Symposium on Jewish Belief

Although his parents were secular, Richard L. Rubenstein was ordained as a Conservative rabbi in 1952 at the Jewish Theological Seminary and received his doctorate from Harvard Divinity School in 1960. He later became a vital force in post-Holocaust theology. In 1963, Rubenstein was one of nineteen rabbis to visit Birmingham, Alabama, in support of the American civil rights movement. In the following decades, Rubenstein served as a chaplain and a professor at several universities, including Harvard and Florida State University. He was president of the University of Bridgeport between 1995 and 1999.