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Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action
(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.
“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.
“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”
Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.
Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”
Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.
A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)
The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.
In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.
Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.
The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.
“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time.
The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.
More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.
For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.
“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.
“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.
The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.
In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded.
Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.
The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices.
“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.”
The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year.
“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said.
The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group.
Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)
Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers.
Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.
She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.
“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said.
Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.
“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”
Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah.
“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said.
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1912 Yiddish operetta tackles class conflict and women’s rights
One of the smash hits of New York’s thriving Yiddish theater scene in the early 20th century grappled with socio-political issues that still resonate 100-plus years later. It’s coming back for a very limited run and you don’t have to speak Yiddish to enjoy it.
The production — a concert of songs from the 1912 Yiddish operetta Khantshe in Amerike — will be performed twice this month, first at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York and then at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan.
The protagonist, Khantshe, is a young working-class woman who dresses as a man, working as a chauffeur for a nouveau-riche immigrant family. Khantshe flirts with and romances the women she works for — mother and daughter alike. The operetta grapples with class conflict, women’s rights, gender fluidity and cars.
The performances, made possible by material reconstructed from archival documents, will feature students from Bard accompanied by piano. There will be no dialogue; instead the singers will deliver brief plot summaries in English before each song. A translation of the lyrics will be included in a booklet for the audience, who will also be able to follow along watching English supertitles.
The operetta first opened on Dec. 31, 1912 at Sarah Adler’s Novelty Theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and was a runaway hit. It was mounted in Warsaw just six months after the New York premiere.
“This is one of the shows that were in dialogue with all of the political and social issues that people were talking about,” said Alex Weiser, director of public programs at YIVO and a member of the trio that reconstructed the performance materials. “They were made because the masses needed the cultural material in their language that spoke to the specificity of their milieu.”
Khantshe in Amerike was also a turning point in the career of both its composer, Joseph Rumshinsky, and its star, Bessie Thomashefsky. The previous year she had left her renowned husband Boris Thomashefsky, the titan of the Yiddish stage, known as a compulsive philanderer.
At the height of their influence, the Thomashefskys owned theaters in and out of New York, published their own magazine, The Yiddish Stage and wrote columns in the popular Yiddish newspapers of the day. When Boris Thomashefsky died in 1939, some 30,000 people lined the streets of the Lower East Side for his funeral.
“This show was a star vehicle for Bessie when she first left Boris,” notes Weiser. “They were a power couple and this was a really important turning point in her career. She left him, she went out on her own and there was a big question: ‘Is this it for her?’”
The angry, wily, rebellious and militantly feminist character that Bessie Thomashefsky portrayed became the prototype for a series of heroines she played going forward. They were tough, brassy, usually working-class fighters, endowed with chutzpah.
Bessie Thomashefsky also produced the operetta.
The musical was a watershed moment for Rumshinsky, as well. He went on to dominate the American Yiddish musical for the rest of the decade. It marked the first time that “American rhythm” had been incorporated in Yiddish music, a euphemism for acknowledging the influence of African-American music on the genre.
“Nothing had ever happened like that in Yiddish theater before,” said Ronald Robboy, who was part of the team that reconstructed the performance material. “Yiddish theater then quickly started incorporating elements of Tin Pan Alley. It also became interestingly more self-consciously Jewish, as smarter and better educated composers learned how to manipulate Jewish modal material, the scales that came from liturgical music and klezmer music. So the music was at once more American and at the same time more skillfully Jewish in its self-identity.”
Robboy’s connection to the material is a lengthy one. For five years he served as researcher for the Thomashefsky Project, an homage to the legacy of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky instigated by their grandson, the late conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. The culmination of the project occurred in April 2005 with the premiere of The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater at Carnegie Hall. A recording of a subsequent performance in Miami Beach aired on the PBS series Great Performances in 2012.
Robboy worked with Weiser and Max Friedman, a law student in Memphis, to turn a number of archival documents into the printed matter needed to do the Khantshe performance. In 2023 the team reconstructed Rumshinsky’s Shir-hashirim operetta.
The documents for Khantshe came from YIVO and the American Jewish Historical Society, among other sources. They included a copy of the libretto that had been published as a bootleg in Warsaw.
Friedman got obsessed with Yiddish while studying for a master’s degree in music composition at Brandeis. For his master’s thesis he set to music sound recordings of Yiddish poets H. Leivick, Yankev Glatshteyn, Kadia Molodovsky, and Rokhl H. Korn reading their own work.
The last musical number in Khantshe in Amerike has the protagonist singing about herself. Soon the song Khantshe was played whenever Bessie Thomashefsky walked into restaurants and social gatherings. Tilson Thomas often played it as she made her triumphant entrance into the family living room.
Khantshe in Amerike will be performed on Thursday, May 14, in the Bitó Conservatory Building at Bard College from 7 – 8:30 p.m.
