Conference on evangelicals, Israel held on Sukkot

A Georgetown University conference on “Evangelicals, Israel and American Foreign Policy” was held on Sukkot.

The scheduling on Tuesday  was an “unfortunate” mistake, said Jacques Berlinerblau, director of Georgetown’s Program for Jewish Civilization. Once the conflict was discovered, he said, some of the speakers from the evangelical community could not reschedule and it was decided to go ahead with the event as originally planned.

A strong Jewish critic of the controversial and growing Jewish-evangelical alliance did not appear on the schedule. Berlinerblau said attracting such a speaker was made more difficult by the scheduling conflict, but he noted that not all of the Jewish speakers would simply be boosters of the alliance. For example, Melanie Maron, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Washington chapter, discussed and analyzed the decision-making process her organization goes through in deciding how and when to work with evangelicals. Berlinerblau also pointed out that theologian Timothy Weber – the most prominent evangelical critic of the relationship – spoke on one of the panels.

The Program for Jewish Civilization will hold other programs on this topic, Berlinerblau emphasized, and he hoped to publish and/or release a recording of Tuesday’s proceedings as well.