Presbyterian Statement on Israel, Anti-Semitism Draws Jewish Ire

What began as a strong paper addressing anti-Semitic attitudes in the church got hijacked.

The document’s revision, says JCPA’s Ethan Felson, above, was an exercise in blame shifting.

by James D. Besser
Washington Correspondent

The Presbyterian Church (USA) faces a firestorm of dissent at its upcoming General Assembly over a dramatically revised document originally intended to acknowledge and fight anti-Jewish, anti-Israel attitudes within the church, but which Jewish leaders say now does the opposite.

The last-minute switch was “appalling,” according to one prominent Presbyterian activist; a coalition of national Jewish leaders, caught by surprise by the revision, labeled it a potential “low point” in Presbyterian-Jewish relations.

Several Jewish activists will attend the convention, but the real action will come from disgruntled Presbyterian leaders who say a radical pro-Palestinian faction within the church pulled a fast one, with the help of a befuddled church leadership.

“I am not a prophet, but I would bet that the actions of the upcoming General Assembly will be far more acceptable to the Jewish community and most of us in the PCUSA than has been this appalling process regarding the anti-Semitism paper,” said John W. Wimberly, Jr., pastor of the Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the steering committee of Presbyterians Concerned for Jewish and Christian Relations (PCJCR).

A range of Jewish leaders said the revision amounts to a betrayal that reveals deeply hostile motives and a church leadership unwilling to confront them. Presbyterian activists who have worked closely with Jewish groups, while denying charges that the revisions were based on anti-Semitism, said they understand why they give that impression.

“Do I think the Presbyterian Church (USA) is anti-Semitic? Definitely not,” Reverend Wimberly said. “Do I think that our uncritically pro-Palestinian activists can sometimes say and do things that cause the world to think we are anti-Semitic? Absolutely.”

The newest chapter in a seesawing fight between the church and Jewish groups over divestment from Israel, charges that the church is biased against Israel and maybe even against Jews centers on a paper, “Vigilance Against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias,” drafted by the church’s Interfaith Relations Office.

The “resource paper” — not a statement of official church policy, but meant to guide activists and congregants in the contentious debate over Mideast peace issues — originated with Jewish-Presbyterian dialogue efforts in Chicago. The Interfaith Relations Office continued and expanded the effort, producing an initial draft last month that was widely praised by Jewish groups.

In it, church leaders urged vigilance when discussing the Middle East conflict, especially when invoking theology.

Liberation theology, according to the initial document, can be “troubling in its demonization of Israel and the Jewish people and its echoes of ancient Christian anti-Judaism.” The paper acknowledged Christianity’s “long and deep complicity in the proliferation of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions.”

Some kinds of language used by Church activists in criticizing Israel, the paper noted, “cloud complicated issues with the rhetoric of ignorance or subliminal attitudes, or the language of hate, and undermine our advocacy for peace and justice.”

A statement by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago (JUF) “warmly” welcomed the initial anti-Semitism paper.

The revised document removes some of those positive elements; others are retained but are swamped by a new litany of talking points widely seen as hostile to Israel.

Ethan Felson, the JCPA associate director who has helped coordinate the Jewish response to the Presbyterians, said a major change “is that the first draft acknowledged that there were things the church was currently doing that were problematic when viewed through the prism of avoiding anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic bias. The revised document doesn’t find those problems in the church’s current stand.”

But he said recent developments argue otherwise — including a church teaching guide, “Cradle of Faith,” that documents 2000 years of Christian presence in the Holy Land “in which the Jews arrive only in 1948, and a recent statement which referred to Hamas rockets as acts of ‘retaliation.’ ”

The revision was an exercise in blame shifting, Felson said; the original explicitly targeted “theologically loaded language,” but in the new version “the problem is that it’s construed by Jews as such.”

The new document, released without warning late last week, outraged Jewish leaders.

“The revision shows us the split within the Presbyterian Church on relations with Israel and with the Jews is a lot more serious than we thought,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

Foxman said Jewish activists working with the Presbyterians may have been misled because “we talk to only the side that shows a greater sensitivity to the Jewish community. So we felt comfortable that the rational, reasonable, conciliatory view would be accepted.”

“You have to assume that either there are many in the church who are motivated by their desire not to be seen as out front in supporting the Jewish community, or in any way being termed pro-Israel,” said Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. “The Presbyterians say we’ve entered a new era in Jewish-Presbyterian relations, but that claim is belied by this statement.”

Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, U.S. director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said the revision produced “a statement that talks about how to speak in a way that doesn’t look anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, but which gives you leeway to say whatever you want.”

Presbyterian insiders and Jewish activists alike say it is unclear exactly how the revision occurred.

“We have a small but very persistent group of uncritically pro-Palestinian activists in our denomination,” sad Reverend Wimberly. “At the end of the General Assembly in 2004, they managed to slip in a divestment action in the last hours of a week-long meeting, when everyone had their airline tickets in their hands. When the entire denomination was paying attention in 2006, we were able to back away from the divestment approach approved in 2004.”

Other Presbyterian and Jewish leaders describe a weak top church leadership, a chaotic decision-making process and a vigorous, persistent faction that remains convinced Israel alone is the source of conflict in the Middle East.

“The process was truly appalling,” said Katharine Rhodes Henderson, executive vice president of the Auburn Theological Seminary in New York. “Who did the revisions? I don’t really know. But we do know that what was intended as an educational resource on anti-Jewish bias no longer serves that purpose.”

And she said the “national church office is not reflective of the views of members and leaders.”

She said the paper will not be up for a vote at next week’s convention — but expects that opponents inside the church will create a major stir.

So do Jewish activists who plan to attend.

“We’ve been told that the new statement will be deliberated – but we haven’t any real sense of what that means,” said David Michaels, B’nai B’rith’s director of inter-communal affairs.

“This is very hard to navigate; there are many different committees, many different resolutions that are being discussed. We’ll have to take things as they come, but we have had some bad signs.”

A prominent Presbyterian activist who asked that his name not be used said: “The second document has produced a firestorm of criticism within the church aimed at the staff who allowed this to take place. From what I am hearing, the upcoming General Assembly will be filled with demands for explanations of how we could basically retract a document that was widely praised and substitute it with a document that is being widely condemned, both within and outside the church.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization