Benjamin Netanyahu

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Top U.S. 2023 story for religion-news pros: Islamophobia and antisemitism spike after October 7

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Top U.S. 2023 story for religion-news pros: Islamophobia and antisemitism spike after October 7

The Hamas surprise attack on Israeli citizens was selected as the year's most important international story by religion-beat journalists, in part because it led to "spikes in Islamophobia and antisemitism" when Israel launched its massive counterattack on Gaza.

Members of the Religion News Association echoed that decision when voting to select the top 2023 religion story in America.

"Incidents of hate against Jews and Muslims skyrocket after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas against Israel, and Israel's military assault in Gaza," noted the RNA, in its poll. "In Illinois, a Palestinian-American boy is killed, and his mother wounded in an alleged hate attack. The conflict prompts numerous protests, and college campuses see fierce debate about the war and the boundaries of free speech."

The generational nature of the U.S. debates was underlined in a Harvard-Harris poll in which 60% of respondents aged 18-24 agreed that the "Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians." In that poll, 67% of participants in that same age group affirmed that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors," as opposed to 9% of respondents older than 65.

The Anti-Defamation League reported 2,031 antisemitic incidents in the United States between October 7 and December 7. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, noted CNN, reported 2,171 U.S. claims of Islamophobic "bias or requests for help" between October 7 and December 2.

For many years, the RNA published one annual list of the world's most important religion-news events and trends. For the second year in a row, the organization produced separate American and global lists. The next few American selections were:

* Legislative and legal battles continued after he 2022 Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, with numerous states banning or restricting abortion and others solidifying access to abortions. U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville blocked hundreds of military job nominations and promotions, while protesting a White House policy that allowed U.S. soldiers to travel to obtain abortions in states where these procedures are more easily available.

* At least 25% of United Methodist congregations left America's second-largest Protestant denomination, following decades of conflict about biblical authority and ancient doctrines on marriage and sexuality, including the ordination of noncelibate LGBTQ+ clergy.


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Plug-In: Texas synagogue hostage-crisis anniversary and a new anti-Semitism report

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Plug-In: Texas synagogue hostage-crisis anniversary and a new anti-Semitism report

We have seen another Friday the 13th come and go.

Well, I’m still your Weekend Plug-in columnist and I’m not at all superstitious about dates.

But I am totally shameless, so look for two of my own stories in today’s roundup of the best reads and top headlines in the world of faith. Let’s jump right in!

What To Know: The Big Story

Think hostility or prejudice toward Jews is fading in America? Think again.

“Classical fascist” anti-Semitic views are widespread in the U.S., according to a new survey by the Anti-Defamation League. Veteran religion writer Michelle Boorstein details the findings for The Washington Post.

At the same time, rising anti-Semitism in the U.S. is seeping into the workplace, according to Bloomberg’s Arianne Cohen.

“It’s not just high-profile incidents,” Cohen’s story notes. “Jewish workers say they’re experiencing more overt discrimination.”

Hostage anniversary: Sunday marks one year since the FBI gunned down a pistol-wielding captor at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.

“Let’s be blunt: We’re healing. We’re not healed,” Jeff Cohen — who was taken hostage along with Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and two others — told me in an interview for The Associated Press.

More: The Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner — a former GetReligion team member — delves deeper into the Colleyville anniversary, while The Washington Post’s Danielle Paquette profiles a Chicago street artist who painted a mural of Kanye West — and then heard from a rabbi.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. Controversial prayers: A sacred Jerusalem site has become a flashpoint with Israel’s rightward shift, The Wall Street Journal’s Shayndi Raice and Aaron Boxerman report.

Jewish activists are “gaining more support for praying at the Temple Mount, called the Noble Sanctuary by Muslims, who have controlled the site for centuries,” according to the Journal.


