A Christian response to anti-Semitism

KELSEY REED: Hello, welcome to Concurrently: The News Coach Podcast by WORLD Radio and God’s WORLD News. Our mission is to come alongside you, learning and laboring with you as you disciple kids and teens through culture and current events. My name is Kelsey Reed. And I’m here with Jonathan Boes.

JONATHAN BOES: Hello!

KELSEY: Together, we want to model conversations and apply tools that you can use at home or in the classroom. And we always love to hear whatever questions you might have, your comments—they’re always so refining and encouraging of us. If you wish, we would love for you to even record any question you might have, and send it to us at the same address—newscoach@wng.org.

JONATHAN: As we’ve talked about on the podcast before, it was on October 7 that Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, which sparked the Israel/Hamas war, which, as of this recording, is still raging, still taking life. It’s just a tragic situation there. We dedicated an entire episode to those events, that we can link to in the show notes here. But today, we wanted to focus on one specific theme that is running out of that and spreading beyond the borders of Israel and into the surrounding nations, even all the way here in the United States. And that is the growing number of incidents of anti-Semitism or harassment of Jewish people, whether it’s in cities or on college campuses. We see this in many different news reports. We can’t point to just one, but to kind of cherry pick a few—the Associated Press had an article about how students on U.S. college campuses that have a large number of Jewish students, they feel unsafe. They have seen graffiti around campuses with, you know, pro-Palestinian slogans. We also see, in France, there have been incidents of anti-Semitism. We’ve seen it in Germany as well. But in France, specifically, more than 180,000 people marched to protest anti-Semitism—you know, evidence that they see this happening in their country, and they are coming out in force to say, “No, this is wrong.”

So to summarize: Since the attacks on Israel by Hamas, and Israel’s retaliation and declaration of war, we have seen, all across the board, a rising anti-Semitic sentiment that has caught a lot of people off guard, it seems. And so we want to focus in on that and ask the question: What is anti-Semitism? What does the Bible say about it? What does Christian history say about it? And how do we respond to it? When we see it cropping up in our own communities, or even our own families, what is our response to this, as parents and educators?

KELSEY: So, you can hear, in Jonathan’s introduction of the tool, that we almost always pull out SOAR as our way of engaging, because it leads us through to a place of discipleship response. But I also really want to encourage you at home, you in the classroom—pull out this other tool that we’ve recently unpacked in an episode. It’s the tool called the Big Five. And particularly with a topic like ours today, which is so unwieldy, it has such a depth of history, such a breadth of application. If you also will track through those five common topics of the dialectic, places where you can locate the conversation with your kids and students, I think you’re going to find that it helps not only to draw out the richness of the conversation, it will equip your students, your teens, for conversation about unwieldy topics even like this in the future.

JONATHAN: And of course, if you feel still a little bit unclear about how to use the Big Five as a tool for conversation in the news and learning through the news, we have stuff about that on the blog, we’ve done an episode about it on our podcast, we can link to those. But also, we will be modeling that somewhat today.

KELSEY: So, in order to make a start with any conversation, but particularly ones where there is this threat of high emotion and misunderstanding that could just happen right from the get go, we always start with definition. And Jonathan gave us a definition in the intro, but I’m going to have him repeat it so that we’re very clear.

JONATHAN: Yes, so the definition of anti-Semitism is quite simple on its surface, but you can kind of break it out into more detail. Just pulling this from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website: “Anti-Semitism is prejudice against or hatred of Jews.” That’s as simple as it is—prejudice against or hatred of Jewish people. There’s a lot of different manifestations of that. You can bring a lot of extra detail to that definition. Another resource you could look at, if you want it to, is the page “What Is Anti-Semitism?” at the website for the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. They actually break that down into what all these different sorts of manifestations of anti-Semitism might look like, how that might actually practically manifest in the community around you, in the rhetoric you see in the news or on social media. And so again, that’s the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. They have some great resources there as well for spotting anti-Semitism on a more concrete level.

