An enduring heritage of persecution, exclusion and intolerance…

This past week I went for a walk with a friend and mentor named Joyce.  When I first came to Rochester, I met Joyce as part of my interfaith work. She and her husband, Bob, are part of the local Jewish community and have been very active in interfaith and social justice efforts for decades. They are also deeply committed to fighting antisemitism. Joyce had reached out to me recently to talk further about the increase in antisemitic attacks in recent years (2022 marked an all time high according to the Anti-Defamation League) as well as what she experiences as a widespread Christian silence about antisemitism.

If you have been following the news, just last week as the Jewish community marked the beginning of some of their high holidays, there were numerous regional bomb threats against some specific temples, and during one of the Rosh Hashanah services at Temple B’Rith Kodesh in Brighton, a man got up during the service and was ranting about hell and the coming of the messiah.

Events like these send deep ripples throughout the Jewish community, and they are something that should concern all of us.

Part of my conversation with Joyce focused on these events as well as the very deep connection between Christianity and antisemitism. Joyce told me about a book that she’s been reading called Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism by Magda Teter.[1] The premise of the book is that from its earliest days, Christian theology and praxis created structures that reinforced a sense of Christian dominance and superiority in the world. While this has systematically been used against Jewish people, these structures and this thinking laid the foundation for anti-Black racism as well. Teter’s work challenges Christians to more deeply explore this enduring heritage of persecution, exclusion and intolerance.

I really tried to take in Joyce’s words and her challenge for Christians to speak more clearly about antisemitism. This blog post is part of my response to our conversation.

Since meeting with Joyce, I have started to do a little more of my own research. I came across a really powerful online article by Elizabeth Moraff[2] which I would highly recommend.  In that article she says, “I think it’s difficult for Christians to grapple with Antisemitism because most Christians haven’t recognized that Christianity is a dominant, oppressive force in the U.S. that operates on its own axis.”

If you identify as Christian, just take that in for a minute. What does it bring up in you? If you don’t identify as Christian, would your experience resonate with Moraff’s observation?

I have also appreciated the reflections of Paul Kivel[3] who prefers the term “anti-Jewish oppression” to antisemitism, in part, because he wants to “separate the concept from the recent use of anti-Semitism to describe critiques of policies of the state of Israel.”[4] But Kivel also says that, “labeling a comment, person or policy anti-Semitic is often not very helpful and focuses attention on an individual act or procedure rather than on the institution it supports. I think it is more useful to point out how those comments, behaviors or policies support or perpetuate anti-Jewish oppression in specific ways.”

So if we’re going to address anti-Jewish oppression, where do we start? And if we’ve already started, how might we go deeper?

Like any other form of oppression, we can educate ourselves. I know that I have heard the term “antisemitism” for a long time, but it has only been in deep conversation with people who identify as Jewish that I have come to understand so much more of what it means.

In Rochester, we have some amazing local resources like the Levine Center to End Hate and the Jewish Federation as places to learn more. The Anti-Defamation league also has a lot of great resources to help us identify and think about responses to anti-Jewish oppression (https://www.adl.org/about/education). Once we have done a bit of our own introspection and learning, we can be on a more careful lookout for various forms of anti-Jewish oppression – in our relationships, in our speech, in our institutions or on our social media, and we can speak up and address it when we hear or witness something that perpetuates it.

At Spiritus, we have engaged in some interfaith conversations and scripture study with Temple Sinai (among other places) as a way to build relationships but also to study and reflect on Jewish texts as complete and whole unto themselves (and not as texts preparing for Jesus).  We will be continuing this ongoing relationship in the spring of next year and will see if we can curate any other experiences before then. But we can all engage in relationship building and getting to know people from the Jewish faith on our own as well (I saw a statistic that almost ¾ of Americans have not met someone who identifies as Jewish).

We can also continue to oppose hate in all its forms. As people like Magda Teter and Elizabeth Moraff remind us, Christian supremacy/nationalism is often at the heart of every other form of hate that we witness in the world. Anything we can do to counter hate is likely a move to counter anti-Jewish oppression.

What are other steps you’d suggest? Are there resources that you have found helpful?

In today’s gospel reading from Luke 8[5], Jesus says to those in his company, “No one who lights a lamp conceals it with a vessel or sets it under a bed; rather, they place it on a lampstand so that those who enter may see the light.” It’s my hope that our “light” against all forms of hate might be visible to all who enter our lives and our faith community.

Note: I wrote this piece earlier in the week and was pleased to see the Democrat and Chronicle’s 9/24/23 headline story was “Hate is on the Rise,” about antisemitism. I was not able to provide a link to the story, but I would encourage blog readers to check it out!

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[1] Princeton University Press, 2023.

[2] https://christiansforsocialaction.org/resource/to-dismantle-white-supremacy-christians-must-confront-antisemitism/

[3] https://paulkivel.com/resource/is-it-anti-semitism-or-anti-jewish-oppression/

[4] I am a firm believer that we need to be able to have ways to separate the Jewish faith from the policies and actions of the state of Israel. No nation/state should be above critique and protest.

[5] In my recent research, I saw a statistic about how much preachers refer to the Hebrew scriptures (often called the “Old Testament” but I generally don’t use that term anymore as a way of acknowledging the integrity of each textual tradition). Most Christian faith leaders only preach or reflect on the gospel – making the Jewish texts invisible and seemingly irrelevant. As a result, I am going to try to pay more attention to these texts in my reflections and preaching.