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Evangelical churches are turning to a Jewish nonprofit to help them have hard conversations
(JTA) – Jeff Nitz, a social worker and lay leader at his church, sees himself as a trained listener.
But beginning in 2020, his congregation — Mosaic Church in the evangelical Christian hub of Lynchburg, Virginia — started becoming riven by fierce COVID-era fights over masking, distancing and vaccinations.
Used to bridging divides among his fellow parishioners, Nitz was at a loss. “I’m used to doing active listening, but there were times where it felt like I would much rather just avoid this person than having the deeper conversation,” he said.
For help, Nitz turned to a Jewish nonprofit, Resetting the Table, which has spent nearly a decade teaching Jewish groups to have more productive and meaningful conversations about Israel. The group offers a modified version of its program to churches and other groups grappling with polarization, so last year, Nitz’s church held two sessions facilitated by Resetting the Table staffers, focused on how to talk about COVID.
Congregants on opposite ends of each issue presented their cases — and then the other side would repeat back the arguments they heard. By the end, Nitz said, he had come to understand his congregants better — and, he believed, they had come to understand him better, too. “He absolutely heard my heart,” he recalled about an anti-vaxxer congregant who had articulated his own ideas back to him.
It’s a breakthrough that Resetting the Table believes it can help happen more often in churches. Founded in 2014 out of the worry that American Jews’ arguments over Israel were tearing apart their communities, the group expanded its work beyond Jewish communities several years ago, expanding its reach even wider during the pandemic era.
“We saw the U.S. descending into its own intractable conflict,” said Rabbi Melissa Weintraub, Resetting the Table’s co-founder.
Last year, Resetting the Table worked with more than a dozen Christian umbrella groups representing tens of thousands of churches and several million church members affiliated with Mainline Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, African-American, Pentecostal and Orthodox traditions. And in the coming year, just half of the organization’s work will be with Jewish groups. The other half is with non-Jewish houses of worship, companies in the entertainment industry and other organizations — work that Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s Hearthland Foundation started funding last year.
According to surveys, the expansion is responding to a significant concern: A study last year found that 28% of U.S. adults named political polarization or extremism as a top issue facing the country.
“There is perhaps more trepidation and anxiety about this work at this stage in Christian communities,” Weintraub said. “But there is also comparable relief and fulfillment once people have done so successfully and seen it makes their communities feel closer to each other.”
Topics more likely to come up in non-Jewish settings include the status of LGBTQ people and women in the church, COVID restrictions and the 2020 election. A series of sessions last spring that were geared toward evangelical leaders, including professors from Liberty University in Lynchburg, covered a laundry list of hot-button political topics, including the role of government, guns, free speech, voting, the death penalty, police, race and abortion.
The group’s sessions in real life, and virtually, begin in large groups. The lead facilitator spells out that the point of the exercise is not to change minds, but to allow conversations to take place, whether or not they shift people’s opinions.
“Some people might want to be having this conversation for the sake of a relationship, right?” Michele Freed, a facilitator, said last year at a session for Or Hadash, an Atlanta-area congregation. “You really care about a person and you just cannot talk about the elephant in the room anymore.”
Those attending split into smaller groups and undergo the exchange Nitz experienced: Listening to someone with a different or opposing opinion, summarizing it, then listening to feedback about that summary. Once the speaker feels the listener has fully summarized their outlook, Freed said, that’s “hitting the bullseye.”
Another smaller-session activity the group offers is called “Life Maps”: Participants compile a list of moments in their lives that shaped their outlook, and then take questions from others. A workshop packet asks participants to “Consider some of the experiences, the interactions, conversations, moments of epiphany – the things you saw or heard that had an impact on your morality or your politics.”
Weintraub said that the Jewish world, “polarized as it is,” is more willing to have those difficult conversations — a readiness she attributes to “the deep tradition of arguments … built into every page of Jewish text.”
