On Thursday, December 17, I will speak at the 92nd Street Y on recent developments in anti-Semitism in France and elsewhere in the world. Some of what I will say is sketched out in a column that appeared earlier today in Vanity Fair reporting on my visit in Rome last week with Pope Francis. The column is reprinted below.
I look forward to seeing many of you at the Y on Thursday.
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Twice I have had the honor of meeting a Pope.
The first time was twenty years ago when the bombing of Sarajevo was at its height. Fed up with the abdication of the great powers, I sought an audience with John Paul II and brought with me the Muslim president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic.
The second time was very recently, December 9, on the eve of a celebration organized by the Holy See and the major American Jewish organizations. The celebration, to be held this Wednesday at United Nations Headquarters in New York, will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the encyclical Nostra Aetate, which -- though this is not widely enough remembered -- marked the beginning of the end of Catholic anti-Semitism.
I will not dwell on my impressions of the two pontiffs.
On their curious and striking blend of grace and power, of visible spirituality and mysterious strength, of almost palpable saintliness residing in an equally imposing body.
Nor will I dwell long on the strangeness, in both cases, of a tête-à-tête between the sovereign Pope of the "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church" and an affirmative Jew accompanied in the first case by a devout Muslim and in the second case by two orthodox Jews, Chief Rabbi David Rosen and Michael Landau, representing the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, who had come to present Pope Francis with a sheet of new commemorative postage stamps depicting some of the major moments in the last half-century of Judeo-Catholic rapprochement.
Because the main point, for me, is just that: the rapprochement.
The real event is the Judeo-Catholic reconciliation that is the subject of next week's commemorative symposium in New York. Directly following our meeting with Francis, we discussed the details of that symposium with Pietro Parolin, the Vatican's secretary of state and second in command.
There was a time when anti-Semitism was Christian.
It was Christian and even Catholic in a worldwide way, with all of the attendant disgraces repeated endlessly in all of the churches of the planet on the theme of the deicidal people and of the former alliance that had been revoked and left to wither away.
And then came Nostra Aetate, the inspiration of another holy man, John XXIII, the purpose of which was to make a narrow, nearly imperceptible, but decisive semantic adjustment that, in one stroke, changed everything.
Until that point, the best Catholics, those who shunned what Jules Isaac, the great French historian of anti-Semitism, called the "teaching of contempt," would say "the Jews are our fathers in faith, and we owe them the same respect that all children owe to their elders." Except that everyone understood that the fate of the Jews would be the same as the fate of all fathers: They would grow old, die, and disappear, leaving their spiritual heritage to their Christian children.
After Nostra Aetate the discourse changed: "The Jews are not our fathers but our brothers; we owe them the same consideration and friendship that we give to our brothers." Of course, there are bad brothers. The Jews know better than anyone that brothers can be like Cain and Abel or Saul and Jacob and that the specter of war between brothers will always stalk us. But though it remains a risk, it is no longer a foregone conclusion. Nowhere any longer is it written that, of two brothers, one must die and be replaced by the other. And so the living matrix of anti-Semitism that for so long went under the name of "replacement theology" is now behind us.
Rarely has such a small change in meaning had such spectacular consequences.
Never has the substitution of one word for another, the simple replacement of one signifier ("father") with another ("brother") had effects so profoundly and endurably revolutionary.
That is where we stand in the middle of the decade.
Anti-Semitic Catholics can still be found here and there.
But they are a minority.
They are fighting a rear-guard action.
And the Church faithful have, for the most part, become the allies of the Jews, not only in their long-term war against anti-Semitism, but also and especially in the joint effort to repair the world and restore human universality.
That is what I plan to say on Wednesday, December 16, at UN headquarters, where I will share the podium with eminent figures from the Jewish and Christian communities.
And that is what I will repeat the next day, but in different terms, to a more philosophically oriented audience at the 92nd Street Y, where I will lay out the metaphysical basis of what I call variously the spirit, the genius, and the glory of the Jews.
In my eyes, few messages are as important as human universality and the contribution that Jewish thinking has made to that concept.
And few are as pregnant with implications for the ideological standoff in which we find ourselves today.
First because the alliance renewed by Nostra Aetate is part of the new strength of Jewish communities throughout the world.
But also because it is a model, a sort of paradigm that one can imagine being extended to other situations and quarrels, beginning, of course, with the hardly less ancient dispute with the Muslims, who are also our brothers and sisters in faith.
With regard to our Muslim brothers and sisters, we have a choice.
Either the ignominy of the Donald Trumps, Marine Le Pens, and others who view them all as potential jihadists.
Or a Nostra Aetate for three voices, the terms of which remain to be worked out but for which a successful prototype already exists.