The Academic Engagement Network (AEN) — a nonprofit which promotes academic freedom and honest scholarship on the subject of Israel — held on Feb. 5-6 two New York City area seminars which aired important ideas about Jewish relations with the Christian world and the Black community in America.

Columbia University hosted the first event, “Ecumenical Zionism: Jews, Christians, and the Land of Israel,” at the Jewish Theological Seminary, a discussion on the ways in which both Jewish and Christians scriptures pointed to the restoration of the Jews in Israel following an extended exile. The featured speakers included Anglican priest Gerald R. McDermott, Regents University professor Dr. Carrie Wood, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, and Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch — who told The Algemeiner on Monday that such a dialogue is necessary.

“First of all, no nation, even the strongest of nations, can exist without allies and without friends,” said Hirsch, whose podcast In These Times has welcomed some of the world’s most renowned academics and public figures as guests. “We often forget that there are only 15 million Jews around the world who can still use all the friends we can get. Any community that offers friendship to the Jewish community is welcome.”

McDermott, author of Israel Matters: Why Christians Must Think Differently about the People and the Land and editor of The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel and the Land, stressed during the Feb. 5 event that such support, even when coupled with hotly contested eschatological claims, is present throughout the Christian community.

For centuries, he explained, the Catholic Church taught supersessionism, a replacement theology in which God’s covenant with the Jewish people, as well as the Jewish people’s claim to the land promised to them, is abrogated by the advent of Christianity. However, a substantial portion of the Christian world came to reject this view after a rediscovery of the Jewish scriptures precipitated by the Protestant Reformation fostered the conviction that the restoration of the Jews in Israel is a necessary expression of God’s will and faithfulness. In the 19th century, this view found one of its most consequential articulations in the doctrine of dispensationalism, a belief that the Jews’ return to Israel would signal the coming of the Messiah — or for Christians, his return — and the end of the world as people know it. For tens of millions of Christians around the world, especially those living in the US, it is this belief which commands support for Zionism and the security of the State of Israel.

A “new” Christian Zionism is gaining acceptance among scholars, McDermott explained, noting the Christian world’s discovering arguments for Zionism which avoid the leaps of dispensationalist theology. It looks beyond the notion that the reestablishment of the Jews in Israel has eschatological significance and points instead to the many Christian scriptures which affirmed the centrality of the Jewish people to God’s plan for mankind and foreshadowed their homecoming to Jerusalem.

Mutual agreement on the irrevocability of God’s promises to the Jewish people persists even amid profound disagreement between Christians and Jews on the identity of the Messiah and Christianity’s innovation on the concept of monotheism — i.e., the Trinity, the idea that God is three entities, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It also binds the destinies of Christians and Jews while being a potent defense against attacks on Israel and the Jewish people, according to McDermott.

“It is a deep theological reason why we should support Israel in this war against the new Nazism. Jews have more title to the land than any other people. God called them to share the land in justice, and they have shown time and again they are willing,” McDermott said, concluding his remarks. “Like Hitler’s Nazis, Iran and its proxies are conducting genocide, the attempted elimination of a whole people, the Jewish people. If we Christians thought it was right to destroy Nazism in World War II, then we should support Israel in her efforts to destroy this new Nazism.”

AEN’s second event took place over several hours at three universities — including the City University of New York-Brooklyn College, New York University, and Cooper Union — and explored the history and continued importance of Black and Jewish cooperation on civil rights as well as the cultures of Black Jews throughout the world. Led by Dr. John Eaves, a politician and founder of Black and Jewish Leaders of Tomorrow, the gathering engaged audiences in a thoughtful dialogue on a sensitive issue.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the Academic Engagement Network has set its sights on reviving the formidable Black-Jewish alliance, which toppled the Jim Crow laws in the segregated south in the 1960s and prompted a massive expansion of social and civil rights. Eaves, an African American Jew who grew up in the southern US, has been a major partner of that effort, touring the country to stress the importance of pluralism, interracial harmony, and equality before the law.

“Judaism is a whole lot more diverse than people give credit, and I’m proud of the fact that I am part of this diverse religious family” Eaves said to an audience of Jewish students at Cooper Union, discussing what he has done to share Judaism with African American youth and kick start a new era of solidarity. “And so, we’re doing unity dinners across the country. We’re bringing Black students and Jewish students from [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] and Jewish students who are part of Hillels and variously predominantly White universities in Atlanta, in New Orleans, in Washington DC, in Houston, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, and several other cities.”

He added, “What we’ve found is that the Black students and the Jewish students reach an incredible conclusion, and that incredible conclusion which is so simple and so basic: we’re more alike than we’re different.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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