Why Believers Have a Duty to Confront Anti-Semitism
“Seventy years after the Holocaust, we’re seeing the ideas that Hitler was advancing coming back in just a moment when we thought those ideas were defeated. They’re coming back in a big way,” Robert Nicholson, founder and executive director of the Philos Project, said on a recent edition of “Charisma Connection” on the Charisma Podcast Network.
“There is a huge, huge problem of anti-Semitism in Europe, and European Jews report on surveys that many, if not most of them, feel afraid from their fellow Europeans. And something that few people are talking about is the return of anti-Semitism right here in the United States. Things are sliding back to the way they used to be. The fact that anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish hostility could be taking root again in a country founded on Judeo-Christian principles is more than a tragedy. It’s an outrage.”
To help combat anti-Semitism, the Philos Project earlier this year created the #WeResolve campaign to equip Christians with the knowledge and tools to help fight anti-Semitism. #WeResolve provides shareable content, and the Philos Project’s goal is to empower individuals, groups, churches and organizations to take tangible action in confronting anti-Semitism around the world.
A shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue last fall—the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States—took 11 lives. Shooting suspect Robert Bowers said in an FBI affidavit, “I just want to kill Jews.”
“We need to stand up, we need to reach out, we need to befriend Jewish communities that are living all around us and feeling the heat,” Nicholson says. “And don’t think the Jewish people aren’t worried. This is, after Israel, the biggest Jewish community in the world. People in the Jewish community are starting to look at one another and say, ‘Do we have a future here? Do we have to go to Israel to really live a safe and secure Jewish life?’ That’s a scary thing.”
For more about the Philos Project and how to help combat anti-Semitism, listen to the podcast below.
