Both Catholics and Protestants have made major advances toward correcting negative portrayals of Jews and Judaism in their educational materials, and toward overcoming distortions regarding the Jewish people, it was reported here yesterday by the American Jewish Committee.
Reporting to the organization’s annual convention, Ralph Friedman, chairman of the AJC executive board, said that Catholic and Protestant religious education have shown significant strides toward stressing the positive contributions of the Jewish religious tradition, both in its own right and as the background of Christianity.
On the Catholic side, the report showed, a new series of elementary textbooks for parochial schools is being prepared by the Pope Pius Religious Education Center, at Monroe, Mich. Two nuns head this project, and Rabbi Marc H. Tannenbaum, director of the AJC’s antireligious affairs department, acts as Jewish consultant to the Center.
The first two textbooks of an eight-volume series being issued by the Center in Michigan, Mr. Friedman reported, “are suffused with an affirmative attitude toward the Jewish people, and contain not a single negative reference toward the Jews. More over, the illustrations demonstrate graphically the origins of Christianity in Judaism by portraying Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Apostles and the Disciples as Jews domiciled in Palestine. Hebrew captions are used to demonstrate the Biblical background of early Christianity.”
On the Protestant side, he said, a seven-year study, stimulated by the American Jewish Committee and conducted at the Yale Divinity School by Dr. Bertram E. Olson, has been published by Yale University Press. Three simultaneous Protestant projects are under way, Mr. Friedman reported. One is an examination of the curriculum publications of 17 Protestant denominations. Another is the development of a self-evaluation guide to determine the adequacy of racial and interracial content for use of editors of denominational curricula on the elementary level. A third is a continuing survey of the inter group content of films and other audiovisual materials used by Protestant churches.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