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Many pieces in this news puzzle: New Israeli coalition reflects land's complex religiosity

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Many pieces in this news puzzle: New Israeli coalition reflects land's complex religiosity

What does it say about Israel that its founding prime minister was someone who today might be labeled a “BuJew,” a Jew strongly attracted to Buddhist philosophy? Or that it took Israel more than 70 years to produce a prime minister who identifies with Orthodox Judaism?

The BuJew prime minister was, of course, the otherwise secular David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s George Washington equivalent. Ben-Gurion actually took several days during a 1961 two-week state visit to Burma (today’s Myanmar) to attend a Buddhist retreat. I can’t imagine an Israeli prime minister doing that today given the Jewish state’s current political turmoil and Orthodoxy’s influence.

The first Orthodox prime minister is set to be Naftali Bennett, who as of this writing is scheduled to command the top spot in Israel’s nascent anti-Netanyahu governing coalition, itself tentatively set to formally assume office within days.

Again, what does all of this say? A lot, I’d argue, about Israel’s religious complexity and the degree to which religion and politics are tightly intertwined, perhaps inseparably so, in Israel (and the Middle East in general, but that’s a larger topic for another day).

I’d also argue it underscores the importance for journalists opining on Israel to be well versed on its religious politics — from its varied and often antagonistic Jewish factions, to its distinctive Arab Muslim, Christian and Druse communities — if they are to adequately explain the thinking that goes into Israeli decision making.

Consider the following. Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the longtime right-wing prime minister, is a secular Jew, as are most Israeli Jews. Yet he nonetheless enjoyed the support of his nation’s ultra-Orthodox parties. Netanyahu gained their support by including the parties in his ruling coalitions, giving them great access and sometimes control over public funds needed for their community institutions and economic safety nets.

Bennett, meanwhile, has gained the condemnation of several leading Orthodox Jews, even though identifies with this religious descriptor.


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Press coverage of Mount Meron tragedy offers window into Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews

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Press coverage of Mount Meron tragedy offers window into Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews

By now most GetReligion readers are likely aware of the fatal crushing of 45 Jewish pilgrims during a religious festival at Mount Meron in Israel’s north at the end of April. It’s been called one of the worst, if not the worst, civilian tragedy in Israel’s history.

(Sadly, the Meron tragedy has been superseded in the news by the serious explosion of Israeli-Palestinian violence this week. But as sad as this is — and as a Jew and a Zionist I find it almost debilitatingly sad —that’s not the subject of this post, so let’s return to Meron.)

For those in need of a refresher, here’s an early Times of Israel news story on the Meron catastrophe.

The sudden and dramatic loss of more than four dozen lives is, of course, a national trauma for a relatively small country such as Israel, which is not much larger than New Jersey. As has been noted elsewhere, “numbers numb.”

Among the dead were six Americans. Other victims came from Canada and Argentina. The youngest of the dead was a boy of nine. Some 150 others were injured.

Beyond the deaths themselves, the Meron incident surfaced major — and intricately interwoven — political and religious implications for Israel. That’s not an unusual mashup in Israel, where the divide between religion and state is near impossible to discern.

For journalists, the tragedy also underscores a Journalism 101 reality of the craft. Which is that the most interesting public commentators are often those closest to the story, such as varied eyewitnesses and longstanding, articulate members or observers of whatever groups are germane to the story.

I’ll say more about this below. First, some pertinent background.

The Meron tragedy took place on the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer. Because this is generally considered a minor holiday by most Jews, it’s largely ignored by the theologically liberal in Israel and elsewhere.


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What's a hot take on Israel worth? Depends on one's media celebrity status (Hello Seth Rogen)

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How do you tell the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?

Easy. The pessimist says, “Things just can’t get any worse. The optimist says, “Sure they can.”

Well, they certainly have — as far as the fraught connection between Israel and liberal American Jews goes.

The latest stressor is a predictably nasty media exchange over high-profile liberal commentator Peter Beinart’s recent declaration that he no longer backs a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A single bi-national, or perhaps a confederated, state, said Beinart, is the best remaining equitable option. This, he concluded, is because of Israel’s deeply entrenched West Bank settlement project. Further undermining the two-state option, he said, is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat to annex much of the occupied West Bank that Palestinians want to include in their own independent state.

