Abraham Joshua Heschel

Polish-born American Jewish theologian, philosopher, prophetic writer, and civil rights leader whose books — The Sabbath (1951), Man Is Not Alone (1951), God in Search of Man (1955), The Prophets (1962), Who Is Man? (1965), and many others — established him as one of the most influential Jewish religious voices of the twentieth century, and whose famous statement that he 'felt his legs were praying' as he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma in 1965 became one of the iconic moments of religious witness in the American civil rights movement. Born 1907 in Warsaw to a long Hasidic dynasty (descended from the Rebbes of Apt and Mezhybizh), Heschel received both a traditional yeshiva education and a doctorate from the University of Berlin. He escaped Nazi Europe in 1939, lost his mother and three sisters in the Holocaust, and made his life and career in the United States — first at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, then for thirty years at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He died in 1972. His writing combines deep Hasidic mysticism with phenomenological rigor and a fierce moral voice on race, war, and the prophetic vocation of all faiths.