KELSEY: So this definition not only provides us some working tools for our conversation, but it also starts giving us a filter for what we’re observing in the world. As Jonathan mentioned, what are we seeing in the news? What are we seeing on social media, or even closer to home, what are we seeing in our relationships? Or the closest—it gives us filters for what’s going on at our heart level, in our own minds. It gives us the chance for careful self-examination. And because we are one foot in the news and one foot in discipleship with this podcast, we’re always trying to talk about, what are those places that it comes close to self, for the sake of growth in Christ? And so when we look at a definition that is as multifaceted as this, we can turn so many of those little categories into questions that drive to the heart. They penetrate. They do that thing that the word can do for us, where it divides bone from marrow, if we allow it. It can be very, I think, stirring of us in the ways that we need to be stirred towards repentance and the gospel. So check out that resource to be able to draw out more questions. And we will use some of those categories to inform our questions for the Companion that we write for this episode. Our Concurrently Companion will have some of those examination or “look out there in the world and what do you see” observation-type questions that you can use for discussion.

So I’m going to actually start there a little bit in terms of self-examination, as we then move into other ones of these observational-type categories, these locations in our Big Five. I’m thinking about the way that my heart can be tempted to scapegoat, how easy it is to try to get the focus off of myself and my brokenness and to put the blame on to someone else. And I want you to just hold that in your mind as we move eventually towards those discipleship outcomes, that we need to allow this to draw close to us to the heart level, even as we think through some of the logic of these things, the history, what we know on that mental level. So I’m recognizing how I have a heartbrokenness that could easily be expressed in a similar hatred of the other. And where I need to start with this conversation is a repentance of the way that I like to squirm out from under something that presses into my own heart. I think then, a great next place to go in terms of our locations is actually that comparison. If I’m not necessarily anti-Semitic in my thinking, but what are some ways that that can come out in me, where in my own life have I experienced this tendency towards blaming or ostracizing the other, failing to do that kind of neighbor love? And how does that work itself out in operation? And maybe even that will lead us into thinking about other places we’ve seen that type of engagement of our nation or other nations in history. So I’m just thinking right now about the state of our nation right now and how we feel about immigration, how we feel about our borders, how we want there to be a security, and how—we’ve talked about it in some of our other episodes—we can get really outraged and inflamed and be ready to try to stamp out any opposition, regardless of the fact that it’s another human being across from us—whether that’s a human being who has a different take on the topic area, or whether it’s one of those people who are interested in coming into our nation. We can forget that they are image-bearers and treat them as uni-dimensional.

JONATHAN: In comparison, thinking about this universal—I guess tragedy, sin, for lack of a better term—of entire societies singling out usually a minority group as the scapegoat, as the source of the problems, which—you know, you see this happening, it happened in Ethiopia earlier this year with the horrific civil war. It’s happened in, I think, even American history. You know, you think about the Red Scare, everything for a season was “communism.” And even, I think, you see flavors of that now, sometimes, when people want to pin the entirety of the world’s problems on the “elite,” which—that’s a little bit of a strange example of that, because the “elites” are people—you think of them as people with power and wealth, whereas oftentimes, the scapegoat is somebody who does not have power and wealth. But it’s a similar—there’s a similar functioning in the heart of, we see problems in the world, it’d be so easy if we could just single out one group of people and put it all on them.

KELSEY: And I love that you actually gave us a segue for talking about two ends of the spectrum, in terms of how we can scapegoat one another. One of those sides is to scapegoat the less powerful, the minority, to say that they’re to blame for why our country is having problems. And I would suggest that that might be kind of a right-leaning type of thought. It is a replication of that ultra-nationalism that we saw in Nazism. On the other hand, there is a Neo-Marxist version of this, where it’s actually the elite or the oppressor that is the one scapegoated, and that anyone who is the oppressed or a victim, that they are actually the ones who are doing it right, or who are righteous, justified, that they have value that needs to be elevated, and that the scales need to be flipped. So what we’re saying here is that all across the political spectrum, there is a temptation towards this type of thinking—anti-Semitism in particular, we’re actually seeing that’s on both extremes.

JONATHAN: It rides a strange line where you see anti-Semitism really crop up in a lot of far right wing conspiracy circles. But now a lot of the stuff we’re seeing with the “Free Palestine” rhetoric, people graffitiing Palestinian slogans on campuses—a lot of that is coming from a more a left-leaning bent that sees Israel as the oppressor. And so yeah, what you’re saying here is, it’s not just confined to these political spectrums, even though it’s a very political issue. In many ways, there is an issue of anti-Semitism that is across the board, almost like an infection.

KELSEY: I think this is a great moment for you to help us to define one of those slogans that you mentioned. You grabbed ahold of an article, I grabbed ahold of an article—I think we’ll make both of these things available in the show notes, because they supply different perspectives. But it’s the Palestinian slogan,
“From the . . .”

