“For half a century Jews and Christians have focused on the way of dialogue that I call face-to-face. The time has come to move on to a new phase, the way of partnership that I call side-by-side. For the task ahead of us is not between Jews and Catholics, or even Jews and Christians in general, but between Jews and Christians on the one hand, and the increasingly, even aggressively secularizing forces at work in Europe today on the other, challenging and even ridiculing our faith.”
— Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Jews in pre-war Europe tended to fear fundamentalist Christianity. They knew that Christian fervor often led to expulsions, blood libels, and forced conversions. Indeed, when Russia’s Queen Elizabeth barred all Jews from her realm in 1742, she declared quite explicitly, “From the enemies of Christ I seek no gain.”
The fact that Eastern-European Jews remained apprehensive of fundamentalist Christianity when they immigrated to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries is therefore no wonder. And yet, over the past 50 years, some Jews have started to view religious Christians in a new light. Rather than fearing them as enemies intent on “converting the Jews,” many now see them as Israel’s only true friends in an increasingly hostile world.
But Israel is not the only issue that has drawn Jews closer to conservative Christians in recent decades. The culture wars have played a significant role as well. As traditional morality declined in the second half of the 20th century, some Jewish leaders began seeing amoral secularism – not fundamentalist Christianity – as the greatest threat facing American Jewry. And with that shift came a new appreciation for the “religious right” and the potential benefits in joining forces with it.
An early example of such cooperation occurred in 1962 when Rabbi Gershon Neumann of Manhattan’s Congregation Zichron Moshe founded a group called Morality in Media together with Father Morton A. Hill and Rev. Robert Wiltenburg to protest the sale of pornography to New York City schoolchildren. A year later Neumann and Hill proclaimed a hunger strike to highlight the issue – a story that made it to the front page of The New York Times and forced Mayor Robert Wagner to act.
In 1964, two other rabbis – including Chaim Lipschutz, at the time an editor at The Jewish Press – joined Neumann and six Christian clergy in attacking the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down obscenity bans on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and a French film, “The Lovers.” The court “virtually promulgated degeneracy as the standard way of American life,” declared the clergymen.
Two years later, in 1966, the group again made its voice heard, this time praising the Supreme Court for ruling against the publishers of a pornographic magazine and books on sadism while criticizing it for reversing an 18th-century ruling declaring the novel Fanny Hill obscene. Four rabbis joined nine Christian clergymen on this matter. Among the four were Neumann and Abraham B. Hecht, president of the Rabbinical Alliance of America.
What motivated Neumann and his colleagues to cooperate with Christian clergy? A desire to keep American culture wholesome. As Senator John O. Pastore said at a Morality in Media dinner in 1972, “Unquestionably, the books [our children] read, and the television and movies they see during their tender formative years, significantly shape their personality. Of all the media none is more pervasive and effective for good or evil than television.”
Thus, Media in Morality aimed, as one reporter put it, “to combat by legal means TV shows, movies, magazines and books that incite the nation’s youth (and their elders) to violence, perversion, promiscuity, drug experimentation, hatred, and tastelessness.”
