Berkley Center

John Borelli, a historian of religions and theologian, is special assistant to the president for Catholic identity and dialogue at Georgetown University, where he is also a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Borelli has actively promoted interreligious dialogue and understanding in various teaching and staff positions since receiving a doctorate in history of religions and theology in 1976 from Fordham University. While at Georgetown University for more than two decades, he worked closely with Rev. Thomas Stransky and others who served as Vatican staff and theological consultors during the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1962-1965) and beyond, researching the development and implementation of the council’s Nostra Aetate (“Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions”). This was a foundational statement by Catholic bishops worldwide toward reconciliation with Jews, officially reversing centuries of anti-Jewish teachings and policies and encouraging Catholics to recognize, preserve, and foster religious and moral values held dear by Jews and the followers of other religions.

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, where she is also chair of the Jewish Studies Program and a faculty member of the Religion Department. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship and the history of anti-Semitism. Her publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (1998) and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (2010). She has received many honors, including the Mendelssohn Prize of the Leo Baeck Institute, and five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. Currently, she is a Guggenheim Fellow and writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam. Excerpts from her writings and those of her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, are included in A Documentary History of Jewish-Christian Relations (2024).

Edward Kessler, MBE, is founder president of the Woolf Institute and a leading thinker in interfaith relations—primarily Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations—as well as chair of the Commission on the Integration of Refugees. He founded the Woolf Institute in 1998 and was elected fellow of St. Edmund's College in 2002; Kessler was described by The Times Higher Education Supplement (London) as "probably the most prolific interfaith figure in British academia" and was awarded Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to interfaith relations. He has written or edited 13 books, including A Documentary History of Jewish-Christian Relations: From Antiquity to the Present Day (2024). In 2024 he was awarded the Seelisberg Prize for his contribution to fostering Jewish-Christian relations.

Rev. Dennis D. McManus is professor of theology at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California. Since 2009 he has served as delegate for Jewish affairs for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. From 2012 to 2021, he was visiting professor and associate director of the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, where he continues as senior research fellow. McManus has written widely on the intersection of Catholic liturgy and Judaism, highlighting the unfinished business of the implementation of Nostra Aetate in the Roman Rite. In 1997, he helped found the Anti-Defamation League’s program of Holocaust education for Catholic teachers in the United States, Bearing Witness, and continues teacher education on Jews, Judaism, and Catholic-Jewish relations with new programs through the Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights.