Rarely in modern history does a single book change the course of human events. But that is exactly what happened 125 years ago, when in 1896 the Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). What makes his improbable achievement – setting the stage for the eventual creation of the State of Israel – all the more fascinating is that Herzl was a thoroughly assimilated Jew.

The story of his transformation into a Jewish national leader and a major player on the global stage of history began a year earlier while he was in Paris covering for the newspaper Neue Freie Presse what became known as l’affaire Dreyfus (the Dreyfus affair).
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Like other progressive thinkers of his time, the thirty-four-year-old Herzl admired France’s revolutionary ideals of liberte, egalite, and fraternite. The arrest, trial, public disgrace, and imprisonment of an innocent French Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, shattered Herzl’s confidence in the ideals and progress of the French Enlightenment.

(RNS) — Black History Month is a fitting moment to recall a brief, remarkable friendship that permanently transformed America.

The extraordinary bond that existed between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel began in 1963, ending only when King was assassinated in Memphis five years later.
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King was born in 1929 in Atlanta and grew up during the violent Jim Crow era of racial segregation that impacted all aspects of King’s daily life. A third-generation Baptist minister, he received a doctorate at Boston University in 1955. Five years later, King became the co-pastor, with his father, of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

While I was raised in a Jewishly thick family, the Alexandria of my youth was saturated with a Southern Baptist/Confederate ethos, and I was fascinated by both. After all, Alexandria was Robert E. Lee’s hometown. The Baptists were the majority religious group in the city of 30,000, and many of them, including my Boy Scout leader, projected a cavalier attitude they were the true believers and guardians of both God and America.

One unforgettable event of my youth triggered a lifelong question: How could a religion that stressed universal love and God’s “Amazing Grace” vilify and demonize its spiritual and historic parent: my beloved Judaism?
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That decisive episode took place on a hot Saturday night in the early 1950s at an outdoor revival meeting in a huge tent erected about ten miles south of Alexandria on U.S. Route 1. While it was my first revival meeting, it was old stuff to my three high school friends – all evangelical Christians – who had invited me to join them.

​Jewish diplomacy began in biblical times, when Abraham negotiated with King Abimelech over possession of precious wells in an arid land. In order to protect their vulnerable communities and ensure Jewish continuity, generations of Jewish leaders have developed effective negotiation strategies in dealing with powerful kings, emperors, sultans, popes, dictators, prime ministers, and presidents.

In his new book The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel (Jewish Publication Society), Emmanuel Navon, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University and a fellow of the Israeli Institute for Strategy and Security, begins with the biblical period, including the kingdoms of David and Solomon, and concludes with U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2020 “Deal of the Century,” intended to settle the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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For Navon, a French-born academic who later moved to Israel, “the star” represents the spiritual faith and destiny of the Jewish people, while “the scepter” symbolizes the eternal quest for Jewish national sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

(RNS) — In a year dominated by the miseries of COVID-19, not all the news in the Jewish world was about the virus — and even some events driven by the pandemic were not without a silver lining. Herewith, a subjective look at the most important news stories of the year:

Anti-Semitism continues to surge

​Seventy-five years after the end of the Holocaust, the continuing upsurge of virulent, often lethal anti-Semitism, especially in the United States and Europe, led all other news for Jews in 2020. The rise of the extremist group the Proud Boys, the spreading influence of the vile QAnon conspiracy that now includes members of the U.S. Congress, and the constant, unfounded anti-Jewish attacks on Hungarian American philanthropist George Soros provided anecdotal evidence that anti-Jewish attacks will again be the most common religious hate crime, as they were in 2019.

(RNS) — Four overarching realities will define relations between Christians and Jews in the coming years.

The first two, demography and geography, are linked. Since the fifth century, Europe and, more recently, North America, have been the centers of Christian population, clerical leadership and religious thought. Today, thanks to rapid population growth in South America, Africa and Asia, most of the world’s Christians reside in the Southern Hemisphere.

This trend is accelerating even as the number of Christians is holding steady or actually declining in Europe and North America, where Christians and Jews are older and fewer in number than their co-religionists in the rest of the world.
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Recent figures report that since 2000, the Catholic population grew by 33% in Asia, by 15.6% in Africa, and by 10.9% in Central and South America. The increase in the European Catholic population since 2000 was only 1%.

Rabbi James Rudin returns to discuss the history leading up to, and Judeo Christian relations since, Nostra aetate (Latin: In our time), the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of the Second Vatican Council.

Rabbi A. James Rudin has served on the American Jewish Committee’s professional staff for thirty-two years and served as the AJC’s Interreligious Affairs Director. He is currently the AJC’s Senior Interreligious Adviser and a member of the organization’s Board of Governors.
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Rabbi Rudin is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion and Judaica at Saint Leo University and teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University Renaissance Academy.