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War strained the Israel-Vatican bond. Will the pope use the ceasefire to heal those wounds?
As the ceasefire took hold this weekend, Pope Leo XIV called it “a spark of hope in the Holy Land.”
To understand the new pope’s approach to Israel, after he came into his role at a time of unusually strained relations between the Vatican and Israel, a bit of history helps.
The Catholic narrative when it comes to the Jewish state is one of initial opposition, followed by resigned acceptance, and eventually, formal and diplomatic acceptance. At the same time, since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Church has embodied a growing love and respect of the Jewish people. In the case of Pope Saint John Paul II, it even gently edged toward a mild Catholic Zionism.
Now, after the late Pope Francis sometimes dropped the ball when it came to the Middle East — and was, rightly in some instances, accused of showing partiality to the Palestinians against Israel, or unwittingly reiterating anti-Jewish tropes — Pope Leo is bringing a balanced diplomatic and theological approach to the issues. He listens carefully, is less impulsive, and more strategic.
‘We cannot recognize the Jewish people’
Initially, the church was strongly opposed to Zionism. In 1904, Pope Pius X told Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, that he could not support Zionism for two reasons.
First, as Herzl recorded in his diary, Pius said “The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.” Religious Judaism had no “further validity,” in Pius’ eyes, as it “was superseded by the teachings of Christ.”
In response to Herzl’s attempt to make an argument for Zionism that was not based on religion, Pius was even more adamant: any religionless group was far worse than a group that, like the Jews, practiced a religion he would not acknowledge.
Yet Pius was, paradoxically, full of compassion for Jews suffering persecution. The core of his approach to Israel could be attributed to a theological attitude known as supersessionism, which is not a doctrine of the Catholic Church, but runs deep in its bloodstream.
Supersessionism teaches that God used the Jews as a vehicle to prepare for Jesus, and that when Jesus came, the Jewish people killed him, cursing themselves. As punishment, the Jews were expelled from their historic land, and their religion was invalidated. (Nevertheless, St. Augustine suggested the Jewish people retained a divine role, through offering testimony to the truth of Christ by their scripture, known under the Church as the Old Testament.)
The radical changes of Nostra Aetate
So far, not so good.
For many subsequent decades, the Vatican had no incentive to support Israel. In 1947, the Vatican never endorsed United Nations Resolution 181, which put forward a plan for separate Jewish and Palestinian states in the Holy Land. The Church preferred the structure that had been in place during Ottoman rule over Palestine, which ended in 1918. In that period, the “millet system” ensured religious freedoms, with 19th-century decrees securing Christian denominational sites and rights.
Under the Ottomans, the status quo arrangements regarding holy sites in Jerusalem were also favorable to Catholicism.
But the Ottomans weren’t coming back. And the state of Israel was, eventually, founded and internationally recognized. So, given the Vatican’s respect for international law, it came to a gradual pragmatic acceptance of the State of Israel.
Matters changed in 1965 with the publication of Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council, convened by Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII. In the light of the Holocaust and widespread Catholic complicity with anti-Jewishness in that time, Roncalli — who saved thousands of fleeing Jews while papal nuncio in Turkey during the war — had become a resolute opponent of antisemitism.
Roncalli asked the council to publish a document that rejected the deicide charge, which declared that all Jews in Jesus’ time, and subsequently, were guilty of deicide — the killing of God. This move, he hoped, would defang Christian antisemitism.
The document’s fourth paragraph was its great achievement. It rejected the deicide charge, without denying the scriptural accounts. And it recovered St. Paul’s teaching that God’s promises to his people are irrevocable, articulated in Romans 11:29. That meant the Jewish covenant was valid, in contrast to supersessionism.
Finally, it unequivocally condemned antisemitism, without defining that hatred in detail.
Full diplomatic recognition
While many Catholics still today know nothing about Nostra Aetate, Pope John Paul II, 15 years after the document’s publication, moved into high gear in pushing the implications of its teachings into the Catholic mainstream. He was a fierce critic of antisemitism during the second world war in Poland, and witnessed from his underground seminary the ravages of the Holocaust.
Under his pontificate, he established full diplomatic recognition of Israel through a 1993 Fundamental Agreement, which obliquely acknowledged the religious dimensions of this new reality.
He established good relations with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. He begged God’s forgiveness for the Church’s persecution of the Jewish people.
Informally, in non-authoritative speeches, he showed an awareness that the return of Jews to their biblical land had religious dimensions.
The Church and the Palestinians
This is half the story of the history behind Pope Leo’s decision-making today.
