Dov Weiss, Associate Professor of Religion, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer grant for his book project “Rabbinic Inferno: Hell and Salvation in Classical Judaism”.

Weiss said that his forthcoming book, Rabbinic Inferno, will be the first scholarly work on afterlife retribution in the rabbinic era (70-700 CE) and situates hell (“Gehinnom” in Hebrew) as central to classical Jewish literature and culture.

The NEH Summer Stipends program aims to stimulate new research in the humanities and its publication. Summer Stipends support continuous full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two consecutive months.

“The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer competition is an extremely competitive program whose aim is to stimulate new and inspiring research in the humanities and its publication,” said Elena Delgado, Professor of Spanish and Director of the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics. “This is therefore a great recognition of Dov and his work.”

Specializing in the history of Jewish biblical interpretation and rabbinic theology, Dov’s first book, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (University of Pennsylvania Press), won the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Scholarship.