Jonathan K. Crane

Jonathan K. Crane holds a BA (summa cum laude) from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, an MA in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and an MPhil in Gandhian Thought from Gujarat Vidyapith in Ahmedabad, India.  As a Wexner Graduate Fellow, he received both a Master of Arts in Hebrew Letters and rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion.  He completed a PhD in Modern Jewish Thought at the University of Toronto.  He currently serves as the Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar in Bioethics and Jewish Thought in the Center for Ethics at Emory University and is a Professor of Medicine in Emory’s School of Medicine. 

Jonathan has held leadership positions in the Society of Jewish Ethics, the Jewish Affinity Group of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, and the Comparative Religious Ethics group of the American Academy of Religion.  Jonathan’s scholarly research and teaching examine religion, ethics, bioethics, social and political ethics, food and eating ethics, animal ethics, and comparative religious ethics.   

In addition to composing dozens of chapters and essays, Jonathan is the author of Ahimsa: The Way to Peace (2007, with Jordi Agusti-Panareda), Narratives and Jewish Bioethics (2013), and Eating Ethically: Religion and Science for a Better Diet (2018), co-editor with Elliot Dorff of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality (2012), editor of both Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (2015) and Judaism, Race and Ethics: Conversations and Questions (2020), and co-editor with Mira Wasserman and Emily Filler of Modern Jewish Ethics: 1970 to the Present (forthcoming).  He founded and co-edited the Journal of Jewish Ethics for its first decade.   

Jonathan received a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from Wheaton College in Massachusetts in 2014. 

Areas of Expertise

• Jewish ethical perspectives on biomedical, social, political, and warfare issues
• Comparative religious ethics
• Jewish theology, law, and lore
• Food studies and ethics