More in ‘Dana Evan Kaplan’

For a very long time, discussions of the future of American Judaism have taken place in an atmosphere of pessimism and recrimination. Since the 1960s, the familiar story goes, Jewish religious institutions have allowed the majority of Jews to slip away. Synagogues are spiritually uninspiring places, which most Jews visit only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The Reform and Conservative movements are in an identity crisis, unable to come up with convincing theological rationales for their existence. Israel and the Holocaust have become the real pillars of American Jewish identity, and they are growing less potent all the time.

Interfaith dialogue requires some delicacy, and it can be especially tricky for Jews to remind Christians just how much of their belief systems and liturgies derive from Jewish sources. (Sholem Asch and Marc Chagall did so in literature and painting, with infamously mixed results.) Still, serious scholars, both Jewish and Christian, continue to detail the depth of Jewish influence on the development of Christianity.