JONATHAN: “From the river to the sea.” Yeah, that’s another one of our news articles we’ve been looking at, is talking all about this specific slogan you see—maybe people are chanting it, maybe it’s being graffitied on walls on campuses, in cities. And this is a really contentious phrase, where people who are pro-Palestinian might just say this is simply a call for peace or a call for freedom of oppressed people. But when Jewish people hear this, it’s definitely something they hear as a call for violence. The full phrase is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” And the phrase actually has roots in the Hamas charter, from Hamas sources that are explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. And so this is a phrase that, even though some people may think of as just a cry against oppression, it is deeply rooted in a desire for the destruction of Jewish people. And so when, for example, Jewish college students wake up and find it graffitied on their campus, you can understand why that would feel extremely unsafe, to see a slogan that is tied to the destruction of your people on what is essentially your home.

KELSEY: And we’re seeing in the news, of course, a lot of the rhetoric that surrounds you know, the pro-Palestinian supporters, Representative Tlaib, who is talking about how she would frame this specific slogan—we will post some of that in show notes, so you can read and understand.

JONATHAN: We’re going to have some wild show notes today. There’s a lot of links.

KELSEY: And if you want, you can go deeply into this. There’s another resource that we’ll share that’s from the American Jewish Committee, that helps us to unpack the history, because the history is fraught. It is long; it is deep. The Jewish state of Israel—it was something that was in the works after World War II. And so the history is at least as long as that between Israel and Palestine, and we will also link something to be able to give you a wonderful outline of that history, to be able to go into understanding the conflict, and the efforts that were even made by the State of Israel to help create a Palestinian state, and the resistance by those who are in power in that area towards having their own state that didn’t run “from the river to the sea.” So there’s a number of different ways that this phrase actually has been used over the course of 75 years.

Now, this type of thinking, if not this specific phrase, has been used to try to promote a certain Arab Street ideal. Here comes another phrase that I think is important to name. When we’re talking about the Arab Street, we’re talking about all of those countries—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan—who are a part of this conflict in the background. And they have a shared ideology and a shared desire. And so that also influences all of those pinchy places between Israel, and, of course, the war that’s on Hamas, a terrorist group, but the Palestinian people who are caught in the conflict. All of that is a part of what’s going on, and therefore stirring of those who are connected in some way or other to that conflict over here in the United States.

So we started diving into kind of the circumstance, or the context, in a historical manner. We’re seeing the relationship, to name one of those locations of the Big Five more clearly, the relationship or the cause and effect of history—World War II and the need for a Zionist state. That was something that just lays the foundation for what is still happening, and the tensions that continue to unfold in that area.

JONATHAN: And that’s also where we see the horrific birth of a lot of the philosophies that undergird modern anti-Semitism, where we see Germany’s Nazi state adopting anti-Semitic policies, but rooted in a very, very secular philosophy that would elevate power and human strength. I think of Nietzsche, the philosopher who declared “God is dead,” you know, and the way his thinking even impacted things like Nazi Germany. And you know, he hated the fact that Jewish theology elevated the weak. And that’s another—that’s something we also see in Christianity, that our God, His power is perfect in weakness. And that’s something that does not go well with a sort of Nietzschean might-makes-right, power-through-strength, Übermensch, Nazi, blond-and-blue-eyed superman philosophy. And there’s echoes of those horrible philosophies even in the sort of secular, pagan even, anti-Semitism we see today.

KELSEY: And interestingly, you’ve painted what’s going on in both a left and right sense—again, I’m going to name that we’re talking about Neo-Marxist and fascist thinking—both have that pagan type of “man is ultimate.” God is not authority over what we say, what we do, how we act. We, in our strength, are what is going to bring a specific flavor of life, style of life, or type of government to bear—you know, leaning into humanity. And what I find so interesting about what we’re talking about right now, in terms of worldview, is that that is actually true of Islamic thinking as well, that “might makes right,” that strong is elevated over weak, that it is about even a god who is completely intolerant of anything besides a very strict set of rules that must be obeyed, and then maybe you will receive his pleasure. And even that is in doubt. And so there is this very authoritative, authoritarian expression of a worldview. One, there is a god in it, but still it is a god interpreted through man’s strength rather than what we see in Christianity.

