‘I see this as an alliance that can last because it’s built on shared values, not just interests,’ Rabbi Mark Gottleib told NR.
Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio has issued an offer of “expedited transfer process for Jewish students in danger of antisemitic discrimination and violence on campuses across the United States.” Though the university recognizes the logistical challenges inherent in accepting more students than the number for which it planned, doing so “is the right thing to do,” the statement reads.
The expedited transfer offer, issued on October 18, is part of a push by the university to emphasize the shared values and interests of Jews and Catholics in a time of rising antisemitism within American higher education. Rabbi Mark Gottlieb, who spoke last week at a conference at Franciscan stressing the indelible connection between people of both faiths, believes that though a majority of Jewish students seem unlikely to accept the offer, it represents significant support for a besieged minority on the campus.
“The fact that it was articulated that way and so graciously extended as a real invitation says that there really is a sense of solidarity,” he told National Review.
Gottlieb said the statements and rallies emanating from universities signify a clash of civilizations that Americans would be wise to take seriously.
“What we’re witnessing on college campuses and in cities,” Gottlieb said, “is nothing less than an apocalyptic or cataclysmic battle for the soul of the West between the forces of Bible-believing Jews and Christians [versus] Muslims and progressives that have found common cause in a cult of identity politics and oppression.”
He describes the seemingly-unlikely confederation between those latter two groups as one that can only arise when traditional religious values have fallen by the wayside.
“Without the basis of a traditional religion . . . in the absence of forgiveness and sin as it’s traditionally understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you have these categories of virtuous and sinful that are solely based on identity,” Gottlieb told NR. “This union of progressivism, of BLM (Black Lives Matter), campus politics, identity politics, and radical Islamists is — as ridiculous as that is, as totally counterintuitive as ‘queers for Palestine’ is — that can only mean something coherent if the coin of the realm is oppression.”
It is under that framework that the Catholic and Jewish leaders who spoke at the conference advocated for greater partnership between people of both traditions. Andrew Doran, director of Philos Catholic, spoke about the necessity for Catholics to stand by what Pope John Paul II called their “elder brothers in faith.”
“We might be tempted here — because of our distance from Israel, or our distance from our own Jewish origins — to feel safe from that evil, like the defenseless families sleeping on the morning of October 7,” Doran said. He continued, arguing that the “universal mission” is one against paganism with which both Christians and Jews must contend.
“Too often in our history, in trying to balance pagan and Christian identities, Christians revert and make an idol of race or ethnicity or nationality or some ideology,” he said. “And wherever there’s pagan reversion, antisemitism follows. As many have noted, ‘The hate that begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews.’”
Gottlieb told NR that, despite the theological differences between Catholics and Jews, an alliance between the two is necessary to defeat what he sees as an evil springing from progressive identitarianism replacing faith in Western hearts and minds.
“I see this as an alliance that can last because it’s built on shared values, not just interests,” he said.