“It should not require bravery to come to a Shabbat, but here we are,”
Those were the words of Pamela Nadall, a professor at American University and author of the new book Antisemitism, An American Tradition. It was a recent Friday night in March, and Professor Nadall was speaking at a Jewish Shabbat in Maryland.
I was also there. A Catholic journalist, I wanted to witness how a local Jewish community near me was reacting to the epidemic of anti-semitism that is raging in America and the rest of the world. It’s also part of a bigger project I am working on about how Jews have enriched American culture, from literature to movies to Mad magazine.
I have also witnessed the absolute collapse of journalistic standards in recent decades, which has fueled the new war against the Jews. The leftists in the media have been propagandists for over a century, but the right in recent years has not been much better. People like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Megyn Kelly do not employ fact checkers. They do not have editors to answer to, editors who ask them about sources and accuracy. (To be fair, Ben Shapiro, whose arguments about the War in Iran and anti-semitism I generally agree with, also has refused to acknowledge or correct mistakes about stories.)
I have given up trying to get the Stasi media to tell the truth, but the conservatives have almost been as bad, and completely gone off the rails when it comes to Jewish people. So I came to a lovely synagogue on a Friday night to attend Shabbat. It was a beautiful service, with songs, fellowship, and Professor Nadall giving a talk on anti-Semitism. I could see the similarities between Shabbat and the Catholic Mass. I was reminded of something the great priest Father Richard John Neuhaus once said – Christians and Jews are not people in two separate houses, but people in different rooms of the same house.