As a guest at the 80th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, Yehuda Kurtzer observed its legislative committee vote on nearly 200 resolutions, eight of which involved “criticism of Israeli policy with regard to the Palestinians.” A separate resolution was advanced to criticize Christian Zionism. Kurtzer, who offered testimony in opposition to an amendment accusing Israel of engaging in “apartheid,” was surprised by the intensity and frequency of anti-Israel rhetoric.
Jewish-Christian relations are in real trouble, more than would seem obvious at a moment in Jewish history when American Jews are freely at home as citizens and stakeholders in a majority-Christian country, and when the Jewish state is the most popular cause célèbre of that Christian majority. The Episcopalians are hardly the only Christian denomination that has been seized by this kind of anti-Zionist fervor. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church released a brief statement centering the Palestinian struggle as the central issue of concern, depicting the Jews as a people of “humble beginnings” to contrast an essentialized [powerless] version of Jews and Judaism with the [political] power held today by Jews in Israel, and implicitly characterizing the Jews as the enslavers—rather than as the redeemed—in the Exodus story.
These are just two examples, and they both witness a slippage in Christian liberal rhetoric back toward the forms of Christian anti-Judaism that, for much of the past two millennia, subsumed actual Jews into metaphorical and mythical renderings of the Jew for the purpose of Christian theology and the construction of a moral conscience for the West. These new Christian expressions of anti-Israelism replace “the Jew” with “the Israeli” toward the same end: a form of dehumanization of Jews, layered on very particular forms of political language and activism that claim themselves as “allyship” with Palestinians.
Alone, these represent political challenges, especially for those inside the church more sympathetic to the Israeli position or at least those who do not want to see church theology used so nakedly to paper over political programs. But the larger concern here is that these efforts are also eroding the enormous progress in Jewish-Christian dialogue and reconciliation achieved over several decades, which was prompted by the post-Holocaust moment and a recognition by the church of the need to reckon with a history of anti-Semitism.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/jewish-christian-relations-suffering