On Sunday, as Jews around the world gathered for the first night of Hanukkah, an antisemitic terrorist opened fire on Jewish men, women, and children celebrating the holiday on Bondi Beach in Australia. This despicable attack has already claimed the lives of more than a dozen innocents, including a girl as young as ten and a Holocaust survivor.
Jews, including my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, have honored Hanukkah—a holiday commemorating the resilience of the Jewish people and the miracles of the God of Abraham—for thousands of years. Sunday’s attack is a somber reminder that the Jewish people will mark Hanukkah once again this year amid a disturbing global rise in hateful rhetoric against the Jewish community, including here in the United States.
As a Catholic Christian and founder of Alliance Defending Freedom, the largest religious liberty legal organization in the world, I have been utterly stunned to see such despicable animus propagated by those claiming to be men and women of faith. Those harboring ill will toward our Jewish friends could not be more at odds with the teachings of Christianity and the spirit of our nation.
In his legendary campaign to expose the evils of slavery, Cassius Marcellus Clay, the son of the largest slaveholder in Kentucky and Alabama, had a message for all Americans: whether you derive authority from God or the laws of man, hatred of fellow human beings is wrong. For the former, he would display a Bible; for the latter, the Constitution; and for those who believed in neither God nor law, Mr. Clay brandished a bowie knife and pistol.
Like Clay, I too have heard stories of the horrors of hatred from those who endured its worst incarnations, and I too have a message for all Americans.
In this case, I brandish only this pen.
The terrible evils that occur when antisemitism spreads uncontrolled are not some distant memory, nor are they relegated to a time far back in history books. They are present in living memory, and they took place in some of the most advanced societies of our time.
If, like me, you have heard stories of those horrors from a close friend, who lost every single member of his family, you would be as intolerant as I am of this despicable hatred.
I met my friend Michael several decades ago at a conference to train lawyers to defend religious liberty. He narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust having been a teenager in Poland when the Nazis came to power. At age fifteen, he was sent on a train to Buchenwald and then to Auschwitz, where his aptitude for welding saved his life. He stopped growing in the camps, but stunted height was not his only lasting scar. Michael told me he never truly recovered from the pain at what was done to him and his family.
He once recounted his last moments with his beloved mother. Before he reported to the transport with the other Jewish men, she packed him a backpack with two loaves of bread. Michael, embarrassed over his mother’s doting, complained that her care was too much. He worried it would make him appear like a child among his teenage friends. Michael abandoned the backpack, leaving the bread behind. He never saw her again.
The Catholic hero Saint Pope John Paul II also saw the cruelty of antisemitism through the eyes of his Jewish friends. He grew up in a Polish neighborhood that was one quarter Jewish, and he played goalie on the Jewish soccer team against the team of his fellow Catholics. He maintained a lifelong friendship with a friend who survived the Holocaust.
Pope John Paul would have been appalled by this current moment. Catholics who espouse the hatred that threatened his friends dishonor his memory and his religious teachings.
As he said during a visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome, “The Jewish religion is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain way is ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion.” Catholics and Jews share “a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers.” We are eternally connected through immortal ties of faith and history.
Tragically, our intertwined fates are also evident in walking the death camps that were the evil ends of antisemitism in the last century. If you visit Dachau, as I have, you will see the priest barracks, which housed thousands of righteous souls, like Father Titus Brandsma, murdered for resisting the Nazis.
Many Evangelical heroes, like Franklin Graham, have also consistently condemned antisemitism, calling it a “cancer” and “poisonous.” Graham has warned of the dangers of the Holocaust happening again, viewing antisemitism as a demonic force.
To those readers who trust not in friendship or in faith, but in the laws of man, our great American heroes saw no place for religious hatred of any kind in our society.
America’s first president, George Washington, famously wrote of his wish that “the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants…there shall be none to make him afraid.”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was so enraged by the antisemitic hatred that took hold in Europe that he ordered local communities to bear witness with their own eyes, and, fearing that some would deny the atrocities, created photographic documentation that was later used at the Nuremberg trials. He would disdain those who deny such horrors today. They are a far cry from the Americans who risked their lives liberating the concentration camps.
American heroes and Christian faith leaders have made it clear that there is no place in the United States, in our religious communities, or in our society for those espousing hatred of our Jewish brothers and sisters. Our patriots and our faith leaders have given their lives in opposition to this evil. This Hanukkah and in the aftermath of the horrifying Australia attack, let us be worthy heirs to their inspiring legacy, and let us, like Clay, stand against the antisemites who dishonor them, their faith, and their country.
