The concerns raised are serious and, in important respects, legitimate. Yet the statement’s imprecise terminology and unexplained omissions weaken its effectiveness and risk obscuring the very issues it seeks to address.

There are also puzzling features of the document itself. The signatories are not listed and not all the Churches have published the statement on their official websites. This contrasts with a similar statement issued by the Patriarchs in 2006, which was signed, more carefully framed, and explicitly directed against extreme forms of Christian Zionism—those that undermine the possibility of a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That earlier statement at least suggested that not all Christian Zionisms were identical.

The core concerns of the 2026 statement are legitimate. The current Israeli government includes religious Zionist figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who claim that Gaza and the West Bank belong to Israel and who envision the departure of Palestinians from these territories. Were such views to prevail, the likely outcome would be the disappearance of Arab Christian communities from the occupied territories. (Christian populations within Israel proper remain relatively stable.) These religious Zionist ideologies tend to make little distinction between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs. Their strand of Jewish religious Zionism, drawing on the theology of figures such as Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, is also explicitly hostile to Christian presence in Israel. 

These concerns are intensified by the influence of American Christian Zionists, especially in the United States. Their political reach is substantial, and the appointment of a Christian Zionist such as Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador heightens fears that Jewish religious Zionists and foreign Christian Zionists together exercise disproportionate influence over policy affecting local Christian communities.

Yet if this alignment is the central concern, the statement raises questions it does not address. Why does it single out Christian Zionism while remaining silent about political Islamist ideologies that also seriously threaten Christian life and institutions across the region? Further, it falsely presumes all Christian Zionists hold the same theological and political views.

Figures such as Ihab Shlayan, an Armenian Christian Israeli Zionist, long-serving IDF officer, and chairman of The Israeli Christian Voice, illustrate the complexity the statement overlooks. Or the Jewish Catholic Zionist Yarden Zelivansky, also an IDF member who established the Association of Hebrew Catholics in Israel. Shlayan is connected to Israeli and American political actors but has not been endorsed by Armenian Church authorities. He may be resented for appearing to speak on behalf of Christian communities. This could explain the statement’s vague reference to unnamed “local individuals,” but it also underscores the diversity concealed by the term “Christian Zionism.”

This leads to the central difficulty: The term “Christian Zionism” is used far too broadly. It presents a flattened and misleading picture of a diverse phenomenon. There are many Christian Zionists, myself included, who reject extremist political agendas and support a two-state solution (but are open to other models). They are deeply concerned about the survival of Palestinian Christian communities, whether threatened by Israeli policies or mainly by the rise of political Islam. There are Anglican Zionists, like Gerald McDermott, who, like me, reject evangelical dispensationalism and work within a post-supersessionist theology. To classify all Christian Zionisms as “damaging ideologies” is both poor theology and obscures the big issues. 

A second major omission is the statement’s silence regarding Jewish–Christian theological developments, particularly post-supersessionist teaching within Churches represented by the Patriarchs themselves. By saying nothing about the Jewish people or about the theological legitimacy of Jewish attachment to the land, the statement risks alienating Jews and Christians committed to post-supersessionist theology. It leaves unanswered a fundamental question: Is there any legitimate place for Israel at all, or is Zionism—Jewish or Christian—understood solely as a project of colonization and empire-building? This silence is especially striking given that the Latin Church formally recognizes the State of Israel and consistently supports a two-state solution grounded in natural law. 

The situation in the Holy Land is complex and fragile. The statement rightly identifies genuine dangers facing Christian communities. But by employing imprecise language, overlooking crucial distinctions, and leaving key theological and political questions unresolved, it misses an opportunity for genuine peacemaking and bridge-building. Instead, it risks generating unnecessary controversy—fireworks that distract rather than illuminate—at a moment when clarity, nuance, and careful dialogue are urgently needed.

The post The Problem with the Jerusalem Statement Against Christian Zionism appeared first on First Things.

For figures such as Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and perhaps the single most influential moral philosopher within conservative intellectual circles, conservatism begins with the claims of natural law. Its founding premise is the inherent dignity of every human being—an anthropology that descends from classical philosophy, Christian theology, and the Enlightenment. For George, conservatism is first a moral project: It safeguards life, liberty, marriage, family, and religious freedom because these institutions reflect universal truths about the human person. George has spent his career articulating these principles in philosophy, public policy, and constitutional thought. His is an approach to conservatism that emphasizes the primacy of the permanent things, the universals that transcend time and place.

Opposing this universalist strand is the ascendant nationalist wing of the right—a coalition influenced by the populist energies that surged after 2016 and represented by Tucker Carlson, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and polemicists such as John Zmirak. This faction sees conservatism less as an expression of moral philosophy than as a defense of Western civilization: a concrete culture, a historical inheritance, with its own people, faith, memories, and vulnerabilities. This conservatism is particularist rather than universalist. It begins not with abstract principles but with cultural loyalties. Whereas George begins with human dignity, Carlson begins with civilizational survival. Whereas George sees imperatives and violations of the moral law, Carlson sees a beleaguered West beset by global elites, porous borders, and cultural disintegration.

The recent dispute over Carlson’s treatment of Nick Fuentes brought these differences into sharp focus. Carlson’s critics—including George, Ben Shapiro, and others in the moral-universalist camp—argued that he had given a platform to a figure who traffics in anti-Semitic rhetoric and white-nationalist themes. For them, this was not merely a lapse in judgment but a failure of moral responsibility. Carlson’s defenders countered that conversation does not equal endorsement, and that conservatives must not mimic the left’s “cancel culture” by excommunicating those who question dogmas about foreign policy or Israel. They argued that a movement committed to free inquiry must not shrink from difficult conversations.

Beneath this quarrel lies a more fundamental question: Is American conservatism about preserving a moral order or protecting a civilizational identity? Is it grounded in rights and duties that apply to all human beings or in the defense of a particular way of life that belongs to a specific people? One could say that the universalist right worries about moral illegitimacy, whereas the nationalist right worries about cultural extinction.

This tension is not new. It has antecedents in the intellectual history of American conservatism, stretching back to the mid-twentieth century. The original conservative coalition—the so-called “fusionist” project—sought to reconcile libertarians, social traditionalists, anti-Communist hawks, and Catholic natural-law theorists. Buckley’s National Review, Irving Kristol’s neoconservatism, Goldwater’s libertarianism, and Reagan’s evangelical alliance all depended on maintaining a precarious balance between universalist commitment and civilizational ­loyalty.

That equilibrium was always fragile. The Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s, led by Robert Taft and the America First Committee, had been isolationist, nationalist, and wary of foreign entanglements. It was skeptical of global institutions and suspicious of cosmopolitan elites. The New Right that emerged after World War II reversed these tendencies, embracing international responsibility and moral universalism—especially once the Cold War framed America’s struggle against the Soviet Union as a defense of global democracy.

The rise of neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s intensified this universalist impulse. Figures such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that America should use its power to defend democracy and human rights abroad. Many leading neoconservatives were Jewish Americans whose commitment to universalist ethics aligned with the American creed. For decades, this coalition kept nationalist particularism in check.

But the paleoconservative critique—articulated by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, and others in the 1990s—never disappeared. Paleoconservatives warned that the conservative establishment had subordinated national interests to abstract ideology and foreign entanglements. They were skeptical of immigration, free trade, and especially America’s close relationship with Israel. Their warnings did not dominate conservative politics—until the populist wave following 2016 revived them.

Carlson, whether he claims the mantle or not, stands squarely in the paleoconservative lineage. His skepticism of U.S. foreign policy, his warnings about demographic change, and his view that elites betray ordinary Americans place him in a tradition that prioritizes civilizational cohesion over universalist doctrine. The controversy over his interview with Fuentes cannot be understood apart from this lineage.

Understanding this history also helps clarify why Zionism has become the main flash point in the conservative civil war. Zionism is, in essence, a communitarian nationalism: the assertion of a people’s right to self-determination in its ancestral homeland. It is a repudiation of cosmopolitan universalism in favor of historical continuity and particular identity. By rights, the nationalist wing of the American right—which champions cultural sovereignty and civilizational rootedness—should admire Zionism. Israel is the very embodiment of the communitarian values that the New Right claims to defend: tradition, identity, faith, resilience.

And yet, the nationalist right has grown increasingly hostile to Israel. Carlson argues that American foreign policy has been excessively shaped by pro-Israel interests. Some of his followers express a deeper suspicion—one that veers into old patterns of anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism. Meanwhile, the universalist right sees criticism of Israel as a sign that the nationalist project is incubating bigotries long dormant but never extinguished.

These ironies reveal a conceptual flaw: The nationalist right’s suspicion of Jewish influence and of Israel makes little sense within its own stated values. It is driven less by philosophical coherence than by a populist resentment of perceived elites—elites who, in the nationalist imagination, overlap with Jewish identity. What begins as criticism of foreign policy slides, easily and dangerously, into ­civilizational suspicion. That suspicion contains a further irony, for what is Western civilization if Judaism is not one of its central pillars? Is it really possible to stand up for the Christian West by treating Jews as aliens?

On the other side, the universalist right, though morally correct in rejecting anti-Semitism, sometimes speaks as if universal principles alone can sustain a society. Their tendency to abstract from culture, tradition, and inherited forms can make them appear insensitive to the anxieties that fuel the nationalist revolt. They underestimate the importance of belonging, memory, and communal cohesion.

The conflict between these two factions would be difficult enough if it concerned only geopolitics or intellectual style. But it also touches on the internal dynamics of American Jewish identity—a subject that must be approached with care.

American Jews inhabit a dual identity that includes a universal moral tradition, rooted in prophetic ethics and the rule of law, and a particular solidarity with the Jewish people, rooted in shared history, ritual, and the existence of the state of Israel. This duality is not contradictory; it is the product of a long history. Jewish Americans have contributed profoundly to American life—in law, medicine, culture, academia, journalism, and politics—often championing the universal ideals that inspired the American founding and shaped the American creed. But global ­anti-Semitism and recent violence at home have heightened the sense among ­many Jews that Israel is essential not ­only as an idea but as a guarantor of ­survival.

The nationalist right’s skepticism of Israel places Jewish Americans in a difficult position. It implies—sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly—that Jewish loyalty is divided, that the Jews’ commitment to America is compromised by their attachment to Israel. This accusation has a long and dark pedigree. It is the same charge historically leveled at Jews in Europe: that they are perpetual outsiders, cosmopolitans, disloyal to the nation, agents of foreign influence.

One need not accuse Carlson of anti-Semitism to recognize that the nationalist critique can activate these ancient suspicions. That is why George and others respond so sharply. They understand that criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate, but they also understand how easily such criticism can become a cover for more ominous attitudes.

To make sense of all this, let us turn to the experience of black Americans, not because the histories are equivalent—they are not—but because the structural problem both groups have faced is analogous: how to reconcile a strong subgroup identity with full membership in the American civic nation.

Black Americans have a unique and foundational place in American history. Unlike Jewish Americans or other immigrant groups, we are not a diaspora with an external homeland. Our ancestors’ arrival on these shores was coerced and brutal, but our presence is inseparable from the nation’s founding contradictions. We are not an added population but an integral one—a people forged in America’s crucible.

And yet, for centuries, our identity was viewed as incompatible with American citizenship. We were faced with the perpetual question: Were we Americans? Could we be? Should we be? The black freedom struggle answered those questions with clarity: We are Americans, and our fate is tied to the nation’s fate. But that patriotism was not naive. It did not ignore the injustices ­inflicted upon us. It was a patriotism grounded in struggle—a love of country that demanded moral redemption.

This posture—what I have called black patriotism—offers a model for resolving the tension between universal ideals and particular identity. Black Americans did not shed their cultural inheritance in order to claim American citizenship. We transformed the nation by insisting that the nation’s universal promise of equality applied to us. Our struggle did not weaken America; it strengthened America by forcing it to live up to its own principles.

In this sense, the black experience reveals the possibility of a civic nationalism that is both universal and particular, both aspirational and rooted. It shows that layered identities—cultural, religious, historical—need not threaten civic belonging. On the contrary, they can enrich and deepen it.

The comparison with Jewish Americans must be handled carefully. The histories differ profoundly. Black Americans are of America in a way that Jewish Americans, with their diasporic ties and in view of the existence of Israel, are not. Black Americans did not choose America; America was imposed on us, and we turned that imposition into a claim of ownership. Jewish Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants who have integrated into the American project with extraordinary success.

But both groups confront a similar challenge: how to be fully themselves and fully American. For Jews, it involves balancing solidarity with Israel and adherence to a universal ethical tradition with commitment to an American civic identity. For blacks, it involves reconciling the memory of slavery and segregation with the aspiration of constitutional equality.

The lesson from both histories is that civic nationalism need not require erasing particular identities. Rather, it requires a political framework that is capacious enough to accommodate them. When conservatism becomes too narrow, too suspicious of internal diversity, it risks undermining the civic unity it seeks to preserve. When it becomes too abstract, too detached from the lived experience of particular communities, it loses its cultural grounding.

The conservative movement, in its current turmoil, faces this very choice. It can embrace a cramped vision of America—one that mistrusts layered identities and treats cultural particularity as disloyalty. Or it can embrace a richer conception of the nation—one that honors universal principles while recognizing the importance of inherited traditions and communal attachments.

A conservatism worthy of the name must find room for Jewish particularism and black particularism within a shared civic framework. It must reject anti-Semitism and racism, not only because they are morally abhorrent but because they violate the very foundations of the Western civilization it reveres. At the same time, it must resist the temptation to use universalist rhetoric as a way to ignore the cultural preconditions of liberty. And it must avoid turning particularist suspicion into a politics of resentment.

A mature conservatism recognizes that universal principles require concrete communities to sustain them, and that those communities are enriched rather than threatened by the presence of diverse histories and identities. The American nation is not a tribe but a covenant—a shared project rooted in moral aspiration and historical inheritance. Both black Americans and Jewish Americans have contributed vitally to that project, each in ways shaped by their distinctive histories. We are a more vital nation for that.

The civil war within conservatism will not be resolved by the choice of universalism over nationalism or nationalism over universalism. It will be resolved by an integration of the two: by a vision of America that honors both the dignity of every person and the particular heritage of its people.

The future of our nation depends on whether we can achieve that synthesis. So does the future of conservatism. And if we are willing to learn from the stories of those who have wrestled longest with the tensions of identity and belonging—black Americans and Jewish Americans among them—we may yet find a path that avoids both abstraction and resentment, both moralism and tribalism.

A conservatism that achieves this synthesis will be intellectually coherent, morally serious, and ­culturally grounded. It will conserve not only the inheritance of the past but the promise of the future.

Image by Gage Skidmore, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Ever since, nothing has made the discomfort of not belonging go away. Living in Sydney, it was an inescapable sadness. It was so pervasive that even though I still found joy in family life and work, I started to wonder if I was suffering from depression.

A friend explained that my trip had likely activated “intergenerational trauma,” which made sense—after all, I had retraced my grandmother’s journey during the Holocaust, visited where she hid, stood in an open place where the remains of scores of my family members and over 400,000 other people were mixed ashes under the soles of my feet.

I was soon to learn that my “intergenerational trauma” was activated less by the place I had visited than the place I was returning to. Two years of continuous exposure to anti-Semitism in my daily Australian life had eroded my sense of safety, freedom, and opportunity. I had returned to the place my passport had been issued, a place I had always proudly loved, and it no longer felt like home. This was not my personal mental health issue. I was sensing something that existed outside myself, something real.

On Sunday afternoon, we lit the candles for the first night of Chanukah at my sister’s place in Bondi Junction. It was my niece’s sixth birthday party. The little girls sang along with prayers and songs of light and miracles. As the birthday girl kindled the holiday lights, I felt happy in my heart.

On my way to the car afterward, I heard the sirens—two or three emergency vehicles, traveling at speed a street away. My daughters, seven and nine, wondered what was going on.

A strawberry-haired Irish man across the road approached us. “I don’t know where you’re taking the girls,” he said, “but stay away from the beach. There’s a shooter.”

My nine-year-old trembled. The seven-year-old said, “That’s scary.” 

As we got into the car, I started to receive a flurry of text messages. News was spreading through the Jewish community—news that would take officials hours to admit to the public: The target of the shooting was the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach.

As we drove, two ambulances, a black police jeep, and an unmarked white SUV with sirens on sped down Syd Einfeld Drive in the opposite direction, coming from St. Vincent’s Hospital. 

I dictated a text message to my daughters’ father, letting him know that we were safe and on our way to him as planned. As we rounded the corner toward Centennial Park, more ambulances sped in the opposite direction, this time from Prince of Wales Hospital.

My ex-husband called us back. He’d been swimming laps at Bondi Beach that afternoon. He told us he was safe too and would get home not long after us.

As we parked the car near his place, the number of security guards outside the Jewish nursing home quadrupled before our eyes. Volunteer guards began to appear from nowhere, donning their uniform shirts as they rushed toward their posts.

After my ex-husband arrived, he confirmed the devastating news: The shooting had indeed been an anti-Semitic attack. Many people had been killed. My daughters wanted to lock all the windows and doors so we could be safe from the evil outside. 

I hugged my daughters close, and we lit the candles with them a second time. We told them that no matter what people say or do, we must always be proud of who we are, and we must always continue to be ourselves no matter who tries to make us feel afraid.

The next day I dragged myself through a fully booked clinic. I tried to maintain focus on my patients as within me the grief I felt shuffled with disturbing flashes of disconnection and denial. Around 8 p.m., unable to bear the dissonance any longer, I got in my car and drove to Bondi Beach.  

From the south, Campbell Parade was closed at the first roundabout. The usually busy shops and restaurants were shuttered. A southerly blew the light drizzle into a floaty haze.

I headed for the water, down the concrete steps, then the pathway to the promenade. I remembered all the other times I had come down there at night—talking with a friend on the sand, kissing a date in the moonlight, running with the girls to my car through rain as we shared a useless umbrella—but I struggled to find the peace I had felt at those times.

I realized that tonight I was not visiting Bondi Beach for the place. I was there for another reason. It was the same reason I had gone to Poland: a desire to understand an evil thing that had happened—the very same evil, in fact.

I approached the police line next to the lifeguard tower. I saw belongings that had been abandoned by people running for their lives the day before: beach towels, flip-flops, a bicycle with two helmets and a baby seat on the back. Closer to the police line were tubs full of lost property: shoes, a folded pram, beach bags. What is it about the hand of evil and piles of belongings?

Next to the police line were floral tributes and candles. I stood, out of place among hoodies and shorts in my black work dress, shivering from the cold or sadness—I’m not sure which. I prayed. 

As my feet trod the path back to the road, the same path I had walked countless times, the landscape morphed to become the path of remembrance I had walked two months earlier through the center of Belzec death camp. What has happened, I thought. What has happened to my home?

Image by JOHN WESSELS via Getty Images.

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This year is different. While menorahs are ordinarily displayed outdoors in celebration, during times of danger the Talmud suggests kindling Hanukkah lights discreetly. Even without overt peril, mounting hostility toward Jews draws me inward and homeward. I prefer to stay indoors with my family, where the somber hymn of my childhood will echo more poignantly than the cheerful holiday prayer.

Like other winter holidays, Hanukkah occurs when daylight is lacking and darkness evokes faith. More than a solstice observance, however, Hanukkah is a celebration of Jewish distinctiveness and daring. In the second century B.C., enlightened Greeks sought to extinguish Jewish singularity, and the rebellious Maccabees prevailed. Afterward, oil in the Temple menorah burned for more nights than it should have.

While Hanukkah has long inspired Jewish exiles, today I am not feeling heartened. From household windows and public squares, menorahs will burn brightly in shows of strength and solidarity, but I will be kindling mine privately. In the sanctuary of home, I will spend eight quiet nights with family, recalling less exhausting times.

This year we will celebrate Hanukkah in a new apartment, with unfamiliar doorways and windows that frame changed views. While negotiating these new spaces, the menorah will cast a familiar light, calling to mind shadows of our previous Jerusalem residence and the slow hours between sunset and bedtime in my childhood home in New York.

Toward sunset in Queens, curtains were drawn open, revealing a concrete landscape outside. Father’s silver menorah stood guard at the porch window, awaiting his return from another day at the office. In less conspicuous spaces, multicolored candles stood like soldiers at attention. We anticipated Father’s arrival eagerly but unhurriedly. On those nights, the ceremony happened not at a set hour but at an accidental moment, when the Long Island Rail Road transported Father from Manhattan to where he preferred to be.

Just as Mr. Rogers changed into a cardigan and sneakers to send a message, Father dressed in holiday finery on Hanukkah to make a point. This lesser festival does not require special attire, but dressing up demonstrated Hanukkah’s importance to us more effectively than dressing down. Stooping before his oil lamp in a black frock, Father rolled uneven wicks from cotton, and Mother recalled how her father, Louie, did the same.

My grandfather Louie was an immigrant to Brooklyn who had witnessed the rise of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Louie sang with a pathos born from Jewish displacement and suffering. As a child, Louie’s demeanor intrigued me, though I could not relate to his generation’s sorrow. As anti-Semitism surges again, I am less naive about Jewish security worldwide.

After kindling the oil, Father would stare at the lights thoughtfully before leading us in song. Some renditions were more melodious than others and some nights we danced. I would peer into the flames and notice how light pirouetted gracefully around each wick. Father shared anecdotes and prompted questions. Mother prepared hors d’oeuvres and radiated contentment. Hanukkah was about being more than doing. A perfect winter evening needed little more than flickering lights.

In our family, the festival of lights also celebrated engagement and creativity. Father and Mother cherished menorahs and dreidels we fashioned of wood and clay and put them to good use. With humor and specialty chocolate coins, Father involved us directly in his rituals. Age-appropriate dialogue was fostered, and questions valued as much as answers. Instead of a formal dinner, we relished appetizers in the family room on a squat table made of tempered glass. Mother shared melodies she learned from Louie. Oil-fueled lights glowed mysteriously, and slender wax candles burned too fast.

By staging an enchanting ritual, my parents were preserving a religious tradition and not merely orchestrating a comforting winter activity. In the holiday’s central prayer, we praised the Almighty for delivering the impure into the hands of the pure, and the wicked into the hands of the righteous. The holiday is a sacred occasion comprising hallowed ambitions and responsibilities. Jews are meant to be pure and righteous, our parents encouraged us, and to shine divine light into the world.

That was then.

This Hanukkah in Jerusalem, I will be at home with my children and grandchildren. The prominent silver menorah will be my own. I will not have arrived by railroad, nor will I roll candle wicks like misshapen cigarettes. Cold rain may make the family room contrastingly cozy. From a cracking analog recording, Louie’s rendition of the holiday hymn will solemnly sound. Like years past, hors d’oeuvres may include cured salmon, crème fraîche, and a local Riesling, aromatic and round with hints of apricot and golden apple. Crispy latkes and doughnuts will arrive in my wife’s reliable hands.

My thoughts this season are with tormented hostages and fallen heroes, with the Bondi Beach victims, with a traumatized Israel and fearful Jewish communities worldwide. As a fragile ceasefire holds in Gaza and Jews are menaced globally, I will sing along with my grandfather to the hymn’s somber strains, its mournful melody resonating with my despair.

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And so it is with the current resurgence of anti-Semitism. There is a sense that we have seen it all before, many times with the same tired clichés reappearing again and again in history. For years, I gave a lecture in my Reformation course on Luther and the Jews. I always began by pointing out that, for all of the controversy surrounding his 1543 tract, On the Jews and Their Lies, it was his 1523 treatise, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, that was the more remarkable in its time. Hatred of Jews among European Christians was a longstanding tradition by the early sixteenth century, and therefore it was not Luther’s anti-Jewish venom that needed explanation but his somewhat more positive—and countercultural—earlier work. 

Why did Luther later change his mind? I believe that he was frustrated that the Jews had not converted to the Reformation cause, and that his declining health increased his bitterness toward the world and everything in it. Whether or not On the Jews and Their Lies is truly anti-Semitic is an ongoing debate, given the strong role in the sixteenth century of categories of religion and the relatively inchoate nature of categories of race. But however one answers that question, there is a path from his day to ours, and the myth of the blood libel, the idea that Jews use the blood of Christians in Passover celebrations, plays a part. Luther drew on it in his later tract, and it has today returned to public discourse.

Last week at University College, London, an academic, Dr. Samar Maqusi, repeated the libel as part of a presentation to the UCL branch of Students for Justice in Palestine. Reaction was strong and swift; Maqusi has reportedly been banned from campus. Had her talk focused simply on criticism of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, it might have been deemed a legitimate contribution to ongoing discussion. Yet it has become clear in the months since October 7, 2023, that the line between concerns about Israel’s conduct of the war and a basic hatred of Jews everywhere because of their ethnicity is one that is too frequently non-existent.

What does this all mean? The current resurgence of anti-Semitism is consonant with the broader cultural disposition to trample on anything held to be sacred by the previous generation. Whether it is a minor cultural sideshow, such as Gig Eva’s quasi-Oedipal rebellion against a previous generation of evangelical fathers, or the more significant mainstream expressions of hatred toward Jews on both the left and the right, iconoclasm, cultural and subcultural, characterizes our time. It seems that today, everybody legitimates themselves by transgressing whatever boundary earlier generations considered impassable. We are defined by breaking established norms—moral, historical, aesthetic. And the result is that we end up repeating some of the most egregious errors of past times. Maqusi is a sign of the times: embarrassing in her historical incompetence, reprehensible in her hatred of what she would no doubt characterize as the Other, and yet oh-so typical in validating herself through violation of established norms.

Is UCL’s decision to ban Maqusi an assault on free speech? There is a sense in which the answer is yes, of course it is. But the more worrying aspect of this whole situation is that it points to deeper changes in our culture. The university has essentially acknowledged that the older ideas—that good speech drives out bad speech, that the truth will triumph over error—are no longer valid on its campus. And why is that? Because university culture has for several generations now promoted critical theoretical, rather than critical realistic, approaches to knowledge. The latter assume that the world has a moral shape—that, yes, while the quest for truth must be modest because of our limitations, the truth does still exist, can be at least apprehended, and is not intrinsically manipulative. The former reconfigure truth in a revolutionary manner. “Truth” has become whatever moves the culture in what its advocates believe is the right direction. To borrow from Marx: These philosophers see their task not as describing the world but as changing it. Therefore, whatever facilitates that change, however historically incompetent or malicious it might be, becomes legitimate. And, as the reappearance of the blood libel and such frauds as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion indicate, there is a sense in which the approaches collectively known as “critical theory” are really no more than conspiracy theories dressed up in specious academic jargon.  

If universities had a strong culture of truth—of believing in its existence and therefore in the possibility and necessity of seeking it—then the blood libel would be greeted as what it is: nothing more than a poisonous lie believed only by those whose natural sartorial choices typically involve wearing tinfoil hats. It would not be deemed dangerous so much as ridiculous. But decades of critical theory have left us both incapable of telling truth from falsehood—or even conceptualizing such a distinction—and paralyzed by the idea that power is truth. And as critical theory’s pop reception in the early 2020s indicates, its predilections are not the monopoly of those who actually know the field. It resonates deeply with a culture fueled by an ethos of ressentiment that stretches far beyond the graduate seminar room to the moral tundra of social media. 

And yet where has it led us? Far from moving us forward, it has apparently carried us back to the most malicious and ridiculous tropes of the late Middle Ages.

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The Sabbath is making a comeback. Across the West, that most singular and ancient of weekly phenomena—a day marked by the absence of market forces, digital devices, and the manic demands of professional ­productivity—is enjoying a ­curious renaissance. The notion that modern individuals desperately need systematic respite from the matrix of expectations and neuroses ­imposed on them by their world is no longer marginal. Perusing the ­smorgasbord of self-help gurus, parenting manuals, mindfulness retreats, and decluttering guides, one constantly encounters paeans to the digital detox, frequently termed a “tech ­Sabbath.”

That highly successful people in the twenty-first century are rediscovering the power, beauty, and necessity of a millennia-old biblical custom will come as a surprise to everyone except those who already observe it. For those of us fortunate enough to live our lives within this propitious rhythm, the only surprising thing about this rediscovery is its belatedness. The blessings of the weekly Sabbath, aptly described by Talmudic rabbis as “one-sixtieth of heaven,” require no elaboration beyond direct ­experience. The Sabbath’s power has been evident for millennia. Jews across the centuries have undergone every tribulation and oppression dreamt up by humanity. Yet every week, for twenty-four hours, they have returned—­liturgically and psychologically—to a state of numinous tranquility. They have rested, they have remembered, and they have affirmed their allegiance to a world in which time itself can be sanctified and the future redeemed. When Ahad Ha’am, a decidedly non-­religious Zionist thinker, remarked that “more than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews,” his exaggeration was, at most, slight.

Given the antiquity and centrality of the Sabbath to both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, it is unsurprising that a number of modern authors have sought to explicate and re-enchant this weekly institution. Perhaps the best-known effort in this vein is The Sabbath (1951), by the neo-Hasidic philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel. That slim volume, overflowing with fabulously poetic aperçus, invited its readers to taste eternity in the guise of sacred time. As a ­psychospiritual tour of the Sabbath’s “palaces in time,” it has yet to be surpassed. Honorable mention must also be made of Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be? (1976), in which the psychoanalyst’s coruscating insights illuminate the Sabbath’s role in counterbalancing the acquisitive instincts of a disenchanted world. Yet our moment, characterized by a profusion of information and an impoverishment of wisdom, demands a reconceptualization of the Sabbath that is both spiritually sensitive and intellectually rigorous, attuned equally to the history and to the phenomenology of this remarkable ­institution.

Stepping into this role with characteristic erudition and eloquence is my eminent mentor Jon D. ­Levenson. In an academic world increasingly defined by methodological parochialism, Levenson’s work has always stood apart. He has the rare capacity to harvest from a wide range of academic fields—history, theology, biblical criticism, rabbinics, and philosophy—in service of extensive and penetrating considerations of enduring theological questions. Levenson writes with exquisite religious ­sensibility, conveying a sense not only of the outer forms of religious praxis but also of the strivings, emotions, and aspirations that accompany them. ­Israel’s Day of Light and Joy is vintage Levenson, evincing the breadth of scholarship, felicity of ­articulation, and twinkle-eyed wit with which he has reigned over seminar rooms and lecture halls for many decades.

The early chapters address a set of questions concerning the origins of the Sabbath itself. How and when did this institution arise? Does it appear consistently across the canon of the Hebrew Bible, or are there variants, slowly converging toward coherence? Do analogues exist in other ancient cultures? Levenson leads the reader across the landscape of accepted scholarship, even dipping a toe in the waters of speculation.

His most salient claim is that the šabbāt of the Hebrew Bible may have originated in connection with a Babylonian full moon festival (šabattu), becoming synonymous with the “seventh day” only through a lengthy process of theological convergence and calendrical standardization. He reminds us that the seven-day week itself is a non-­natural phenomenon. Unlike the day (solar rotation), month (lunar cycle), and year (earth’s revolution), the seven-day structure appears sui generis. Its only general analogue in the ancient world exists within the Greco-Roman astronomical system, with each day being governed by a celestial body (hence the name of our modern seventh day, derived from “Saturn’s Day”).

Yet for all such similarities, ­Levenson’s most forceful point is the uniqueness of the theologically freighted biblical Sabbath. Ordained from the start as a moment of sanctity and transcendence, it has no true parallel in any ancient civilization. It is no mere “Day of Rest” (although cessation from work is important), nor is it a tribute to the powers of the planetary spheres that were once invested with deterministic power. Such a pagan cosmology, in Bertrand ­Russell’s arresting formulation, views humankind as “a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature,” a pitiable slave “doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself.” The Sabbath stands as a ritualized repudiation of inexorable temporality. The Sabbatical observer declares his faith in a vision of the cosmos in which humanity is not an ­isolated speck adrift in ­indifference, but a covenantal being of irreducible significance, bound from inception to God, community, and creation. This paradigm shift, foundational to the biblical revolution, is ratified every week by the imbrication of a non-natural unit of sacred time within an otherwise cosmological calendar. This jarring break functions as a subtle yet transformative simulacrum of the Bible’s insistence on mankind’s unique dual status: as a being confronted at once by both the majesty of a powerful universe and the sovereignty of its all-powerful author.

Levenson devotes much time to comparing Jewish and Christian approaches to the Sabbath, particularly around the question of legal regulation. Rabbinic tradition, from its earliest texts, surrounds the Sabbath with a latticework of prohibitions, customs, and finely wrought distinctions. The act of ceasing from labor, it turns out, requires extensive and exhaustive attention. For many Christian interpreters, this has seemed paradoxical, if not absurd. For how can a day of spiritual liberation be reduced to a list of technicalities? At its worst, this rabbinic normativity is caricatured as a monument to desiccated Pharisaism, overcome by the ­liberating spiritualization of Christian grace.

Levenson rejects this caricature. Following a venerable line of halakhic thought, he argues that it is through law—precise, enforceable, and shared—that the Sabbath achieves its character. To observe the Sabbath is not merely to embrace a state of mind, but to enter into a communal choreography of rest. The laws of governing the Sabbath, correctly conceived, cannot be dismissed as mere crabbed legalism. Far from hindering spiritual praxis, they underwrite it. This tightly guarded and defined form of rest also safeguards the socio-ethical component of this institution, compelling as it does kings and paupers, seigneurs and peasants, humans and animals, to return to a prelapsarian state of freedom and fellowship. This radically egalitarian state becomes possible only within a matrix of normative constraint. If Heschel rhapsodized about the Sabbath’s “palace in time,” Levenson reminds us that these marvels of spiritual architectonics require floor plans.

As elsewhere, Levenson’s work here demonstrates a deep sympathy with rabbinic interpretations of the biblical texts, as well as with their traditionalist heirs in the medieval and modern canons of Jewish scholarship. Levenson’s competence in these frequently difficult textual traditions, and his sensitivity to their subterranean theological subtleties, are uncommon for a biblical scholar and, indeed, are lacking in some modern theologians. This sympathy leads him not only to oppose the classic Pauline approach to the Sabbath, but also to point out the lamentable failure of various reformist denominations of Judaism to preserve the “essence” of the Sabbath while eviscerating its legal frameworks. Some may view these commitments as a flaw in his analytical approach. Others will count them as a strength and a welcome counterbalance to the pervasive misapprehension that rabbinic hermeneutics are inimical to sound scholarship and reasoning.

The chapter with the greatest contemporary ­relevance—and the chapter this reviewer wishes could have been more extensive—is this book’s final one, which details the challenges posed by the Sabbath to modernity, and vice versa. Levenson notes that, for Orthodox Jews in particular, the Sabbath now functions as a weekly act of defiance against the instrumentalization of human life. The refusal to use technology, to conduct commerce, or to attend to digital devices forms a profoundly countercultural posture, a theological protest against the mechanization of existence. Highlighting and entrenching Heschel’s observations, Levenson notes that various forms of the “secular Sabbath” bear only the palest semblance to the genuine article. True Sabbath is not a tool for a more efficient Monday. It stands as a reminder that human life and dignity are ends in themselves, imbued with the eternity of the divine image and the attendant obligation to tend to those parts of our lives and personhood that cannot be priced on the market, yet have worth beyond number. In an age of overstimulation, the Sabbath is a rare opportunity to step off the treadmill that claims so much of our time and attention, and dedicate ourselves to restoring our tranquility, dignity, and, ultimately, our humanity.

To be sure, Levenson’s work is hardly the final word on the Sabbath. Some of his historical claims invite further scrutiny, and his alignment with rabbinic traditionalism will perhaps alienate some of his readers. The extent to which the Jewish Sabbath is truly equipped to function as a counterweight to the excesses of twenty-first-century life is a subject that demands more extensive reflection. Yet this book’s great strength is in its aspiration: It dares to treat the Sabbath as neither a museum artifact nor an ethereal phantasm, but as a vibrant historical, theological, and moral institution, with the power to alter individual and communal rhythms of life.

To understand the Sabbath is to grasp something elemental about Jewish history, biblical anthropology, and the metaphysics of time itself. It is to encounter a vision of life in which the world is not merely a field for toil but a garden of repose, to be received in ­humility and joy. Levenson’s luminous work offers us the best starting point yet for such an encounter. ­Israel’s Day of Light and Joy is a book worthy of the day it honors.

The post The Rest as History appeared first on First Things.

Rabbi Held, president and dean of the Hadar Institute in New York, has recently offered a stirring vision of God in Judaism Is About Love. His book is not merely a theological statement, it is a moral intervention. Held writes to a generation that has inherited ritual but not reverence, ethics but not encounter. He urges readers to reclaim a faith rooted in divine care. As he puts it, “God seeks partners in love and justice, and Jewish life is the work of responding to that invitation. God cares, and wants that care to flow through us into the world.”

It is theology at its most humane and expansive. Held’s God is not a distant monarch but a power-sharing presence, inviting humanity into moral co-creation. Yet precisely in that beauty lies a peril. When the Creator is defined primarily through relationship, when his essence is framed chiefly as partnership, transcendence can yield to reciprocity, and God risks becoming a reflection of our aspirations rather than the ground of their possibility.

As a school leader, I see versions of this every day. We are very good at teaching compassion and belonging, less good at teaching reverence. We train children to manage their emotions, but not always to recognize mystery. We have social-emotional learning, but no metaphysical literacy. We tell students that God cares about how they treat one another, but rarely that God is the reason there is a world in which treatment matters at all. Prayer becomes a form of mindfulness, ritual takes on the cadence of group therapy, and the divine presence begins to mirror our own interior state.

Either we will recover transcendence, or we will exhaust ourselves trying to manufacture it. The choice is simple. The recovery is not. What we need is not less love but a love grounded in being itself, a return to the God who is, not only the God who feels.

R. Hayyim of Volozhin saw this two centuries ago. The foremost disciple of the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, and founder of the Lithuanian yeshiva, he watched Hasidic fervor sweep through the Jewish world, promising emotional closeness to God. Volozhin admired its passion but feared its collapse into sentiment. His answer, Nefesh HaChayim, teaches a double vision of the divine. God both “fills all worlds,” present in the intimacy of every breath, and “surrounds all worlds,” utterly beyond comprehension, the ungraspable source of being. Creation, he explains, is an unending act, God’s speech continuously sustaining all things. To live in faith is to move between those two poles, nearness and distance, warmth and wonder.

Later thinkers such as Rav Shagar echoed this rhythm for a postmodern age, reminding students that spirituality is not a form of self-expression but an opening to something larger than the self.

Catholic theology traced a similar arc. Vatican II sought to open the Church to the modern world, emphasizing renewal and relationship. But renewal risks flattening transcendence unless paired with awe. Hans Urs von Balthasar attempted that synthesis. In The Glory of the Lord, he argued that divine love and divine glory must be seen together, self-giving and majesty, intimacy and otherness. Love, for Balthasar, is not a feeling but the very structure of being. Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, carried that vision into pastoral form. His first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, begins not with emotion but with ontology. “God is love,” he writes. That verb, is, restores gravity. God does not simply act lovingly. Love is the texture of reality itself, and to love is to participate in being.

Seen together, Volozhin, Balthasar, and Benedict form a united front against the temptation that defines our age: to reduce the vertical to the horizontal, awe to empathy, transcendence to affirmation.

So how might educators recover a grammar of reverence? The answer is not to replace empathy with abstraction but to remind students that kindness is sacred because existence itself is a gift. Awe begins in silence and in beauty. A teacher who lets a question hang, who allows a room to feel the weight of wonder, teaches theology more powerfully than any lecture. When students watch an adult pause before lighting Shabbat candles, or hear a teacher speak of learning as covenant, they encounter the possibility that life itself is responsive.

Across the West, religion is returning, but no one knows what kind. It could become another therapeutic brand, spirituality retooled for stress management, or it could become again what it once was, a grammar for awe. Whether the revival deepens or dissipates will depend not on slogans but on schools, not on outreach but on teachers. A generation ago, we taught rules without warmth and drove children to rebellion. Now we teach warmth without weight and risk raising souls unable to bow. If we want faith to endure, we must recover the weight of the One before whom we stand, for children need more than affirmation. They need a world that can command their attention.

If I could leave my students one gift, it would be this: that when the world tells them everything is negotiable, they will still feel the tremor of something unchangeable; that when they speak of love, they will mean the kind that holds the cosmos in being. The world does not need more curators of mood. It needs mediators of mystery.

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Christopher R. Seitz’s The Predestinate: Ecclesiastes and the Man Who Outshone the Sun King unexpectedly pairs the author of Ecclesiastes with the finance minister of King Louis XIV. Before his fall, Nicolas Fouquet was “the best-connected man in France,” overseer of the French treasury, collector of fine art and manuscripts, builder and resident of the famed Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, and, eventually, the purported author of Les Conseils de la Sagesse, written in prison after Fouquet’s arrest for embezzlement. His thoughts follow the wisdom and spirit of Ecclesiastes. The author of the Old Testament book was, Seitz says, “a man who, though once enormously wealthy and endowed with great wisdom, lost everything.” Fouquet did, too, and was probably mostly innocent of the charges made against him. Hence, “the parallels with Fouquet are obvious.” Ecclesiastes is also a source of personal inspiration for Seitz. He discloses that the verses in chapter 12 “grab a hold of me spiritually and emotionally.” The book is not a “tribute to pessimism and futility,” as often thought, but a map of how to “become a different [and better] man.”

From Sinai to Rome: Jewish Identity in the Catholic Church is a collection of essays “concerned with recovering the Jewish dimensions of the Gospels and the Church so that Catholicism may recover its full ecclesial dimensions as consisting of Jews and gentiles under the Messiah of Israel.” At issue is the supersessionist understanding, in which the Jewish covenant has been nullified by the coming of Christ. Contributors address the Jewish origins of Jesus and Mary, Aquinas on the Jews, the very idea of “Hebrew Catholics,” and what it means for a Jew to convert to the Church. How Catholic universalism accords with Jewish particularism, along with other tensions between the faiths, is discussed. Editors Angela Costley and Gavin D’Costa have a goal: to “deep[en] our Catholic appreciation of the Jewish church.” They believe that Catholic faith expands when it is understood in continuity with ancient Judaism. As one essay says, “After all, at the most primitive stage of her formation, the Church was a strictly Jewish undertaking.” Another one quotes Cardinal Newman: “The Jewish Church and the Christian Church are one.”

In Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America, Peter Berkowitz combines intellectual depth with firsthand reportage to explain a situation that leaves Americans often perplexed and dismayed. The volume collects forty columns written by Berkowitz from 2014 to 2024, the topic being the complex place and continuing story of Israel in recent times. Berkowitz’s commentary on the October 7 attacks maintains an admirable objectivity and prudence at a time of horrified worldwide reaction. The goal is to inform, not to provoke. His September 2016 assessment of the deal Obama made with Iran concludes by asserting that the deal made Iran more dangerous and destabilizing, not less so. But Berkowitz treats the error analytically, attributing it to “Obama’s unconventional version of balance-of-power politics,” not to lesser motives. That’s the tone of the entire book, a ten-year record of the region by one of the most reliable observers we’ve got.

Modern Jewish Worldmaking through Yiddish Children’s Literature, by Miriam Udel, contains dense historical accounts and careful readings of Yiddish culture and the children’s literature it produced. We learn, for instance, of the career of Leyb Kvitko (born 1890 or 1893), the most popular Yiddish children’s author in the Soviet Union, who had to write stories in a polity growing ever more hostile to the “bourgeois family.” He composed stories of children with absent or bad parents, who resort to their own initiative and, eventually, receive kind support from the state. Ultimately, officials weren’t sufficiently impressed. In August 1952, Stalin gave orders for him to be executed.

Finally, a note about The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, a new textbook to which all history teachers should pay close attention. The authors are noted historians Allen Guelzo and James Hankins. The first volume is subtitled “The Ancient World and Christendom.” I include it here because it has sections on “Ancient Israel,” “Exile and Return,” “The Judaism of the Second Temple,” and “Jewish Revolts.” The authors take time to explain the theological meaning and historical status of Israel, the covenants, ideas of justice and equality, God’s punishments, and so on, up to the emergence in Galilee of Jesus. This is a legacy not always given sufficient attention in Western Civ layouts. I recommend The Golden Thread for classical, Christian, and Jewish schools everywhere.

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Rabbi Hauer was an Orthodox rabbi, a label that to many outside observers implies inflexibility: laws, obligations, technicalities, and a worldview resistant to change. Yet those who encountered him, from progressive Jewish leaders to Christian clergy and secular professionals, found in him a man of grace, empathy, and intellectual generosity. Most people assume that coexistence requires compromise, that maintaining friendships across ideological lines means retreating from principle. Rabbi Hauer rejected that assumption.

In countless meetings and public appearances, Rabbi Hauer listened attentively, albeit with great concern, even to those who questioned the values he held sacred. The respect he showed was not strategy but sincerity. He believed that every human being is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God, which compelled him to treat every person as worthy of dignity no matter how strongly he disagreed. People who expected confrontation found conversation. Those prepared to defend themselves discovered they could instead open up to a warm friend.

Rabbi Hauer’s approach exposes a false dichotomy that dominates modern discourse: the idea that one must either compromise or condemn. He charted a third path. He understood that compromise may preserve relationships temporarily but often weakens both truth and trust. If friendship depends on pretending differences don’t exist, it is not genuine. The better way, he believed, is honesty suffused with compassion. 

This guided his leadership of the OU, where he built coalitions with non-Orthodox Jewish leaders on issues like anti-Semitism and communal security, even as he maintained sharp theological boundaries. It guided his advocacy for family, education, and moral clarity in the public sphere, where he worked with faith leaders and policymakers from diverse backgrounds. It guided his pastoral work, where he counseled people across the religious and political spectrum with empathy and discretion. 

When paying a condolence visit to the family, I sat next to an unlikely visitor. In a room full of Orthodox Jews sat Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the progressive Union for Reform Judaism. Rabbi Jacobs commented about the deep friendship and comradery he experienced with Rabbi Hauer, even while both passionately believed in opposing worldviews. Everyone present was moved by the love between these ideological opponents.

America is drowning in a culture of outrage. It is hard to even remember when public debate was about persuasion rather than performance. Rabbi Hauer modeled another way. His presence and demeanor were his arguments: that strength and compassion can coexist, that moral clarity and openheartedness can reinforce each other.

The Torah’s laws are not just rules of conduct but also “ways of peace.” Part and parcel of observing the many divine rules is also disagreeing peacefully and respectfully, albeit vigorously and passionately. The path of peace is not paved by ignoring differences or lowering standards. It is paved by seeing others as partners in society, even when their conclusions diverge dramatically. Rabbi Hauer believed that while disagreement is not a flaw of society, disagreeableness is a flaw of character. The danger lies not in disagreement itself but in the absence of goodwill that must accompany it. 

Rabbi Hauer loved people enough to tell them the truth. He loved truth enough to tell it gently. This was not tolerance in the contemporary sense of benign indifference. It was a more demanding standard: caring deeply about others while standing firmly for what one believes. 

Rabbi Hauer’s life offers a moral methodology this fractured nation needs. The Torah teaches traditional morals and family values, among which civility and respect play important roles. He modeled this in his leadership of the OU, in his writing and teaching, and in private, where no title or prestige could obscure his humility.

His final lesson to this country is that to disagree agreeably is not weakness. It is moral maturity. His legacy challenges every one of us, leader and lay person, to rediscover that balance.

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At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Tucker Carlson continued his pell-mell descent down the slippery slope of vileness by attributing Jesus’s death to the “hummus-eaters.” So it is well that we have the Catholic Church’s solemn declaration, in Nostra Aetate, that “neither all Jews indiscriminately” at the time of Christ, “nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during [Christ’s] passion”—and the unambiguous affirmation that the Church “deplores all hatreds, persecutions, [and] displays of antisemitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews.” 

Just as importantly, we have the Council’s acknowledgment of the religious debt that Catholicism owes to Judaism:      

The Church of Christ acknowledges that . . . the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ—Abraham’s sons according to faith (cf. Gal. 3:7)—are included in the same Patriarch’s call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people’s exodus from the land of bondage. The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles (cf. Rom. 11:17–24) . . .

The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: “theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises . . .” (Rom. 9:4–5) . . . She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church’s main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ’s Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people . . . 

In company with the Prophets and [St. Paul], the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice . . .

As I said in a lecture last month at the University of Colorado Boulder, anti-Semitism is a betrayal of Christianity, for Jew-hatred is Christ-hatred. Why? Because Jesus of Nazareth makes no sense without understanding him as he understood himself: as a son of God’s covenant with the Jewish people who, from the Cross, evoked Psalm 22 and its triumphant claim that “dominion belongs to the Lord” who “rules over the nations” and to whom “all the proud of the earth bow down.”

Moreover, Christianity makes no sense without its Jewish parent, as the Christian New Testament makes no sense without the Hebrew Bible. Absent its foundation in, and tether to, Judaism, Christianity would have been another short-lived mystery cult from the ancient world, with Jesus of Nazareth as the miracle-working Galilean version of the first-century miracle-working Neopythagorean, Apollonius of Tyana. Early Christians understood this. So even in its childhood, historically speaking, Catholicism decisively rejected the heresy of Marcionism, which scorned the Old Testament and created a repugnant caricature of the God of the Hebrew Bible. 

Anti-Semitism is a malignancy in society. Throughout modern political history, rising anti-Semitism has been an unmistakable marker of cultural decay. And as politics is downstream from culture, the public effects of that cultural decay can be draconian, as history teaches us—from the passions unleashed during the Dreyfus Affair in the French Third Republic, through the cultural meltdown of Weimar Germany and its genocidal political outcome, to the maniacal barbarism of Hamas on October 7, 2023. If we imagine the twenty-first-century Western world immune to those political passions, we are fooling ourselves—and not paying attention.

So let us mark the diamond anniversary of Nostra Aetate by slamming down, and then nailing shut, the widening Overton Window on anti-Semitism.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

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I was instead startled to discover that the author of that article, Gerald McDermott, argued the opposite. Unfortunately, McDermott’s review misrepresents the arguments of the book so substantially that I felt it necessary to set the record straight with a response.

McDermott’s review begins by claiming that my book proposes “that the apostle thought of Gentiles as the predominant Israelites,” a statement for which McDermott provides no quotation or evidence. This absence of any specific reference to back up his claims sets a pattern observed throughout the rest of the review.

This summary is in fact at odds with the actual thesis of the book, which is that the apostle thought that because of the past scattering and assimilation of the bulk of northern Israel among the nations, the prophetically promised restoration of “all Israel” required the union of both Jews and non-Jews within the people of God (see page 20). Far from this meaning gentiles are “the predominant Israelites,” the book is clear that, according to the apostle, Jews/Judah are the preeminent (“the leading,” page 48) portion of the larger category of Israel.

McDermott also claims that I translate 1 Corinthians 12:2 as “when you were former gentiles,” protesting that “the word ‘former’ is not in the Greek but inserted by Staples” and complaining that “he reverts to this lone verse (and idiosyncratic translation) over and over throughout his book.” But the lone translation of that verse provided in the book is as follows: “You know that when you were gentiles (ἔθνη), you were led astray, being carried away to mute idols” (page 331).

Here McDermott fails to distinguish an argument from a translation. It is true that (along with many other Pauline scholars) I regard Paul’s use of the past (imperfect) tense in 1 Corinthians 12:2 as an indication that his addressees are no longer ἔθνη (ethnē), but have become something else—which would, by implication, make them former ethnē. 

McDermott objects to this conclusion (which he misrepresents as a translation) on the grounds that “most English translations render the [verse] ‘when you were pagans’ or ‘heathens,’ because Paul immediately adds, ‘you were led astray to mute idols.’” But this begs the question. The reason these translations use “pagans” or “heathens” is the presumption that these persons cannot cease to be gentiles—despite the fact that Paul’s wording says exactly that. Had he meant otherwise, he could easily have said, “when you were idolaters” or “unbelievers” or used one of several other terms for worshipers of other deities. But Paul instead uses the term elsewhere translated “gentiles.” Why should we presume that in this one verse the word ethnē designates something other than what it means every other time Paul uses the word? 

Instead, the apostle’s point in 1 Corinthians 12:2 is that when these people had been members of other nations/ethnic groups, they had worshiped and served the gods of their respective peoples. (As Paula Fredriksen has rightly pointed out, in the ancient world, “gods really did run in the blood.”) But this changed when they became followers of Jesus and were incorporated into the “commonwealth of Israel” (Eph. 2:12); they no longer serve the mute idols of their previous people, they now worship only the God of Israel.

The review then declares: “Staples claims that ‘Israelite’ is never used for Jews in the New Testament era,” again providing no quotation for this claim. This is patently false.

Instead, the book demonstrates that Jews are “a subset of the larger category of Israel” (page 52) and explicitly states that in the New Testament era, “‘Israel’ could refer to any of its subsets by synecdoche” (page 48) and “contemporary Jews could, as part of a subset of Israel, be referred to as ‘Israelites’” (page 66). It is as though McDermott read an explanation of how not all Americans are Floridians and then concluded that this meant Floridians can never be called Americans.

McDermott then builds on his misrepresentation of my argument by citing a variety of examples in which “Israel/Israelite” language is used of Jews in the New Testament. But not one of these examples contradicts the model actually put forward in the book, nor do any of them support McDermott’s conclusion that “‘Judeans/Jews’ and ‘Israelites’ are synonymous.”

McDermott closes his article by referring to “Staples’s suggestion that non-Messianic Jews no longer matter to God.” This statement surely qualifies as willful misreading. Pointing to Romans 11:28–29, he then claims, “Tellingly, this passage (which inspired Nostra Aetate at Vatican II) is buried in a single footnote.” This too is untrue. 

Instead, Romans 11:28–32 appears in full as a block quote within the body text (page 320), immediately followed by the explanation that

contemporary unfaithful Israelites have in no way lost their election. They remain God’s chosen despite their opposition to the gospel, which (like historical Israel’s unfaithfulness) is itself being used for redemptive purposes (cf. 9:21–26). Paul thus argues that the covenantal promises to Israel are being fulfilled in the present—the redemption of the nations together with Jews witnesses to the fidelity of God to the whole people of Israel. 

McDermott’s claim of the “virtual omission” of this passage in my book is false, as is his assertion that this book “implies that God has revoked the covenant promise” and “is standard supersessionism (the Gentile Church superseding and displacing Jewish Israel in God’s affections).” 

All authors eventually must face the fact that some readers will inevitably misinterpret their writing. Fortunately, in this case I am able to correct the record.

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The writings of the apostle Paul have confused many. Even his fellow apostle St. Peter wrote that Paul is sometimes “hard to understand,” and “the ignorant and unstable” twist his words “to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). Two thousand years later, there is still much uncertainty about Paul. The Catholic philosopher Robert Royal, for example, recently confessed it was many years before he came to fathom St. Paul’s “mania.”

Perhaps the most controverted aspect of Paul’s thought has been his thinking about Judaism and its relation to the Jesus movement. Martin Luther convinced Protestants for centuries that Paul was attacking first-century Judaism for teaching salvation by works. But the “New Perspective on Paul,” a movement led by James Dunn and N. T. Wright, showed that Jews of Paul’s day held to a “covenantal nomism” whereby God elected Jews by grace but required obedience to remain within the covenant. So Jewish salvation was actually by grace, but faithfulness was necessary to remain in salvation.

This rethinking about Paul and Judaism was provoked by the Holocaust directed by Germany, the most Christianized country in history and birthplace of the Reformation. This attempted genocide of Jews forced biblical scholars and theologians to ask if previous Christian thinking—perhaps a misreading of Paul—had somehow contributed to this catastrophe. British New Testament scholar Charles Cranfield concluded that an impartial reading of chapters 9–11 in Paul’s epistle to the Romans “emphatically forbid[s] us to speak of the church as having once and for all taken the place of the Jewish people.” The Welsh historian W. D. Davies noted in his seminal work on the biblical concept of land that “Paul never calls the Church the New Israel or the Jewish people the Old Israel.”

If Pauline theology has been unsettled since World War II, it is now being shaken again by a provocative new book from Jason Staples, religious studies professor at North Carolina State University. In Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, Staples challenges centuries of Protestant thinking about Paul and proposes a new and arresting model for Pauline theology of Israel—that the apostle thought of Gentiles as the predominant Israelites. But Staples’s proposal is more clever than careful.    

Staples deserves credit for his willingness to re-examine hoary traditions of Pauline scholarship. He insists that Paul never rejected the Judaism he inherited, and stressed the importance of works in ways that contradict the assumptions of many Protestant theologians: “Judgement based on works . . . is so foundational [to Paul’s thinking] that it appears in every undisputed Pauline letter except Philemon, being significantly more pervasive in that respect than justification by faith.”  

Therefore faith (which Staples translates as “fidelity”) was never opposed to works in the apostle’s thinking: “Such a distinction between fidelity (pistis) and obedience puts asunder what Paul joins together—the apostle explicitly states that his mission is to bring about ‘the obedience of fidelity’ . . . indicating that he understands fidelity as defined by obedience.”

Staples also challenges Protestant appeals to divine sovereignty in salvation based on Paul’s analogy of a potter and his clay in Romans 9. Staples argues that Paul is actually using Jeremiah’s analogy (Jer. 18:1–11), where the prophet defends God against the accusation of arbitrariness. Jeremiah and Paul are drawing on the artisan’s understanding that clay is “an especially stubborn and willful material” that a potter must adapt to.  

The implication is that God’s sovereignty is not unilateral or arbitrary but something like a conversation between the God of Israel and his human creations. In this sense, Paul is more Jewish than most Protestant interpreters have imagined.

But if these pushbacks against familiar Protestant readings are persuasive, Staples’s principal thesis is not. He argues that Paul considers all Gentile followers of Jesus to be “Israelites,” just as much as Jewish believers in Jesus. To continue to call them “Gentiles” is to misunderstand the gospel and the “resurrection of Israel.” 

By “resurrection,” Staples means what Paul signified by “the hope of Israel” (Acts 28:20)—namely, the eschatological restoration of the Twelve Tribes when “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26). Staples takes as paradigmatic the experience of the Ten Lost Tribes who were probably assimilated into paganism (and gentilism) after the first exile to the Assyrian empire in 721 B.C. Because Paul is convinced they will be restored to Israelite status, and since this eschatological restoration will take place when “the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Rom. 11:25), this will involve their transition from “pagan/Gentile” status to “restored Israelite” status. And since Jesus-following Gentiles are also “grafted in” to the olive tree of Israel (Rom. 11:17), Paul must mean that in the new Body of Messiah, Gentiles are just as much Israelites as messianic Jews are.

Just as the Ten Lost Tribes to the east will one day transition from Gentile to Israelite status once again, Staples says Paul believes the same about Gentiles in the West. Paul “goes so far as to call them former gentiles” in 1 Cor. 12:2. And he refers “to them as descendants of biblical Israel” in 1 Cor. 10:1. Therefore, “they are not saved ‘as gentiles’ because they are no longer gentiles; instead they have become equal members of Israel” along with their Jewish siblings.

But Staples claims too much for his translations “when you were former gentiles” and “descendants of biblical Israel.” Most English translations render the first “when you were pagans” or “heathens,” because Paul immediately adds, “you were led astray to mute idols.” The word “former” is not in the Greek but inserted by Staples. Yet he reverts to this lone verse (and idiosyncratic translation) over and over throughout his book.

Staples claims that “Israelite” is never used for Jews in the New Testament era, but that “the term [Israelite] regularly refers to biblical [Old Testament] Israel or suggests an eschatological nuance,” as in “all Israel will be saved.” Yet the two terms—Israel/Israelite and Ioudaios/oi—are in fact treated as equivalent by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul himself, and in none of these cases does “Israel/Israelite” refer to Old Testament Israel or the eschaton.  

Matthew, for example, says the Romans put a sign over Jesus’s head on the cross—“This is Jesus, King of the Jews (ὁ βασιλεῦς τῶν Ἰουδαίων)”—and then narrates what the chief priests and scribes said of him: “He is the King of Israel (βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ), let him come down now” (Matt. 27:37, 42). Matthew thus refers to the Jews of Judea as both Jews (Ioudaioi) and members of “Israel.”

In Acts of the Apostles, Luke does the same. In his Pentecost sermon, Peter first addresses the crowd as “men of Judaea” (Ἄνδρες Ἰουδαῖοι), and then refers to this same crowd as “men of Israel/Israelites” (Ἄνδρες Ἰσραηλῖται).  As in Matthew, Mark, and John, the referents are neither Old Testament Israelites nor future denizens of an eschatological kingdom. “Judeans/Jews” and “Israelites” are synonymous.

This pattern is no less present in Paul’s largest letter. In Romans 9:6, when referring to Jews of his day, Paul distinguishes between those “from Israel” (ἐξ Ἰσραήλ) and those who “are Israel” (οὗτοι Ἰσραήλ). The latter are evidently messianic Jews, the “children of the promise” (9:8) who are the “remnant” (9:27; 11:5) who accept Jesus as messiah. They are the “called” (9:24) from the Jews (ἐξ Ἰουδαίων) alongside “called” Gentiles (ἐξ ἐθνῶν). Here Paul refers to Jewish believers both as “Israel” and as “Jews” (Ioudaioi).

In a revealing concession, Staples notes “the absence of any direct statement in Romans identifying gentiles as Israelites” and cites the distinguished Pauline scholar Douglas Moo, who writes that for at least ten times when Paul uses the term “Israel” in Romans 9–11, he “refers to ethnic Israel.”

If Staples is right about his thesis, non-messianic Jews are no longer Israelites and (by implication) God’s covenant with Abraham’s descendants no longer applies to them. And the land promise, repeated one thousand times in the Old Testament, is now defunct because all the promises are restricted to Jesus-followers. Yet Luke tells us that Paul was still affirming the land promise nearly thirty years after Jesus’s resurrection: “After destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, [God] gave [this people Israel] their land as an inheritance” (Acts 13:19).

Contrary to Staples’s suggestion that non-messianic Jews no longer matter to God, Paul refers to them as still “beloved” and says their “calling” to be the chosen people is “irrevocable” (Rom. 11:28–29). Tellingly, this passage (which inspired Nostra Aetate at Vatican II) is buried in a single footnote.

This virtual omission demonstrates why this book matters. It perpetuates an ugly history in the Church’s use of Paul to denigrate those whom St. John Paul II called our “fathers in the faith.” Its message that the Church is the New or True Israel is familiar. But its use in this book implies that God has revoked the covenant promise that the Jewish people would remain a “nation” before him as long as the sun and moon and stars are in the sky (Jer. 31:35–36). This is standard supersessionism (the Gentile Church superseding and displacing Jewish Israel in God’s affections) that Rome has denounced at Vatican II and in recent documents. 

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These tears of grief were shed by both Israelis and Palestinians, and the stories of loss were shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I encountered heartbroken mothers with their babies, grandparents, married couples, aunts and uncles, families and friends. And what I heard from Palestinians and the survivors of the October 7 carnage was the same: “We just want to be home. Home, safe, and secure, with our families and friends.” 

Isn’t that what we all want for ourselves? For our children, for our parents, for our families and friends?

Sadly, sixteen months after that visit to the soil we call holy, the violence and bloodshed persist. Hamas still uses innocent lives as hostages even as the Israeli military continues its onslaught, flattening Gaza. Its families, maimed, shattered, and dispersed, face mass starvation. Many Israelis, and American Jews, too, fear this relentless response will be a catalyst for anti-Semitism and ask: When will it end? 

No oases remain in Gaza. Brotherhood Park—once a place of repose for families in Gaza City, donated by Marie and George Doty of New York and built by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA) and Pontifical Mission for Palestine in 2002—lies in ruins, as does the Arab Orthodox Cultural Center and much of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the only Christian medical center in Gaza. Not even Gaza’s Catholic and Orthodox parish churches have escaped the violence.

Gaza’s Christian community of Catholics and Orthodox has always been small in number, but large in its reach. As with Christians throughout the Middle East, those in Gaza, imbued with the gospel and inspired by the words and works of Jesus, the saints, and martyrs, have served their community—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, believer and non-believer. Through their initiatives and efforts, Christians have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, nursed the sick, healed the broken, offered refuge to the lost, and uplifted the lowly with schooling and counseling. Even amid the barbarity of total war, Gaza’s Catholic and Orthodox parishes have sheltered families and reached out to the community, preparing hot meals, distributing—when available—fresh fruit, vegetables, nursing formula, drinking water, medicines, and fuel for generators.

Some have lost their lives giving unto others, including the parents of one of my colleagues at CNEWA-Pontifical Mission, when the compound of St. Porphyrios Orthodox Church was shelled on October 19, 2023.

Nearly two years later, on July 17, an Israeli mortar round hit the pediment of Holy Family Church, sparing the cross at its pinnacle but damaging its roof and interior. Three people seeking shelter at the church were killed, and at least ten more were injured, including its pastor, Fr. Gabriel Romanelli. 

“One cannot calculate the psychological damage and the fear incurred with this totally unjustified attack on a people already suffering from the trauma of constant war,” said CNEWA-Pontifical Mission in a statement released the day after the incident, for which Israel’s prime minister later apologized in a phone call to Pope Leo XIV. 

One of my responsibilities as archbishop of New York is to chair CNEWA, which the Holy See established in 1926 to support the pastoral and humanitarian works of the Eastern churches, entrusting this special agency to the archbishops of New York. It was in this capacity that I traveled to the Holy Land last year to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Pontifical Mission for Palestine. The pope set up this task force in 1949, placing it under CNEWA, to care for the refugees of the first Arab Israeli war, many of whom took refuge in Gaza. That work of the Church continues among the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those first refugees—who continue to share in the tragedy of their people—and includes outreach to Jews and Muslims.

I also traveled there to listen. I wanted to meet with and hear from the survivors of the October 7 terror attacks on Israelis. I met with the shattered families of those who had been taken hostage—mothers, fathers, siblings who harbored hopes their loved ones would return to them alive. Sadly, since hearing their grief, seeing their pain, and offering some consolation on behalf of all New Yorkers, we have learned that many of those young men and women are now dead.

“We want to be there for Catholic partners who have been there for the Jewish people in our times of need,” said my friend Rabbi Noam Marans of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) after the shelling of Holy Family Church. “Together, as Christians and Jews, we can affirm the shared humanity of all.”

I appreciate these words of consolation and support expressed by the AJC, as well as those offered by other Jewish leaders and congregations. I appreciate this mitzvah on behalf of the Jewish community as it brings some much-needed light to the darkness of this total war. I appreciate, too, the donation from AJC of $25,000, which I am directing to CNEWA as it coordinates worldwide Catholic aid in assisting Holy Family Church in its rehabilitation, so it may move forward in service to the Lord for the good of all. The Commission of Religious Leaders (CORL), an ecumenical and interreligious group here in New York City, raised $75,000 to help an Israeli family rebuild their home leveled by Hamas on October 7. As I write, collections are being taken up in Catholic parishes all over the country to help rebuild Gaza.

“Peace be with you!” With these words, Pope Leo greeted the world after his election as pontifex maximus, the bridge-builder. This peace “is the peace of the risen Christ. A peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering. A peace that comes from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally.”

To bring about this just and lasting peace, whether in the Holy Land or among our own families, we must be “a Church that builds bridges and encourages dialogue, a Church ever open to welcoming, like this square with its open arms, all those who are in need of our charity, our presence, our readiness to dialogue and our love.”

Image by Omar Al-Qattaa , via Getty Images.

The post Restoring Holy Family Church: A Bridge of Faith Amid War appeared first on First Things.

In Germany and other European countries, Muslim and non-Muslim anti-Semitism is on the rise. Jews are once again no longer safe in public spaces. At demonstrations in Berlin, the cry “Death to the Jews” is often heard. Meanwhile, the much smaller pro-Jewish and pro-Israel demonstrations are broken up by the police, because anti-Semitic reactions might become violent. The state’s concern is realistic. Jews are being repeatedly attacked in the streets. 

I have lived as an adult through half of the time that has passed since 1945. Collective imperatives like “Never Again Auschwitz” made anti-Semitism absolutely taboo. As chancellors, Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz emphasized that Israel’s security was part of the “German raison d’état.” But this former affirmation has not prevented Merkel from criticizing Israel’s war against Gaza today. And since she opened the borders to millions of Muslims in 2015—ultimately justified by the same appeal to Germany’s special responsibility that has for decades reinforced taboos against anti-Semitism—countless Islamists have come and continue to come into the country. Now daily escalations of violence threaten not only Jews. There are regular knife attacks in Germany. On July 3, a Syrian attacked other Syrians with an axe and a hammer on a train traveling through Bavaria. Just days before, a Syrian in Hesse tried to kill the sexton of a church with a five-foot-long crucifix he had torn from the wall.

But it is not the fight against migrant violence that enjoys the highest attention and generous financial support in Germany. Priority is given to the fight “against the right.” In the metropolitan juste-milieu, it is not mass immigration that is openly criticized, but Israel. When Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently declared that Israel was doing the “dirty work” for its Western allies, including Germany, this was at least a break with Germany’s previous niceties toward the mullahs in Iran. Merz’s welcome clarity was met with fierce protests. According to recent reports, he is supporting Gaza with an airbridge and is also taking a more critical stance toward Israel. Because he does not want to form a coalition with the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), Merz must stand by and tolerate the left’s hostility toward Israel in order to stay in power. Whether we call this political strategy anti-Semitic or not, the end result is a growing climate of hostility toward Jews.

Jewish schools and synagogues have increased their protection. Recently, high school graduates at a Christian school in Göttingen were required to listen to a sermon by an imam during their graduation ceremony. During “Islam Week” at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, organized by an Islamic student group, men and women were segregated. A university hospital in Berlin felt compelled to ban a Muslim student society after it also held gender-segregated meetings. Parents of German descent in particular are faced with the growing threat to their children in the schoolyard. Politicians remain silent or resort to ridiculous measures such as banning knives in trains and public places.

Celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the Leo Baeck Institute, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in mid-June: “Jews are once again asking themselves whether they are actually safe in the country of the perpetrators of the past.” Two weeks later, Angela Merkel appeared with a select group of well-integrated Syrians and criticized the Germans for their xenophobia. Complaining about “resurgent” anti-Semitism, German political representatives remain silent about the anti-Semitic consequences of the Muslim immigration they themselves are responsible for. 

Even a soccer bar in Bielefeld, where an Islamist attacker injured five guests in May, took part in the usual demonstrations “against the right” afterward. Left-wing radical “anti-fascists” and their Muslim friends recently called for “Nazis” to be run over in Berlin-Kreuzberg—and “Nazi” is, as we all know, anyone who is not a left-wing radical. A left-wing alliance of Social Democrats, Greens, and the former East German communists (Die Linke) with close ties to Muslims and Islamists is projected to win next year’s election to the Berlin House of Representatives (its city council), with Die Linke eventually providing the mayor.

How could it come to this? Centuries ago, various German countries helped keep the Ottoman Empire at bay. In Pauline terms, Christianity should be understood as a branch of the tree of Israel. But the majority of Germans have abandoned Christianity and forgotten their spiritual roots in Judaism. Some accuse ordinary Germans of secretly sympathizing with Muslim anti-Semitism. In my view, it is more likely that they have no connection to Jews whatsoever. The European metaphysical heritage ceased to mean much to them before the arrival of the Muslims. 

Germany’s apostasy and self-forgetfulness plays a key role in its own downfall. To atone for the Holocaust, the Germans gave up their national identity and a great deal of their cultural heritage. It is this overcorrection and self-abandonment that allowed Angela Merkel to open the borders—not primarily for persecuted Jews and Christians, but for their enemies. The conclusion is as terrible as it is unimaginable: In Germany, Muslim anti-Semitism and hostility toward Christians are emerging from something that was meant to atone for the Holocaust.

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