Beinart detailed his thoughts in this New York Times oped and, in much greater detail, in this Jewish Currents essay.

For liberal Jews — who have long argued that two independent states coexisting side by side, one Jewish-run and one Palestinian, is the best and only realistic option — Beinart’s abandonment of full Jewish nationhood was nothing less than Zionist heresy.

Naturally, given today’s insatiable 24/7 media universe — in which all who dare venture are but a tweet away from “woke” fame or “cancel culture” renunciation — the verbal warfare started immediately.

Beinart’s, you may be wondering, is but one voice in a cacophony of voices claiming to know what’s best for Israel-Palestine, so why the fuss? Moreover, he lives in the United States, not Israel, so to what degree does his opinion even matter?

The answer, of course, is his American media prominence. His frequent talking-head appearances, (he’s a CNN regular) and voluminous writings have won him a place in the liberal Zionist media firmament, where he’s long been a harsh critic of Netanyahu and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. That’s not Hollywood famous, but it’s a start.


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'The Bible Code': What was that all about, other than a headline-grabbing pseudo-mystery?

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THE QUESTIONS:

What was “The Bible Code”? Was it valid? Did it prove anything about God, or the scriptures or world events?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Time for a nostalgic look back at “The Bible Code” sensation, upon the death last month of journalist Michael Drosnin — who scored big with his 1997 best-seller of that title and two sequels that inspired imitators, though Hollywood’s film version never got off the ground.

Drosnin’s titillating claim was that the Hebrew Bible’s text contained secretly coded, uncanny predictions of phenomena across the subsequent thousands of years that could only be revealed through modern computers. The fad has not totally died out. Inevitably, we even got the 2015 pamphlet “Donald Trump in the Bible Code: New Testament Echoes of America’s Future Leader.”

Some thought Drosnin’s book meant the biblical God not only inspired the Bible but cleverly knitted in hidden messages for contemporary humanity. Yet, as The New York Times obituary noted, Drosnin himself was a devoted atheist from his days at Hebrew school in New York City.

All quite diverting.

But as we’ll see, experts both scientific and religious deemed the whole business to be bogus.

The story in brief: The traditional Jewish practice of “gematria” assigns a number to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet to calculate the numerical value of a word. A variation originated with Orthodox Rabbi Michael Weissmandel, who moved from Eastern Europe to the U.S. following the Nazi Holocaust and died in 1957. He looked for patterns through Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) counted by hand, for instance seeing what a word produced by every 50th letter in a text might show.

Intrigued by this, Eliyahu Rips of Israel’s Hebrew University worked with two fellow mathematicians to manipulate the Hebrew text of the book of Genesis into lines of various lengths. They reported discovering the names of 32 leading rabbis across Jewish history located on the grid near their dates of birth, death, or both.

After a major scientific journal rejected the trio’s article about this, it was accepted in 1994 by the respected, peer-reviewed Statistical Science as “a challenging puzzle” for discussion.


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Israel faces a possible turning point on 17th of September, with religion at the heart of it

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While rehashing the Miftah-inspired — www.miftah.org — feud between U.S. Muslim Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Israel, U.S. and international media should also be focusing on Israel’s September 17 elections. Vivian Bercovici, Canada’s former ambassador to Israel (in 2014-16), sees a dangerous internal split perhaps unmatched since modern Israel was founded in 1948 – or even since the 1st Century.

Media without bureaus in Israel (and that’s most of them) should be planning coverage by in-house staffers or freelance experts before and/or after the vote. They will benefit from Bercovici’s opinion piece in the summer issue of Commentary magazine and Marcy Oster’s objective roundup on the tangled parties and pols for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Israel, of course, faces endless conflict with Palestinians. But there’s an increasingly troublesome internal struggle involving a minority of “ultra-Orthodox” Haredim (a term meaning those who “tremble” before God), currently 12 percent of the population and growing steadily. (They are distinct from the equally devout Hasidim and the less rigorist modern Orthodox.)