It will also be performed at YIVO on Monday May 18, at 7 p.m., as part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival. Admission is $15, $10 for YIVO members and students. Registration is required for the free livestream on Zoom.
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They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading
The suspects texted one another as though they had everyone fooled.
“How’s the rabbi?” one asked in a message. “Is he still scheduled for surgery?”
“We are still waiting for the doctor to check if it’s still needed,” came the response.
But there was no surgery, authorities say, and there was no rabbi. Instead, prosecutors allege, the men were referring to Amazon’s impending acquisition of the vacuum company iRobot, hoping to trade on what was then still a closely guarded secret. According to a pair of federal indictments unsealed last week, the deal was one of dozens leaked to a criminal network that used Jewish code words to plan their investments.
At the center of the alleged insider trading scheme was Nicolo Nourafchan, 43, a corporate lawyer who prosecutors say used his access to company files to collect and share deal information with a sprawling network of middlemen and investors. Capitalizing on the lawyer’s knowledge of in-progress mergers and acquisitions, the crew allegedly racked up tens of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds over the course of a decade.
The indictments are rife with Jewish code words that the defendants used in the alleged plot. “Torahs” and “mitzvahs” were stock tips, and a merger was a “flight to Israel.” A “chavrusa” — Aramaic for study partner — meant another lawyer or investor, and a company was a “shul.”
And to share the ticker symbol of a company soon to be acquired, one alleged co-conspirator spelled out its initials using Jewish names.
Nourafchan and the other lawyers received kickbacks when the deals hit, according to prosecutors.
Nineteen of the case’s 30 defendants have been arrested in Los Angeles, New York and Florida and have appeared in federal court. (Two located in Russia and Israel are considered fugitives, according to the Department of Justice.)
Of those, 16 defendants are each charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, two counts of securities fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy. The conspiracy charges carry a combined sentence of up to 30 years in prison, while the fraud charges carry a sentence of up to 45 years and money laundering up to 20 years. Fines could exceed $5 million per defendant.
Those charged in the first indictment include Nourafchan, who prosecutors say drew extensively on a network of family and friends to build the scheme, and David Bratslavsky, the former director of the U.S. Israel Business Council, a group that brings together business leaders from those two countries.
An additional five alleged co-conspirators, including Nicolo’s brother Lorenzo Nourafchan, face two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, two counts of securities fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy.
Reuters has reported that Avi Sutton, a former Israeli Supreme Court law clerk, is among the unindicted co-conspirators involved in the alleged scheme. (Sutton could not be reached for comment.)
The prosecutions have caused an earthquake in the world of M&A law, with the Wall Street Journal calling it “one of the most brazen insider-trading schemes in years.” Nicolo Nourafchan had worked at top M&A law firms and leaked information on corporate giants that included Amazon, Johnson & Johnson and Burger King.
“Everyone charged today is accused of scoring significant profits from expected market moves and making out like bandits,” Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, said May 6 after the charges were announced. “That’s not merely gaming the system — it’s a federal crime.”
If proven guilty, the Nourafchan brothers, who have not yet entered a plea, could face decades in prison. Lawyers for each did not respond to a request for comment.
No attorneys are on record for other defendants and no pleas have been entered yet in the case. The Forward could not reach them for comment.
Ask the ‘rabbi’
To most who knew them, Nicolo and Lorenzo Nourafchan were LA brothers who had made good. They had graduated from top schools — Nicolo from Yale Law School, Lorenzo from Yeshiva University — and gone on to careers in corporate law and finance.
Nicolo bounced around between major law firms including Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins and Goodwin Procter. At each stop, authorities said, he used internal document management systems to access information about deals that were in progress. He recruited Robert Yadgarov and Gabriel Gershowitz, respectively his former roommate and classmate, to gather tips from their firms, prosecutors allege.
The three would allegedly then pass on the tips to middle-men, who would share the knowledge with investors. (Yadgarov is among the 16 charged in the first indictment. Gershowitz has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with authorities, who have recommended a sentence of two years in prison.)
Eager for the next tip, the investors often badgered the middlemen in code, authorities say.
“Gavy, we are all just waiting for you to tell us when the next flight to Israel is,” one investor named Simon Fensterszaub asked alleged middleman Gavryel Silverstein. “It’s coming soon,” Silverstein replied. (Silverstein is also charged in the first indictment.)
In June 2022, court documents say, Fensterszaub, who had invested in a company expected to be acquired, asked Silverstein for an update on the deal: “Any chance you can find out how the rabbi is feeling?” Fensterszaub wrote.
“Unfortunately nothing,” Silverstein replied.
Then Fensterszaub dropped the code entirely: “Should I tell ppl to pull out?” he said.
Ultimately, he didn’t — and the brothers netted about $179,000 from their iRobot trades.
In another instance, one of the investors, unable to remember the name of the company being purchased, asked a co-conspirator to remind him. The company’s name was Momentive — ticker symbol MNTV.
According to authorities, the person replied:
“Menachem
Nachman
Tuvya
Vladmir”
Silverstein and Simon Fensterszaub, who do not have lawyers currently assigned in court documents, could not be reached for comment.
Family affairs
The Nourafchans are not the only brothers named in the indictments, which in total run more than 120 pages. Text messages from Brian and Mark Fensterszaub, of Hollywood, Florida — Simon’s brothers — show the two using code to discuss Nourafchan with Silverstein, who is their brother-in-law.
The first indictment shows the brothers as regularly agitated about the status of deals. “We need that damn rebbe already,” Mark Fensterszaub allegedly told Silverstein in 2022 as the two discussed money issues.
Soon after, Silverstein came through, court documents say. With Amazon on the verge of acquiring iRobot, he used Hebrew letters to allude to iRobot’s stock symbol in a text, allegedly tipping the brothers to the opportunity.
The traders in Nourafchan’s network made a total of $1.7 million trading on the Amazon/iRobot deal, according to court documents.
After Nourafchan lost his job at Goodwin Procter in September 2023, the Fensterszaubs appeared worried that the tips might stop coming.
“Let’s say he’s not davening or doing any Torahs, mitzvahs,” Brian Fensterszaub told Silverstein that October. “Let’s say he said ‘I don’t have anything, f”ck you, give me my money.’ We’d still be like alright, torah and mitzvahs. We gotta do what we gotta do.” (The three Fensterszaub brothers are charged in the first indictment.)
Nicolo Nourafchan reassured Silverstein that December that more info would be on the way soon. “I’m working on getting a job,” he said, according to court documents. “So baruch hashem we’ll have more.”
Silverstein’s brother-in-law Yisroel Horowitz is also charged in the scheme, as is Brian Fensterszaub’s brother-in-law Joseph Suskind; Eliyahu and Daniel Kavian, another sibling duo, were allegedly connected to the plot through Simon Fensterszaub.
It was the relationship between the Nourafchan brothers, however, that may have led the decade-long scheme to unravel.
Lorenzo Nourafchan, 38, ran a business he started called Northstar Financial Consulting Group, and on LinkedIn had accrued several thousand followers. He also wrote a money column for the Los Angeles Jewish Home, an Orthodox print weekly, in which he wrote about the challenges and opportunities of being an Orthodox business owner. (The LA Jewish Home did not respond to an inquiry.)
Lorenzo was looser with the information, court documents show, recruiting his hair stylist to the scheme, who then involved nearly a dozen of his friends and relatives. Lorenzo instructed the stylist, Miakel Bishay, not to do the trading himself so the trail would not lead back to him, authorities say, but Bishay did anyway. Bishay’s friend, Nowel Milik, netted more than $700,000 in the iRobot deal, according to one of the indictments. (Bishay and Milik are both charged in the second indictment.)
Soon, the jig was up. In March 2024, a federal agent posing as a representative from FINRA, a regulatory organization that monitors trading activity, called Brian Fensterszaub asking for more information about the iRobot trade. The call alarmed Fensterszaub, who immediately called Silverstein to let him know.
“Listen, God forbid that I don’t think anything should come of it,” Fensterszaub told Silverstein, “but God forbid if something did, you don’t need it pointing back to you and you having to deal with it.”
A legal filing from Tuesday by lawyers for the Nourafchan brothers asked the court to grant Lorenzo permission to use the proceeds from the sale of his business to pay for Nicolo’s legal representation. Judge Leo T. Sorokin granted the request.
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Trump announced a national Shabbat — and a giant celebration of Christianity the very next day
To celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, President Trump has announced several religious ceremonies. This weekend is Shabbat 250, in honor of Jewish Heritage month, beginning Friday night and carrying into Saturday.
“We celebrate the contributions that Jewish Americans have made to our way of life, we honor their role in shaping the story of our Nation, and we remember that religious devotion, learning, and service to others are enduring pillars of a thriving culture,” the announcement says.
But that recognition of Judaism is followed the very next day by Rededicate 250, a celebration “about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values,” as Paula White-Cain, Trump’s senior faith advisor, said in a webinar earlier this month for the National Faith Advisory Board, adding that attendees shouldn’t worry the event might include “praying to all these different Gods.”
In that same webinar, Brittany Baldwin, an executive of the America 250 taskforce planning the event, reassured viewers that the event would focus on Christianity and not give much space to other religions to ensure it has “the right focus for our community of believers.”
“The vast majority of the speakers are Christian,” Baldwin said. “If you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way, talking about religious freedom.”
All this is certainly mixed messaging as far as the place of Jews in the nation’s celebrations is concerned.
