Fifty years ago, the Catholic Church released an official statement, Nostra Aetate, delineating its attitudes toward non-Christian religions. Most significantly, Nostra Aetate condemned anti-Semitism and rejected previous Christian teachings that encouraged it. Jonathan Sacks sees it as a model for all religious leaders today to heed and emulate:

Religiously motivated violence has brought chaos and destruction to great swaths of the Middle East [as well as] parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Christians are suffering the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing in countries where they have been a presence for centuries. Peaceful Islam is being subverted by radical jihadists, leading to barbarism and slaughter, often of other Muslims, on an ever-widening scale. Meanwhile anti-Semitism has returned in full force within living memory of the Holocaust. . . .

We need, if anything, another and larger Nostra Aetate, binding together the great world religions in a covenant of mutuality and responsibility. The freedom and respect we seek for our own faith we must be prepared to grant to others. We need a global coalition of respected religious leaders with the vision [Pope] John XXIII had in his day and the honesty to admit that much that is done in the name of faith is in fact a desecration of faith and a violation of its most sacred principles.

It took the Holocaust to bring about Nostra Aetate. What will it take now for religious leaders to stand together in opposition to the religiously motivated hatreds spreading like contagion through our interconnected world?

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.