The other half concerns Catholic support for the Palestinians, and Catholic concerns about Arab Christians, of whom there are an estimated 10-15 million in the Middle East.
The Vatican has long supported Palestinian refugees through its charitable agencies. While Pope John Paul II established stronger ties between the Vatican and Israel, he also, in 1999, spoke of “Palestinian’s natural right to a homeland,” and concluded a Fundamental Agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 2000.
After the U.N. accepted Palestine as a non-member observer state in 2012, the Vatican recognized the state of Palestine in 2015. Internally, none of this was seen as incompatible with the Vatican’s close relations with the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
But the Israeli government thought otherwise, as the Vatican had recognized a state that, in Israel’s eyes, did not exist.
Pope Leo’s immediate predecessor, Francis, did some damage to the Vatican-Israel relationship, including through his citation of a biblical text often deployed against the Jews to speak of evil on the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and his implied criticisms of Israel’s incursion into Gaza in its early days as terrorism. (I think Francis’ more controversial choices regarding Israel were related to his temperament, rather than indicative of a change of course regarding the basic orientation of the Catholic Church.)
Pope Leo’s first moves
On the day of his election, Leo wrote to Rabbi Noam Marans, director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee. “Trusting in the assistance of the Almighty,” he wrote, “I pledge to continue and strengthen the Church’s dialogue and cooperation with the Jewish people in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate.”
Twelve days later, when speaking to Jews and Muslims at a meeting convened in Rome, he reiterated: “The theological dialogue between Christians and Jews remains ever important and close to my heart.” He continued, “Even in these difficult times, marked by conflicts and misunderstandings, it is necessary to continue the momentum of this precious dialogue of ours.”
To my mind — although he hasn’t asked my advice! — Leo might consider developing the Church’s teachings on the Jewish people in one way.
In past Church teachings, Jews were expelled from Israel as part of their punishment for the death of Christ. But since the deicide charge has now been rejected, that punishment is no longer tenable. Is it time for Catholics to teach that the Jewish return to the land of Israel may well be part of the promises made by God that are irrevocable?
This is not to affirm the extreme religious nationalism of far-right Israeli ministers like Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben-Gvir, but rather to provide breathing space for moderate Zionism. Moving to such a teaching would also not undermine the Church’s support for the Palestinian people, but rather give responsible credibility to the Vatican’s continued support of the two state solution.
It is also not to suggest that Leo should cease to be outspoken about the suffering of Palestinians. Like the pope who came before him, his empathy for Palestinians has so far been a hallmark of his papacy.
After the only Catholic Church in Gaza, the Church of the Holy Family, was hit by shrapnel — or shelled directly — on July 17, Leo called for the end of the “barbarity of war,” the protection of religious sites, and proper respect for civilians. He subsequently received a call from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who apologised for this incident.
He met Israeli President Isaac Herzog in September discussing the urgent need for a ceasefire, humanitarian access for Gaza and a two state solution. He plans to visit Lebanon soon to show solidarity with Middle Eastern Christians. His papacy will be characterised by his efforts to reconcile differences — as he has been doing so successfully within the Catholic Church.
As the Middle East moves carefully toward peace, in the wake of the recent ceasefire, Leo must walk this tightrope, keeping these two deep commitments in careful balance: a love of the Jewish people and a love of the Palestinian people. This is his signature statement: seeking peace between peoples and nations using all the power of his office.
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On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee
Following Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win of the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the state’s Jewish Democrats are reflecting on whether the divisions El-Sayed’s candidacy brought to the fore can be bridged before November.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race, with Jews both in fierce opposition and fiery support of El-Sayed in an election that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin, who had endorsed El-Sayed, believes Democrats will get behind the nominee in the interest of defeating Republican Mike Rogers — a race that could determine which party controls the Senate. Pre-primary polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
“Shame on any Jewish Democrat if they’re going to go vote for Mike Rogers and put our democracy at risk because they can’t find their way to supporting Abdul El-Sayed, who is such a brilliant person, just because he doesn’t share their exact beliefs on Israel and Palestine,” Levin told the Forward. “That’s ridiculous.”
Levin lost his Senate seat to Rep. Haley Stevens after heavy spending against him by AIPAC, the campaign fundraising group advocating for unrestricted U.S. aid to Israel. An AIPAC-associated super PAC spent some $32 million in a failed attempt to get Stevens the Senate nomination.
Stevens endorsed El-Sayed for the general election Wednesday morning. But some Jews who voted for Stevens see no possibility for reconciliation. Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the modern Orthodox synagogue Kehillat Etz Chayim in suburban Detroit had endorsed Stevens in the primary, alarmed by El-Sayed’s association with the controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and condemnation of Israel as a genocidal and apartheid state.
In a TV interview Wednesday, El-Sayed used the term “bloodthirsty” to describe Israel.
“To have so many people vote for someone who is so hurtful to the Jewish community, the things that the Jewish community values — I think it’s depressing,” Lopatin told the Forward.
Lopatin has made up his mind that he will not vote for El-Sayed in the general election, but he also isn’t yet sold on Rogers, the Republican nominee.
“I have to study him more,” Lopatin said. “But I will not vote for Abdul El-Sayed, definitely, and I would tell people they should not.”
Lopatin said he wishes Stevens would condemn El-Sayed rather than endorse him.
Still, others see El-Sayed as the best candidate to face Rogers in the general — and don’t want him to pull back on the issues that won him the nomination. Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a photographer outside Detroit who helped organize the group Jews for Abdul, said she has confidence El-Sayed will win the general — attributing the close primary race partly to the influence of outside money supporting Stevens.
“He was able to win this election in the face of close to $70 million of outside funding going to bolster his opponent,” Weinberg Barefield said. “This election is showing us, and elections around the country are showing us, that elections are not to be bought — they’re to be earned.”
Roslyn Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, was also among El-Sayed’s Jewish supporters, even as she disagreed with him on his lack of support for a two-state solution. She stressed the importance of beating Rogers in November irrespective of disagreements on Israel.
“My motto is and will be: vote blue, no matter who,” Schindler told the Forward. “I am hoping that all Democrats realize that to do otherwise will be self-destructive and just plain wrong.”
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens in the primary — isn’t issuing an endorsement in the general election yet.
She said the close margin El-Sayed won by, about 15,000 votes, gives her hope that El-Sayed will see the need to unify his party. A start, she said, would be focusing less on AIPAC during his general election campaign.
“There’s a lot of opportunity on Abdul’s side to be a better bridge maker versus kind of a bridge burner,” Alexander told the Forward. “The cards are his. It’s his responsibility to initiate.”
In his election night speech, El-Sayed didn’t mention AIPAC by name, instead speaking more generally about getting money out of politics.
On Wednesday, he addressed Jewish Michiganders directly: “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
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‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem)
One thing about the late Forverts staff writer and critic Miriam Hoffman — she cooked a heavenly eggplant in tomato sauce.
And why do I know this about one of our writers? Hoffman, a veritable lexicon-caldron of Yiddish sayings and terms she’d archived from her own mother’s distinct poylish dialect, was many things: A distinguished long-term professor of Yiddish at Columbia University; a theater critic turned playwright who turned the New York Public Theatre’s founding director Joseph Papp into a serious supporter of Yiddish culture; a child survivor of Siberian exile, and so much more.
As she encountered immigrant American life in da Bronx, the tiny dynamo that was Hoffman delighted in becoming American, freely advising everyone on the best consumer goods this country had to offer. A country that was a home and refuge to her, her parents, her husband and so many in her vast circle of Yiddishist friends, students, fellow writers, educators and chosen family. And then, once upon a time, she welcomed me into her Florida home for an overnight stay, so that I could record her jaw-dropping tales of how she and her beloved mameloshn Yiddish both survived the khurbn, the Holocaust. And talk into the video camera she did.
But first, there was lunch.
Rest in all your ferocious deliciousness, Miriam Hoffman, and thank you. For the eggplant, the advice on the best toothpaste, the stories — and for doing everything, everything, everything possible, to transmit your Yiddish to another generation.
The Yiddish Teacher
The Yiddish teacher bending saying:
In my book you’ll learn
the alefbeys through pictograms like so:
The gimel is a camel
The beys a house
You see?
The Yiddish teacher has an archive
in her bedroom closet
The folding doors open revealing:
shoeboxes filled with
stories and
poems and
songs she
wrote as a child
in the displaced persons camp
on paper donated to Jewish refugees
The Yiddish teacher was once
seated in back
of a transport truck
with all the other refugees
Trying to go over the Swiss Alps
to Mandate Palestine
The Yiddish teacher was born
in a Siberian prison camp
“people were starving, sure,
but there was sex”
The Yiddish teacher was the only
woman writer on staff
at the Forverts Yiddish newspaper
The Yiddish teacher remembers
the first time her family ate
Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and
meatballs
from a can
in the Bronx
We go shopping together
The Yiddish teacher loves Rao’s tomato sauce
“it’s the best”
The Yiddish teacher recommends
“Mavis Toothpaste”
It’s the best
The Yiddish teacher loves to
go fly fishing
The Yiddish teacher is short and slim
and round
I think
if I cup my hands together
I can
carry her around always
— Chana Pollack
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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ is a Talmud-quoting, Tisha B’Av epic
“Before there were Jews… there was ‘The Odyssey,’” a theater manager infamously posted on a marquee in Portland, Oregon.
While the mythic, Bronze Age events recounted in the blockbuster film likely never transpired, Homer’s epic poem is by any measure younger than the Jewish people. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, now a proxy for a pitched battle over the essence of Western civilization, could not exist as it is without the Jews. Indeed, whether it knows it or not, it is telling a foundational story of our history.
Much of the criticism surrounding the film, which managed to agitate classicists from its first set photos of Matt Damon in a crested Grecian helmet (not a period-accurate Mycenaean boar-tusk ensemble) and bigots of all stripes with its casting of a trans man and people of color, has shifted since its release just before Tisha B’Av, taking aim at the film’s ideas and how they may clash with those of antiquity’s.
“Did you Christianize The Odyssey?” podcaster Zhong Shu asked Nolan in a now-viral interview.
Nolan explained that he was drawn to the ancient ethic of “xenia,” called “Zeus’ Law” in the film. In the Greek conception, this means welcoming guests because you never know if they may be a God. In Nolan’s blockbuster it’s described as treating others how you would be treated. When the law is breached, society as we know it comes undone, leading to our hero’s atonement and qualms that seem at odds with his traditional characterization.
While Nolan’s understanding mirrors the Christian Golden Rule, which itself is antedated by statements in the Torah and by Hillel, his vision of civilizational ruin when it is trespassed is more central to Judaism. Odysseus laments that, by creating the Trojan horse, and exploiting the code of hospitality to launch a massacre, he has broken something.
“To burn the walls of Troy is to burn the world entire,” Damon’s Odysseus tells Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. This is more or less a paraphrase from Talmudic wisdom: “To destroy one life is to destroy the world entire,” and its more recognizable corollary, “to save one life is to save the world entire.”
The Hebrew Bible is rife with examples of hospitality in extremis. In Sodom, Lot offers his daughters to a mob of rapists rather than have them violate his heavenly guests. The result: a destroyed city and a wife reduced to a table condiment. (Just before, Abraham fed these visitors, plus another angel of God.)
But watching the film Tuesday, I was reminded of another story. Remember when I mentioned Tisha B’Av, the holiday marking the destruction of Judaism’s ancient capital?
Our tradition teaches that the second temple fell because a man holding a banquet in Jerusalem kicked out his enemy, a fellow by the name of Bar Kamtza. Humiliated by his host, Bar Kamtza plots his revenge. He goes to Caesar and tells him the Jews are conspiring against his rule. To prove it, Bar Kamtza, like the wily Odysseus, concocts a ruse, suggesting the Romans send a sacrifice to the rabbis and see if they offer it.
They don’t, as Bar Kamtza blemishes the animal, making it unfit for offering.
In The Odyssey, the famous gift horse is presented as a tribute to Athena. Its blemish is the fighting force it hides inside, ready to sack the city.
The upshot of the rejected temple sacrifice was the razing of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. The temple is desecrated, in much the way the temple of Athena is in the film.
Christian theology doesn’t argue quite so forcefully that the violation of the Golden Rule augurs a civilizational collapse. Quite the contrary today, where xenophobia and whispers of Great Replacement — akin to the trade-wind rumors of sea peoples in Nolan’s film — have taken root in the Evangelical right. (Ezra Klein, and really anyone attuned to commentary as subtle as IMAX subwoofers, picked up on this tension.)
Jewish history tells us we fare poorly in places where the stranger isn’t welcome.
In a departure from the text, Nolan ends Odysseus’ wandering with his voluntary exile. He sails west, predicting a benighted age to come, where his exploits will be sung as men lose the ability to write.
Our story ends on a similarly bleak, yet hopeful note.
When Jerusalem fell, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai devised his own deception, sneaking past the city walls in a casket (before he was let out, zealots wanted to stab the bier, recalling the Trojans’ stabbing of the horse).
But before Yohanan can make his escape he’s intercepted by the general Vespasian, who he mistakenly refers to as the emperor. Vespasian offers a correction, but almost instantly a messenger confirms this designation, telling him Caesar died and named him his successor. Regarding Yohanan’s mistake as prophecy, he offers him a request.
Jerusalem had fallen, self-determination was unrealistic, and so Yohannan asks for the city of Yavneh and its sages. From there our modern history began, literacy thrived and a dark age was subdued.
The Temple and Troy have yet to be rebuilt, but their legends live on.
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