Rededicate 250 will feature dozens of Christian speakers including pastors; figures such as Dr. Larry Arnn, the founder of Hillsdale College, a private, conservative Christian school; members of the Trump administration including Pete Hegseth, who has openly voiced support for Christian nationalism; Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus on the hit Christian show The Chosen; and a selection of Christian musical performers. Rabbi Meir Soleveichik is the sole non-Christian slated to participate.
Rededicate 250 and Shabbat 250 are both headed by the larger task force organizing the 250th birthday celebration, led by the public-private partnership organization founded for this purpose, Freedom 250, the funders of which include Exxon Mobile, Palantir, and Wall Builders, an advocacy group “integrating the elements of Biblical faith and morality throughout all aspects of American life and culture.” Its page highlights religion as a central piece of the nation’s birthday, advertising initiatives like “America Prays,” a site where Americans can post prayers and commit to praying 10 minutes every week for the country from May 7 until July 4 this year.
The back-to-back Shabbat and Rededicate events are taking place shortly after the Trump administration released its report on anti-Christian bias, the work of a task force on the topic Trump founded shortly after taking office for his second term. For nearly 600 pages, the report inveighs against what it frames as oppression of Christians in the U.S., with examples including American embassies flying rainbow pride flags, President Biden’s declaration of a Trans Day of Visibility and limitations placed on church services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though the report mentions the importance of freedom of religion to all Americans — and notes that Christians make up 62% of the U.S. population — the papers, much like the Rededicate 250 event, heavily emphasize Christianity’s particular importance in the U.S.’s founding. No one disputes this — the founders were Christian. But the document takes it a step farther, interpreting Christianity’s centrality in American history to imply that the religion should play an essential role in the government.
“Christianity was embedded into both American government and society, to its great credit and benefit,” the report says, “even as its laws strive to protect religious pluralism.” After outlining Christianity’s historical influence, the document concludes that it is just as central to the U.S. today. “The Christian faith has been an indispensable feature of American governance and society,” it says, “from the earliest colonies to present.”
The report, as its title implies, focuses exclusively on Christianity. But even then, it excludes certain beliefs. It offers a definition of the religion, stating that “most” Christians oppose LGBTQ marriage and abortion, quoting liberally from the Bible to support this point, though many churches differ in their interpretations of the verses or actively reject the stated beliefs on LGBTQ marriage or abortion.
“This belongs to a package, a story, about who ‘we’ are, when they talk about ‘we the people,’ or ‘in God we trust.’ When they use that word ‘we’ — who are the ‘we?” said Robert W. Tuttle, a professor of religion and law at George Washington University’s law school, of the report. “Whose voices are silenced in this? We know whose voices are being lifted up. But whose voices are silenced?”
The task force report, the America Prays page and the page for Rededicate 250 largely avoid mentioning Jesus by name, and Freedom 250’s site even has a brief “Jewish blessing for the government” from 1789. All ostensibly leave space for non-Christian religious observance and prayer. But looking at the contents and speaker lists, Christianity is the only religion that is given more than passing attention. Judaism is the only minority religion mentioned at all.
Instead, all of the events frame the nation’s founding, and its birthday, as a gift from God — a God implied to be Christian. On the Rededicate 250 site, three “pillars” are outlined for programming at the nine-hour event on Sunday. One is “a reflection on God’s providence throughout 250 years, honoring the faith that inspired America’s founders and has carried us forward in every generation since.” The next is personal testimonies, and the final is the titular rededication, asking for God to grant the U.S. another 250 years.
The rhetoric “suggests such an image of the state being the recipient of this divine blessing, this divine empowerment,” said Tuttle. “And it’s troubling because when the state claims that it has authority from God, it loses what is crucial about our specific political arrangement, which is the idea that we the people create the government. The government is not a creation of god. ‘We the people,’ — this is a secular compact.”
Why, then, among numerous events all dedicated to Christianity, have a national Shabbat? Many Christians see Jews as part of a unified “Judeo-Christian” society and system of values, one that often downplays the differences in beliefs, practices and culture between Jews and Christians. And Shabbat is becoming increasingly popular among Christians; Charlie Kirk’s book on the topic encouraged his fellow Christians to observe a specifically Jewish Shabbat on Saturday instead of the Christian Sunday Sabbath — all while downplaying and even stripping away the Jewish beliefs from the practice.
Shabbat 250 too encourages Americans of “all backgrounds” to observe Shabbat this weekend, one that Trump said should center “gratitude for our great Nation.” In this schema, Shabbat, too, can fit in with the celebrations’ Christian focus.
“How do we knit together a religiously pluralistic polity into a society? They’ve offered one way to do it — we’re going to center this one. If you don’t wish to join it, we’ll tolerate you,” Tuttle said, in summary. “It’s the story of who belongs and who doesn’t belong.”
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