A screen capture of a Zoom session of a Multi-Faith Convener Cohort for Faith Leaders in the South. Michele Freed is at the upper left, and Rabbi Melissa Weintraub is second from the upper left, Nov. 5, 2021. (Resetting the Table.)
While recruiting for one of the group’s multifaith cohorts last year, she said, “The rabbis were lining up out the door,” while “Southern Baptists and evangelical leaders were like, ‘How do you know this isn’t going to tear my community apart?’ I think in the Jewish world at this point there’s a recognition that this work is possible and desirable and leads to good outcomes in a different way.”
Some evangelical leaders say they’re coming around to the value of tough conversations. Chelsea Andrews, who participated in the spring sessions for evangelical leaders, said it was the first setting in years where she felt she could engage in dialogue outside her milieu of evangelical Christians without being judged for her conservative values.
“I think that the feeling of belonging is very difficult for evangelical Republicans, like myself, who also are deeply committed to peace-building and reconciliation work,” Andrews said in a testimonial Weintraub shared with JTA. The Resetting the Table sessions, she said, were “the first time in many years that I have felt like what I have to bring to the table is welcome. I don’t feel judged and I don’t feel like an error someone needs to correct.”
Christian groups also approach the dialogue differently once they’ve entered the sessions, said Eyal Rabinovitch, Weintraub’s husband and co-founder, who was the lead facilitator for the 2022 sessions at Mosaic Church, which took place via Zoom. He cited the adage of “two Jews, three opinions,” and said Jews walked into sessions with their views at the ready.
Evangelical Christians, by contrast, he has found, have a “cultural norm of ‘don’t-rock-the-boat’ niceness.” But he feels that that culture is inhibiting the airing of divisions, and that as a result “churches like Mosaic are falling apart.”
“We’re mindful of the norms at play. So oftentimes, at Mosaic, for example, people just go slowly towards differences,” he said. “They don’t want to upset each other. They don’t want to overstep, people don’t really want to get into escalated dynamics and they don’t want to feel like they’re intruding on other people’s spaces.”
Jews’ eagerness to engage and argue was evident in a series of video sessions Resetting the Table allowed JTA to attend last summer at Jewish institutions, on the condition that the participants not be named unless they gave their permission.
A typical Jewish participant was Howard Lalli, a marketing specialist who, in a session last May with Or Hadash, wondered aloud whether being Jewish made him too excited to speak out.
“I know you gave us the option of not weighing in on a question, but I confess that I found myself in the questions about Israel scrambling mentally to come up with a position,” he told the moderator, Freed. “And I wonder if that’s a problem/challenge in our culture: that to appear to be engaged you have to have an opinion — versus asking questions, being curious.”
The group’s work with Jewish institutions has also stretched beyond Israel. In addition to that topic, Or Hadash members discussed funding the police and whether to privatize social services.
The work with churches has also ended up bridging religious divides. Nitz said Resetting the Table made him feel secure enough to ask questions that might otherwise be awkward. At one of the group’s training sessions, he asked a rabbi he met a question that had long intrigued him: why do Jews vote for Democrats, given that, in his opinion, “Republicans tend to be stronger on preserving religious rights, and very pro-Israel.”
The rabbi said they should set up a one-on-one so he could explain at length but offered as a first insight that as descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves, Jews have traditionally sympathized with poor and disadvantaged people, an approach that has historically been associated with Democrats.
Nitz said the exchange was “delightful.”
“I just felt it was just so instructive and open, transparent,” he said. “I would have had a two-dimensional viewpoint when it came to understanding a Jewish voting bloc, and he added so much more nuance as a result of that conversation.”
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The post Evangelical churches are turning to a Jewish nonprofit to help them have hard conversations appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Abraham Accords Tested on 5th Anniversary as Arab Leaders Gather to Condemn Israel’s Strike on Hamas in Qatar
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, attends the preparatory ministerial meeting for emergency Arab-Islamic summit in Doha, Qatar, Sept. 14, 2025. Photo: Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Handout via REUTERS
The fifth anniversary of the Abraham Accords was overshadowed on Monday as top Arab diplomats gathered in Doha for an emergency summit after Israel’s strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar last week.
