U.S. Jews Kvetch to U.S. Catholics
Are they trying to convert us?
August 21, 2009
(Uriel Sinai/Getty Images))
The AP is reporting today that representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and rabbis from the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements got together to send an aggreived letter to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. They’re complaining that the bishops issued their own letter in June, which seems to suggest that they think the value of Catholic-Jewish dialogue is to give the Catholics a chance to convince the Jews that they should accept Christ as their savior. If so, it’s certainly a clever gambit by the Catholics. (Indeed, were the miter on the other head, one might even call it crafty.) But we’re less than convinced that a kvetchy letter is necessarily the best countermeasure. So we offer this, instead: Let’s just go proselytize them back.
Jesse Oxfeld, a former executive editor and publisher of Tablet Magazine, is a freelance theater critic. He was The New York Observer’s theater critic from 2009 to 2014.