JONATHAN: And this might take us into another topic—sadly, one of the things we see throughout history is that there has also been a connection between Christianity and anti-Semitism. I think one of the more famous examples is the great reformer Martin Luther, who did so much amazing work for the church. At the end of his life—some people believe it’s because of, you know, some of the mental health problems he was experiencing with his age—he wrote some very anti-Semitic things, essentially blaming the Jewish people for killing Jesus. And that is actually—that idea, that the Jewish people killed Jesus, is kind of a hallmark of anti-Semitism in the church. You see that false idea crop up.

KELSEY: It’s interesting to note here, as well, that a lot of that comes from an ignorance of the gospel and ignorance of scripture. So if we were outlining what it meant to cancel out God—because I think even Nietzsche was observing that man had canceled God, he wasn’t just declaring it to be so out of himself, but it was based on his observations of what was going on in the world in which he lived at that time—and so we can make that same observation, that we have really canceled God, is maybe what we would do if we put it in our own modern terms, and either canceled Him or made Him in our own image. That is so typical to what we see in the course of scripture, that we have made man-made religion, that we have had a false understanding of what His authority looks like in our lives. We haven’t recognized it as a benevolent, good authority that knows what it looks like for all creatures to flourish under His reign. And so we think of the ways that in the Middle Ages—let me just paint a little bit more history here—in the Middle Ages, there was a huge ignorance of what scripture had to say, because they were either illiterate or they didn’t know Latin, which was equivalent to literacy in that day and age, because almost anything that was written was written in Latin—for Europe in the Middle Ages, at least, I would say that. We know that there were Arabic texts. I’m not sure how widely read that they were. But the point is, an ignorance of the gospel is an ignorance of who God really was, and of His intentions for His world, that there was this misunderstanding of who we were, and what our relationships to others looked like, and even what our purpose in the world was. And that worked its way out into, again, some of this violent outpouring or violent misunderstanding, as in doing violence to our mind and to our relationships. This scapegoating.

JONATHAN: Yeah, and so that’s something we see crop up really in the Middle Ages. Obviously, in the early church, Judaism and Christianity were so closely tied—you know, Christian preaching was happening in the synagogues, was among Jewish people. It was a big deal when God said to Paul, the Gentiles, this is for them too. It’s not just for Jewish people. Those of us who aren’t Jewish are the ones being included into something that started with the Jewish people. And now, with the benefit of being able to read scripture, we can see just the vacuousness of the idea that it was the Jewish people who killed Jesus. You know, we still see that claim pop up today. And when we see that, we can go back to scripture ourself and say, yeah, the Jewish leaders played a role, the Roman leaders played a role. So right there, you have the Jewish people, you have the non-religious authorities. And then Jesus’ own followers, Judas, and Peter even through his denial, played a role. So essentially, you could say Christians played a role in the execution of Jesus. And then, on top of that, the fact that Jesus’ death was not a mistake or something that didn’t go according to plan. This was God’s cosmic plan to bring the gospel, to save humanity. And so the idea that the Jewish people should somehow be blamed for killing Jesus—there are so many levels at which that is wrong. And I think, when we see that, we can gently but firmly confront it with those simple truths of scripture.

KELSEY: Not to mention the loss there that my sin played a role, that I’m desperate for His death for me. You know, whoever and however the Lord orchestrated this cosmic renewal through a redemptive act, I need to wonder with awe at the way that He orchestrated this grand story, instead of somehow getting confused and blaming the death that saved me on a people, as though I could have a righteous and violent or harassing response to them. So there’s a number of ways that we’re seeing that, again, this comes so close to our own hearts and our own understanding. And this is a process, not only of understanding history, as we’re beginning to dive into, or push into, and then open the door for further study for you, at home, and with your kids in the classroom, but also a deepening understanding of scripture, a wrapping your flesh and your heart around this understanding of who Jesus is to me, and how His plan included the people that He called originally out of Ur, of the Chaldeans. That He had this people through Abraham that He set apart in order to give His word to, and then in order to send His Son through. And so, as believers, there’s this need to have, I would suggest, a two-pronged response—one that is concentrated on those discipleship aspects that we’ve been naming, but also one that is very missional-minded. Because if you track back through the Big Five and ask these questions of, what are people thinking about history? You know, what are they saying is the historical truth of something? What testimony are they leaning into that supposedly supplies the foundation for their claims about what’s going on in Israel and against the Palestinian people? We can ask those questions and see maybe the brokenness of their thinking, the brokenness of their emotions, and that move us towards compassion, and what I would call that missional response, where we ask questions to try to draw out those thoughts, those emotions, and to be able to engage them for the sake of—and we use this term a lot now—but for the sake of human flourishing in this world, which includes our Jewish neighbors.