The conflict centers on exemption from the military draft for 130,000 Haredi men who study Torah and Talmud full-time. Bercovici, an attorney living in Tel Aviv, contends that the resulting burden on the national population is divisive, unfair and has become ‘financially and ethically unsustainable.”

Journalists must note: There is no way to escape the religious issues linked to these conflicts.

The system dates from a compromise by the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who exempted the tiny band of 400 such students to soften resistance by the Orthodox who believed modern Israel should not be founded before the Messiah appeared (as depicted in Chaim Potok’s classic 1967 novel “The Chosen”).


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Regarding Israel and the End Times, what is Dispensationalism? What is the rapture?

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Regarding Israel and the End Times, what is Dispensationalism? What is the rapture?

THE QUESTION:

Regarding Israel and Bible prophecies about the End Times, what are the meanings of such terms as Dispensationalism, the rapture, premillennialism, the great tribulation,  pre-tribulationism and Armageddon?

THE GUY’S ANSWER:

A March 31 New York Times article on how religion may influence U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s approach toward Israel had this headline: “The Rapture and the Real World: Pompeo Mixes Beliefs and Policy.”

One key point was that the then-Congressman told a religious audience in 2015 that humanity faces “a never-ending struggle” until “the rapture.” Yes, think “Left Behind” books and movies.

The move of the United States embassy to Jerusalem, and U.S. recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over Syria’s Golan Heights, were thought to boost both President Donald Trump’s evangelical support and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s April 9 election prospects. Analyzing those decisions, the Times explained that “white evangelicals,” Pompeo included, believe “God promised the land to the Jews, and that the gathering of Jews in Israel is foretold in the prophecy of the rapture — the ascent of Christians into the kingdom of God.”

The Times wording was truthy but confusing, and the standard rapture belief is not taught by evangelicalism as a whole — but only one segment. Also, the “white evangelical” reference is strange, since this doctrine can be found in quite a few different kinds of evangelical sanctuaries.

So let’s unpack some elements of these complex matters.

Secretary Pompeo is a member of the Michigan-based Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a small body (89,190 members, 207 congregations) that forsook the more liberal Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1981. It upholds the Westminster Confession and catechisms proclaimed by British clergy and politicians assembled by Parliament in the mid-17th Century. Churches that follow such Reformation-era credos affirm Jesus’s Second Coming and the Last Judgment, but not the modern rapture belief formulated two centuries later.


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Secretary of State Pompeo's invitation-only briefing with 'faith-based media' causes a stir

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On Monday, I got an email inviting me to join an “on-the-record conference call” with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The message, sent to my Christian Chronicle address, indicated that Pompeo would discuss international religious freedom ahead of his trip to Jerusalem and the Middle East and take questions from call participants.

Ordinarily, I might have RSVP’d and listened to what Pompeo had to say.

But I’m still recovering (read: exhausted and taking a few days off) after my own recent travel to Israel. So I decided I’d rely on other journalists’ news coverage of the call and perhaps check out the transcript later.

Little did I know that the exclusivity of the invitation itself would make headlines.

Then today, I noticed on Twitter that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press had issued a statement expressing concern about the State Department barring some journalists from the call:

On Monday, the State Department held a briefing call for only faith-based media to discuss international press freedom with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In response to inquiries from journalists who were not permitted to join the briefing, the Department declined to provide a transcript of the call, a list of media outlets who were allowed to participate or the criteria used to determine which media outlets were invited.

“The decision to bar reporters from attending a press briefing held only for ‘faith-based’ media on international religious freedom and to withhold the transcript of the discussion raises serious questions about the State Department’s understanding of — and commitment to — a free press,” said Jenn Topper, spokesperson for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.


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