Five years on, experts say that, despite war and political shocks, the US-brokered deals that normalized relations between Israel and several Araba countries have endured, though not without setbacks, and many argue that strengthening them is the most effective way to defeating the hatred and terrorism that led to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Trade between Abraham Accord countries in 2025 increased from the year before, though it remained well below the levels seen before the Hamas-led attack. The UAE, Israel’s most significant new trading partner, has dominated the commerce generated by the accords, signed on the lawn of the White House on Sept. 15, 2020.
Hundreds of Israeli companies now operate in the UAE, with Emirati investors channeling capital into Israeli tech startups and sovereign funds taking stakes in gas and technology ventures, though a planned $2 billion acquisition was shelved after the outbreak of the Gaza war. Recent figures show trade between Israel and the UAE reached $293 million in July 2025, a 4 percent rise from the year before, while trade with Morocco grew 32 percent in the same month to $8.7 million, according to data published by the Washington DC-based Heritage Foundation. Over the first seven months of 2025, Israel–Morocco trade totaled $71 million, a 7 percent increase from the same period in 2024, the report said.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-US President Donald Trump, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed display their copies of signed agreements as they participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and some of its Middle East neighbors, in a strategic realignment of Middle Eastern countries against Iran, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, US, Sept. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner
Asher Fredman, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who also served as Israel director of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute — a nonprofit founded by former White House adviser and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to promote and expand the accords — said the agreements had “proven their resilience.”
He noted that the war had exposed how Hamas, with its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, continues to threaten the region’s stability.
“Many regional leaders appreciate Israel’s efforts to remove Hamas, a terrorist group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, from power, even if they are critical of Israel’s tactics,” he told The Algemeiner.
But he went on to say that the war had resulted in diminishing many aspects of the “warm peace and people-to-people cooperation that made the accords so unique” and that restarting momentum will require “regional projects with tangible benefits,” with strong US backing, and ensuring Hamas can no longer undermine progress toward peace.
“Lasting regional integration will depend on removing Hamas as the dominant military and governing power in Gaza,” he said.
Defense trade has also expanded, with Abraham Accords countries accounting for 12 percent of Israel’s $15 billion in arms exports last year, and major defense projects, including the UAE’s co-production of Israeli drones, continuing in 2025 – though many are now under wraps.
Middle East experts Elie Podeh and Yoel Guzansky, from the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University, respectively, noted in The Jerusalem Post that Washington’s 2021 decision to place Israel within US Central Command signaled Arab states’ readiness to work with Israel openly, not just behind closed doors. Israel had already taken part in joint drills with regional neighbors, but its integration into CENTCOM created what they described as a qualitative shift in collaboration — a shift that was evident during Iranian attacks on Israel in April and October 2024 and again in June 2025.
But the UAE’s decision to bar Israeli defense firms from a major global defense and aerospace expo in Dubai later this year – reportedly in response to Israel’s strike in Doha – highlighted the political strains now testing the accords.
Podeh and Guzansky agreed with Fredman that people-to-people ties have suffered during the war but emphasized the particular impact on younger Arabs. “The gap between elite positions and Arab public opinion – especially among younger generations – continues to widen across all countries, placing pressure on ruling elites to respond,” they said.
Earlier this month, the UAE also issued a rare public rebuke to Israel over reports of renewed annexation ambitions in the West Bank. A senior Emirati official, Lana Nusseibeh, warned that any Israeli move to apply sovereignty would constitute a “red line” for Abu Dhabi that “would severely undermine the vision and spirit of the Abraham Accords” – marking the Gulf country’s toughest criticism of Israel since the war began.
On Friday, the UAE said it had summoned Israel’s deputy ambassador over the strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s subsequent “hostile and unacceptable” remarks, in another sign of strain between the two countries with close economic and defense ties. The Emirati foreign ministry said it told David Ohad Horsandi that “the continuation of such hostile and provocative rhetoric … solidifies a situation that is unacceptable and cannot be overlooked.”
