“Most Americans,” observes Joel Kotkin, “see conflict, not harmony, between religion and science (though only a small fraction of believers, some 16 percent, agree).” Similar attitudes are even more prevalent in Europe. But not all scientists feel that way, Kotkin writes:

Whatever their current religious orientation, many spiritually inclined scientists draw inspiration from recent breakthroughs in fields like biology and physics that have seemed to move us away from the mechanistic, predictable outcomes suggested by Enlightenment science and philosophy—and toward a view in which uncertainty and mystery appear to play a fundamental role.

Historically, Kotkin adds, there is a long history of seeing science and religion as “strongly linked” which can be found in many cultures:

Some scientists and historians—most famously the great British writer Edward Gibbon—saw the spread of the Mosaic religions as undermining the rational, scientific legacy handed down by the Greeks and their Roman acolytes. Yet Judaism, the root of both Islam and Christianity, has generally accepted science as simply as another means of revealing God’s work, not a challenge to divine agency.

Edward Reichman, a medical doctor and ethicist at New York’s Montefiore hospital, notes that, though some branches of Orthodox Judaism reject widely embraced scientific ideas like evolution, most Orthodox intellectuals embrace science and discovery. . . . “For most Jews, including the Orthodox,” notes Reichman, “it is impossible to distinguish between religion and science because God created science as well.”

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.