Soon after meeting the fellow who would become my best friend in law school, I confessed something to him: I’m pro-Israel. For Orthodox Jews, this allegiance isn’t simply a matter of politics. As close to my heart as any article of faith is the land God granted Abraham with the promise to multiply his descendants like stars in the sky.
I had reason to be nervous about broaching the subject. I’d spent the previous two years, 2000-02, as a graduate student in Europe, a period that coincided with the second intifada. I learned then—with every fire-bombed synagogue in France and the cries of the rabble that stormed Oxford carrying Israeli flags defaced with swastikas—that otherwise sensible people can transmogrify when the topic of Israel arises.
My new friend, one of only two Southern Baptists I’d known, let out a barking laugh. The North Carolina church where he’d worshiped as an undergraduate, he told me, had two flags: One American, the other Israeli. Supporting and loving Israel was part of his faith, too.
This was my introduction to the new friendship between Orthodox Jews and religious Christians. American evangelical Christians’ affinity for Israel and Jews is decades old. But the affection long went unrequited. Only a negligible percentage of Jews were Orthodox, and Jews of all denominations viewed religious Christians’ enthusiasm for them with suspicion, uncomfortable with its perceived predication on Jews’ conversion.
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