A draft resolution from the Arab-Islamic summit in Doha, a day before Monday’s emergency summit, warned that Israel’s “brutal” strike in Qatar and other actions “threaten prospects of peace and coexistence in the region, and threaten everything that has been achieved on the path of normalizing ties with Israel, including current agreements and future ones.”
The text accused Israel of “genocide, ethnic cleansing, starvation, siege, and colonizing activities and expansion policies,” and said such conduct jeopardized efforts to expand normalization with Arab nations.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with Emir Of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and GCC representatives pose for a group photo ahead of an emergency Arab-Islamic leaders’ summit convened to discuss the Sept. 9 Israeli attack on Hamas on Qatari territory, in Doha, Qatar, Sept. 15, 2025. Photo: Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS
Podeh and Guzansky noted that Saudi Arabia, once seen as the most likely next signatory to the Abraham Accords, is “treading very carefully” since the outbreak of the Gaza war. As the guardian of Islam’s holiest sites and a leading voice in the Sunni world, Riyadh is reluctant to proceed without “significant progress on the Palestinian issue” or firm American commitments on security and civilian nuclear cooperation.
Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, Israel’s special envoy for trade and innovation and co-founder of the UAE-Israel Business Council, struck a more positive note, saying that the Abraham Accords have been “game changing for Israel and the Middle East,” and stressing that even after an extensive regional war they have “stood strong.” She noted that the signatory states have consistently condemned Hamas, blocked boycott efforts against Israel at the Arab League, and made no overtures toward unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, unlike Canada, the UK, France and Australia.
“Even with the current tensions, it is the Abraham Accords countries who are clearly calling for the end of Hamas, as European countries remain silent,” Hassan-Nahoum told The Algemeiner.
“I am extremely optimistic about the long-term viability and even expansion of the Abraham Accords in the next ten years,” she concluded.
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Anti-Israel Protests Force Early End to Vuelta a Espana Cycle Race
Cycling – Vuelta a Espana – Stage 21 – Alalpardo to Madrid – Madrid, Spain – Sept. 14, 2025: Barriers are smashed by anti-Israel protesters during Stage 21. Photo: REUTERS/Ana Beltran
Anti-Israel protests forced the Vuelta a Espana cycle race to be abandoned at its finale on Sunday, with Danish cyclist Jonas Vingegaard declared winner as police sought to quell demonstrations against an Israeli team’s participation.
Protesters chanting “they will not pass” overturned metal barriers and occupied the Vuelta (Tour of Spain) route at several points in Madrid as police attempted to push them back.
Two people were arrested and 22 police officers injured, the Spanish government said.
“The race is over,” said a spokesperson for the organizers, who also canceled the podium ceremony, leaving Vingegaard celebrating in the back of his team car.
Earlier, Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez expressed “admiration for the Spanish people mobilizing for just causes like Palestine” by protesting during the race.
Israel‘s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar posted on X that Sanchez and his government were “a disgrace to Spain.”
“Today he encouraged demonstrators to take to the streets. The pro-Palestinian mob heard the incitement messages – and wrecked the La Vuelta cycling race.”
The demonstrations have targeted the Israel-Premier Tech team over Israel‘s actions in Gaza. Some riders had threatened to quit last week as routes were blocked, causing some falls.
Israel‘s war against Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has sparked protests globally and affected several sporting events.
Seven Israeli chess players withdrew from a Spanish tournament starting on Friday after organizers told them they would not be competing under their flag, citing the Gaza conflict and expressing solidarity with the Palestinians.
On Sunday in Madrid, more than 1,000 police officers were on duty as cyclists reached the final stage of the 21-day race – the biggest deployment since the Spanish capital hosted the NATO summit three years ago.
