Rabbi Burton Visotzky serves as Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at The Jewish Theological Seminary, where he joined the faculty upon his ordination in 1977. Rabbi Visotzky is the Louis Stein Director of the Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies of JTS, charged with programs on public policy. He also serves as director of the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue of JTS. Rabbi Visotzky holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Harvard University, and JTS. He has been visiting faculty at Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton universities, and at the Russian State University of the Humanities in Moscow. With Bill Moyers, Rabbi Visotzky developed 10 hours of television for PBS. Their collaboration, Genesis: A Living Conversation, premiered in 1996. He also consulted with Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks for the company's 1998 film, Prince of Egypt. Rabbi Visotzky's articles and reviews are published in America, Europe, and Israel. He is the author of 10 books and more than 100 articles and reviews.I have replaced the first link in the quotation, which is dead, with one that works. Parts two and three of the interview are available at the following links:
The following exchange will focus on Rabbi Visotzky’s new book Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It.
The Aphrodite exchange, part 2: On Judaism’s ambivalence toward Rome;
The Aphrodite exchange, part 3: What we can learn from Jewish-Roman relations.