He studied with the rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, whom he called "my beloved teacher",[7] at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he received rabbinic ordination.
In 1974, he earned a PhD in sociology and Jewish history at Harvard University, where he wrote a dissertation on Menachem Mendel Lefin, described in its title as "a case study of Judaism and modernization".
[13] While conducting research in Poland in 1979, Levine discovered the Kronika of the movement of Jacob Frank, a text which the scholar Gershom Scholem thought had vanished, in an eighteenth-century manuscript that a local priest had recently sold to the Public Library in Lublin.
[14] The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities published Levine's translation of the text in 1984 as The Kronika: On Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement.
[16] In 1992, he published The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions, co-authored with Boston Globe columnist Lawrence Harmon.