Research Fellow in Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies
she/her
About
Forger is a scholar of Ancient Judaism (including the New Testament), with an additional focus on early Jewish-Christian relations. Though later polemics suggest that Jews and Christians differentiated themselves based on their views of God’s body, her work complicates this picture by analyzing how first-century Jews envisioned God in bodily form. Her work is situated at the intersection of embodiment theory and sensory analysis. It also addresses questions of where, how, and when the ways parted between Jews and Christians and how scriptural hermeneutics impacted, complicated, impinged upon, and fortified those separations.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
(2023). "Christianity and Antisemitism." In The Routledge History of Antisemitism. Edited by Mark Weitzman, Robert J. Williams and James Wald, co-authored with Susannah Heschel.
(2022). "The Eye, the Sense of Sight, and Seeing God? Reflections on God's (In)visibility considering Early Jewish Christian Relations." Ancient Jew Review. Sept 28.
(2021). "The Pharisees in Modern Scholarship." In The Pharisees and their History of Interpretation. Edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Joseph Sievers, co-authored with Susannah Heschel.
(2020). "God Made Manifest: Josephus, Idolatry, and Divine Images in Flavian Rome." Journal for the Study of Judaism, 51, 231-260.
(2020). "Jesus as God's Word(s): Aurality, Epistemology, and Embodiment in the Gospel of John." Journal for the Study of the New Testament 42.3, 274–302.
(2018). "Divine Embodiment in Philo of Alexandria." Journal for the Study of Judaism, 49.2, 223–262.
(2016). "Interpreting the Syrophoenician Woman to Construct Jewish-Christian Fault Lines: John Chrysostom and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilist in Chrono-Locational Perspective." Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting, 3, 132–166.
PeDAGogy
(2020). "Parchment Packages in the Jewish Jesus Class: Pedagogical Practices in the Digital Age." Ancient Jew Review. August 26.