There were some wonderful things that came out in our discussion about those responses. Jonathan, I loved what you were saying about what we can see that substitutes for us that place of shaping our children’s thinking, if we aren’t careful—how social media can be the discipler if we don’t step into that place. So I want to give you the floor for that.

JONATHAN: So something I observe is just this need for belonging that—I’m specifically here thinking about preteen and teenage boys, and often feeling like there is not a place of belonging for them anymore. And that’s for all sorts of reasons that we can get into. But you know, there’s a lot of voices in culture telling teenage boys, who are trying to come into their own and form an identity, telling them that their voice is no longer valued, or that it’s kind of their turn to take the back seat, so to speak. And often the places that offer them belonging, especially spaces online, are not healthy spaces. And it’s in some of those spaces where we see things like anti-Semitism and racism really taking root, where there’s this sense—the world is broken, you don’t have opportunities, people are trying to silence you, it’s because of those people over there. That scapegoating we’ve been talking about is really rampant in some online communities. And that, I think, can be very tempting to young people who feel like they don’t belong, or who feel like they don’t have opportunity—but because they’re full of hatred, but because they are full of a need to have a place, they’re full of a need to belong. They’re full of a need to have their voice heard. And so often, that good need, that good desire, is being met by people with ill intentions and with hatred. And then, you know, hatred is something that is taught—“those desires you have, it’s because of this group over there, it’s because of the Jewish people” or whatever it might be. And so I think we need to be aware of that, as parents and educators. I think maybe that starts with having—what is a good practice anyway—which is having our eyes open to loneliness, having our eyes open to the people who seem to not have a place or seem to not belong anywhere, to be welcoming arms for them, instead of those places who would welcome them with these ulterior motives and with these hateful purposes.

KELSEY: I’m so thankful for your tenderness in this area. I mean, it refreshes me to hear just that opposite of what we’ve been talking about. You’re not blaming. You’re not getting violently passionate about this problem with young men. But you display a tender heart and see the heart’s need, and this coaching that we can do of the heart, if we turn our faces towards that need. I’m thankful for your model in that, because that’s what we’re trying to also convey in our manner with you. We want to recognize that this is a tender area, and that it needs our tenderness towards it, and it needs our undistracted attention towards it too. Because young men, obviously, are not the only ones who, if left to their own devices—and I do mean the literal devices in their hand—are going to find something else that shapes their thinking. And I just want to step outside of this current topic area to point back to another one that we’ve mentioned, that it’s the same for girls, that they find a community online that shapes their thinking. And whereas boys might be attracted to the strong response that can turn destructive and violent, girls are often dealing with that hated response towards themselves and can fall in with a community that inflames their self-hatred. We don’t have to go much further into it except to say, we talked about some of that in our episode on transgenderism. We want to encourage you—parent, educator, mentor—to remember: It’s important to quiet the voices of your own device, so you can look and see where my children’s attention—where are their hearts turned towards? And to be able to coach them well.

JONATHAN: Something else you brought up, when we were discussing this episode, is paying attention, looking long and hard at human brokenness and sin in history and how that shapes our responses.

KELSEY: If it’s okay, I’m just going to read what I wrote. Because I was thinking about this and mulling on it, and I’m not sure I could be more eloquent than I was the other day when I wrote it.

JONATHAN: Go for it.

KELSEY: I think one of my major conclusions for discipling our kids is how important it is to look long and hard at human brokenness and sin in history. We need to teach them about slavery. We need to teach them about the Holocaust and wars and the reasons for them, the worldviews behind them. These things are real and they destroy people. If we don’t face the condition of our hearts, we will cultivate a confused generation of young people who think that they know what justice looks like, and that they can judge right from wrong based on their own authority.

JONATHAN: Yeah. That really spoke to me, and just a few things that sparked in my brain—after hearing those words you wrote, one is again about the importance of education and remembering the past. That’s another thing we’ve talked about on the podcast before. We talked about it in the context of slavery in the Civil War, but very pertinent to today’s topic, where today we see many people trying to deny that the Holocaust of World War II actually happened. One of the most horrific—I mean, I guess you could say one of the most horrific events in human history, the slaughter of so many Jewish people for no other reason than that they were Jewish. And so much evidence that it did happen, but there are people today who would like to try to deny it. Again, there’s that idea of scapegoating. We don’t want to deal with human brokenness. We want to try to look the other way. But as parents and educators, to make sure our children’s eyes are open to human sin and brokenness—and to me, that kind of comes out into other responses, which, one—just being vigilant, to understand that this is something that comes from human sin. So we need to watch our own hearts. And we need to watch our own communities for, when we see hatred taking root, to not believe that we are necessarily beyond even horrific things as what we think of as a peaceful American culture. And then to not be surprised or shocked when we do see hatred take root, because we understand that these come from a universal brokenness. And so when we do see anti-Semitism cropping up on even American campuses, there can be this shock, like “Holy cow, what is happening?” It is horrible, but it shouldn’t surprise us, because the human heart in its fallen state is bent toward that hatefulness, that scapegoating.

KELSEY: Part of the reason why we didn’t come out with this episode earlier is because I was wrestling with the emotional responses to this. I looked long and hard at the history surrounding World War II and the philosophies that seemed to just multiply coming out of that, as a part of my response to having lived in Europe as a teen. So during my undergrad, you know, I tried to figure out some of the logic, you know, tried to bring things that were a heart’s response to what I saw as the despair of Europe. I tried to bring some categories to that. I had to do the same thing in preparing for this episode, because my heart is just heavy and angry. There are too many of my own close relationships where I am seeing anti-Semitic-type leanings, things that they’re posting online. It grieves me deeply. Parent, teacher, when you are coaching a response, when you are looking long and hard with children at the broken stories of history in the news, it is so vital to coach that heart level, and to give our students that slow process of working maybe from the hard emotions into the softer emotions. That’s where the root of compassion is towards not only the other, who is not a believer, but even towards ourselves, as we’re in this process of growing in Christ’s likeness.

Let me camp out a little bit in the missional part of that, because I think that’s harder, that we can be so steeped in the hard emotions, the anger, the scapegoating ourselves, the blame, that we can fail to see that that person is desperate to hear the grace that is poured out abundantly for us in Christ Jesus, and that by the power of the Spirit we can learn to love, we can and are equipped to love in a way that is transformative, in a way that brings His kingdom into men’s and women’s and children’s hearts. And so I just want to say again, the emotions need to be engaged, at the same time as the logic, to give the categories and to work through it slowly in order to shape a new generation who grows up in a way that is honoring of the one who called each of His people to Himself, and began with this original people group.

JONATHAN:  So my mind goes to Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Which makes me think, you know, we shared all these resources for spotting anti-Semitism in the world. And those are helpful. But we could spend all day trying to identify every different instance of anti-Semitism and be vigilant against it, but I think one of the most powerful things we can do is, instead, to seed this vision of humanity we see in scripture, a vision that is rooted in love of neighbor and seeing the image of God in the people around us, delighting in them. And knowing that everyone who comes to Christ will be part of this vision, in which these identity politic categories no longer matter. We are all one in Christ Jesus.

KELSEY: The roots of this family of God began with the people that He called to Himself, that He saved and called out of Egypt, out of slavery. Deuteronomy 7:6 says: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the Earth.”

Because of Jesus, we are in grafted into the family of God, which began with this people. Our prayer is that we could have the compassion for those who do not yet know the saving power of Jesus, who are a part of that original chosen people, that we might display a compassion, a weakness, rather than a strength—that we would come in disarming winsomeness. And the one who equips us for that is the Spirit who indwells us, who engrafted us into Christ. He has equipped you for this work.

Show Notes

Anti-Semitic incidents around the globe have increased since the start of the Israel/Hamas war. What is anti-Semitism, and how should Christian parents and educators respond?

Check out The Concurrently Companion for this week’s downloadable episode guide including discussion questions and scripture for further study. Sign up for the News Coach Newsletter at gwnews.com/newsletters.

We would love to hear from you. You can send us a message at newscoach@wng.org. What current events or cultural issues are you wrestling through with your kids and teens? Let us know. We want to work through it with you.

See more from the News Coach, including episode transcripts.

Further Resources:

• Listen to our previous episode, “Israel, Hamas, and worldviews at war.”
• For more on the Big 5, see our Big 5 article and our Big 5 episode.
• To further define anti-Semitism, visit the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
• For more info on the phrase “from the river to the sea,” see the American Jewish Committee and the Conversation.

Concurrently is produced by God’s WORLD News. We provide current events materials for kids and teens that show how God is working in the world. To learn more about God’s WORLD News and browse sample magazines, visit gwnews.com.

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