Presbyterian Study Guide Equates Zionism with Racism – Lauren Markoe
(Daily Alert)

Major Jewish civil rights groups are denouncing a new publication distributed by the Presbyterian Church (USA) that rejects the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. “Zionism Unsettled,” a study guide published last month by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network, a group chartered by the church, writes of the “pathology” of Zionism, the movement undergirding the founding of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

    The publication laments that the major streams of Judaism – Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist – have included the “Prayer for the State of Israel” in their prayer books.

    Rev. Chris Leighton, executive director of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, wrote in an open letter to the church: “to suggest that the Jewish yearning for their own homeland – a yearning that we Presbyterians have supported for numerous other nations – is somehow theologically and morally abhorrent is to deny Jews their own identity as a people.”  (Religion News Service-Washington Post)

(To see the full article, click on the title…Ed.)