In a now-famous 1964 essay, the great American Jewish sage Joseph B. Soloveitchik sought to put firm limits on interfaith dialogue, encouraging social and civic engagement with followers of other religions while forbidding open-ended efforts to find theological common ground. When Yitzchok Adlerstein, after a career as an Orthodox rabbi and educator, began engaging in conversations with priests, pastors, and imams on behalf of the Simon Wiesenthal center, his main goal was to advance the good of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. This remains his “first and foremost” purpose, but he has also come to appreciate these conversations as an end in themselves. (Interview by Elie Mischel.)

For the first time in 2,000 years, we have an opportunity to speak our minds as believing Jews and provide guidance to others who wish to know the word of God about pressing social issues.

Often, these groups are embattled in their own ways, and are looking for someone to hold their hand or pat them on the back and say, “Listen, we are theologically incompatible with each other. But we share in our gut and our minds a firm conviction in the existence of a Creator, of His communication with man, of normative demands that are immutable and without which man and mankind will not be happy.”

I have learned a number of things in doing this work. The assumption with which many of us grew up, that every Christian is out to convert us, and that converting us is at the very top of their list of priorities, is simply not true. There are tens and probably hundreds of millions of Christians who are neither anti-Semitic nor particularly zealous about recruiting others. . . . But history has taught them that direct proselytizing is often counterproductive and not as effective as trying to live as exemplars of their faith and hoping that others will be attracted to it.

So much of our vocabulary coincides. We talk about God in intimate terms, as One Who surrounds us 24/7, a God we feel responsible to, [Who guarantees that] there are consequences to our actions and not everything is up for grabs, and a God Who cares about us. This instantly gives us things to talk about, without having to get into theological points that separate us.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”