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Facing Religious Freedom Day as an American Jew [1]
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Date: 2025-01-16
On this Religious Freedom Day, like many of us, I am looking with trepidation towards the incoming administration and its attacks on immigrants, trans folks, and every marginalized group under the sun, and on the very foundations of our multiracial democracy.
As an American Jew, I greet this day with urgency and foreboding. Religious equality in America, so the story goes, has allowed my people a degree of freedom to flourish that is practically unparalleled in historical memory. But that freedom is under assault. The Christian Right project to make America a ‘Christian nation’ flies in the face of this spirit of religious equality, and will effectively turn us, like so many other communities, into second-class citizens.
Draconian bans on abortion make it impossible for Jews to follow our religious law, which tends to prioritize the health and well-being of the birthing parent. Christian nationalist initiatives like Project Blitz have helped state adoption agencies discriminate against Jewish parents, as they have against LGBTQ folks. The movement’s broader agenda is disastrous to the human rights of LGBTQ Jews; immigrant Jews; Jews of color; and so many others in our community, as well as our friends and neighbors. And as Christian nationalism gains momentum, we’re seeing a resurgence, in many quarters , of the kinds of classical antisemitic ideas that animated Christian Europe over centuries.
Many in my community seem to not get the message. While 80% of American Jews did not vote for Trump, a vocal minority have signaled their vigorous allegiance to the MAGA agenda. They have formed organizations and social movements devoted to the wrongheaded idea that a Christian nationalist America will somehow be ‘good for the Jews’. The Christian Right has long courted the support of a vocal minority of Orthodox and right-wing Jews to lend a veneer of ecumenical diversity to its crusade against LGBTQ rights, bodily autonomy, church-state separation and the public good. But the Christian nationalist and MAGA movements are the main source of rising antisemitism in our country. These bedfellows don’t have our interests at heart.
Worse still, today’s Christian nationalist movement instrumentalizes the fight against antisemitism to pursue its anti-democratic agenda. What’s notable about initiatives like the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther– which promises to use heavy-handed measures to repress movements for Palestinian rights and other forms of social justice– is that hardly any Jews are involved. Instead, the effort is led overwhelmingly by Christian Zionists, whose end-times agenda yearns for the submission of Jews and all other Others to the dictates of universal Christendom.
There are many Jews like me in the US who support the rights of Palestinians to freedom, justice and equality. But we aren’t represented by many of the mainstream institutions, like the Anti-Defamation League , whose voices dominate the public square and claim to speak in our name. Today, too many Jewish communal leaders, in the name of fighting antisemitism, are joining the Christian Right in an unholy crusade against the human rights of Palestinians, and the free speech rights of their supporters. This crusade doesn’t make Jews any safer– it only foments Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian and -Arab bigotry and other forms of racism. This is antithetical to the spirit of religious freedom– the underlying idea of a pluralistic society where all groups should enjoy full flourishing.
On this Religious Freedom Day, I’m worried about the future of my American Jewish community, and the future of all of us– and I’m committed to standing with the millions of Americans who share this worry, and who are doing what we can, day by day, to build a different future together.
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