UW are bringing her for a lecture series Friday 2/6 and Saturday 2/7. Here's the link

Friday's lecture is Jesus the Jew: Piety, Prayer, Purity and Practice from 7 - 8:30 pm.

Saturday, February 6th, 9 - 3:30 pm a series of 3 lectures:

Understanding the Parables with Jewish Ears

How Jews & Christians Read Scripture Differently

Jesus and Judaism; Sex and Gender

Don't worry if you have no interest in Jesus, feminism, or Jewish/Christian relations, you will after her lectures.

A.J. may be at Vanderbilt now (see blurb below), but she taught at Swarthmore when I was there, and she is my all time favorite professor. This is saying a lot because I had consistently great, if not, absolutely outstanding teachers and professors my whole life. A.J. is brilliant, funny, fascinating, and I would attend any lecture she gave. But, I have to admit, I rank her number one not because of her lecturing or scholarship, but because of how she treated her students.

A.J. Levine asked more from me as a scholar than anyone has ever done before or since. Seminars were notoriously intense at Swarthmore. A.J.'s even more so. On my day to lead seminar, I would turn a seriously researched paper into her in the morning. By noon, she would have covered it with comments, suggestions, critiques. I would spend the next five hours in the library preparing to respond. She would not tolerate average work; you had to excel.

You wanted to work so hard for her because she believed you were capable of it, and she was willing to work that hard for you. Her office door was always open. Too many students wanted her for their thesis advisor, so I had someone else. He kept my rough draft for a month and returned it with a few notes on grammar. I went to her crying, and she read the 100 page paper giving me substantive feedback on the concepts, the organization, and she also taught me how to use semi-colons.

My teaching friends tell me I give my students too much. My office door is always open. I never take lunch; I'm always meeting with students. I help them with their transfer letters, their letters to the court, their papers for other classes. If they want to work, I want to work with them. It's because I am trying to be A.J.

Excerpts from her blurb:

Amy-Jill Levine is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Graduate Department of Religion, and Program in Jewish Studies. She holds a B.A. from Smith College, M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University. She has held office in the Society of Biblical Literature, the Catholic Biblical Association (she is presently the New Testament book review editor for the Catholic Biblical Quarterly), and the Association for Jewish Studies. Her most recent books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (HarperOne), the edited collection, The Historical Jesus in Context (Princeton) as well as the fourteen-volume series, Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings (Continuum). She has recorded "Introduction to the Old Testament," "Great Figures of the Old Testament," and "Great Figures of the New Testament" for the Teaching Company. A self-described "Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt," Professor Levine combines historical- critical rigor, literary-critical sensitivity, and a frequent dash of humor with a commitment to eliminating anti-Jewish, sexist, and homophobic theologies.