PROTESTERS CLASH WITH RIOT POLICE
Police held back a crowd of hundreds bearing placards and waving Palestinian flags for several hours as the cyclists snaked their way through towns and villages towards Madrid.
As the riders drew closer to the capital, the demonstrators hurled plastic bottles and traffic cones, upended blue barriers and surged onto the road. Baton-wielding riot police fired smoke bombs to try to disperse them.
Sanchez has repeatedly clashed with Israel over its war in Gaza, describing it as genocide. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused his Spanish counterpart of antisemitism and making genocidal threats.
Madrid’s Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida blamed Sanchez.
“[It’s] violence that the prime minister is directly responsible for due to his statements today in the morning instigating the protests,” Martinez-Almeida said.
“Today is the saddest day since I became mayor of this great city.”
Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right Vox party, posted: “The psychopath has taken his militias to the streets.”
“He doesn’t care about Gaza. He doesn’t care about Spain. He doesn’t care about anything. But he wants violence in the streets to maintain power.”
It is the first time one of cycling’s Grand Tours has been prevented from completing its final stage by political demonstrators since the Vuelta in 1978 was halted by Basque separatists in San Sebastian.
Health Minister Monica Garcia said the latest protests showed Spain was a “global beacon in the defense of human rights.”
“The people of Madrid join dozens of demonstrations across the country and peacefully bring to a halt the end of a cycling race that should never have been used to whitewash genocide,” Garcia said in a post on Bluesky.
Israel‘s nearly two-year-long campaign against Hamas in Gaza was prompted by the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. The onslaught, in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages, was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
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Iran’s Uranium-Enrichment Program Must Be Dismantled, US Energy Secretary Says
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright speaks on the opening day of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Sept. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
Iran’s uranium–enrichment program must be “completely dismantled,” US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the UN nuclear watchdog’s annual General Conference on Monday.
The US and Israel bombed Iran’s uranium–enrichment plants in June, arguing Iran was getting too close to being able to produce a nuclear weapon, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency that inspects Iran’s nuclear facilities said it had no credible indication of a coordinated weapons program.
The IAEA has, however, said it is concerning that Iran amassed an estimated 440.9 kg (972 lbs) of uranium enriched to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent of weapons-grade. That is enough, if enriched further, for 10 nuclear bombs, according to an IAEA yardstick.
Iran’s enrichment plants were seriously damaged or destroyed in the attacks. It is less clear what happened to its stock of enriched uranium. The IAEA has not been able to carry out verification inspections since the attacks.
“If it wasn’t already clear enough, I will restate the United States’ position on Iran,” Wright said in a speech to the meeting of all IAEA member states.
“Iran’s nuclear weapons pathway, including all [uranium] enrichment and [plutonium] reprocessing capabilities, must be completely dismantled.”
E3 IN PROCESS OF REIMPOSING SANCTIONS
Britain, France, and Germany, known as the E3, have initiated a one-month process to re-impose sanctions on Iran lifted under a 2015 nuclear deal that unraveled after President Donald Trump pulled the United States out in 2018.
The E3 have said they might hold off on completing that process if Iran lets IAEA inspections fully resume, accounts for its enriched uranium, and holds direct nuclear talks with the United States.
Iran reached an agreement with the IAEA last week to pave the way towards resuming inspections. It is unclear whether enough progress will be made to satisfy the Europeans.
Tehran insists, however, that it has the right to enrich uranium, as all parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) do, provided they use nuclear technology solely for peaceful purposes. It denies seeking nuclear weapons.
Israel, by contrast, is not a party to the NPT and is widely believed to be the only country in the Middle East to possess nuclear weapons. Israel has a policy of not commenting on that subject.
“We hope dialogues restart, and we hope they’re successful. I think there’s a reasonable chance they will be,” Wright later told a press conference.
Asked what the United States was offering Iran, he said: “Rejoining the community of trading nations, removal of sanctions. It would be a home run for the Iranian people, and we’ve talked about other things as well, so there’s plenty of carrots for Iran to abandon their nuclear weapons program.”