Imagining Heschel November 27, 2010

This drama imagines the private conversations between Cardinal Augustin Bea and Rabbi Abraham Heschel during the summer and late fall of 1968. While the Pope sent Bea to Heschel to implore him to accept a formal and public apology from the Catholic Church for their silence during the Holocaust, Heschel turned the meetings around - lobbying the Pope to formally exonerate the Jews for the death of Christ, a crucial repudiation of anti-Semitism. The riveting discussions between these philosophical giants in the midst of the myriad conflicts of the late 1960s-raises important questions about the intellectual justification of retaliation within any faith community.