University Libraries
UD Launches Jewish-Christian Reading Group
By Abraham Rubin
2025 will mark the 60th anniversary of Nostra aetate, the Catholic Church’s declaration regarding its relationship to non-Christian religions. Nostra aetate is rightly regarded as a watershed moment in Catholic history, galvanizing a new attitude of religious pluralism and openness that the Church came to embrace in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust.
The University of Dayton has chosen to honor the occasion of Nostra aetate’s publication by launching a Jewish-Christian reading group with the support of the Ruslander-Friedland Fund and in collaboration with the Dialogue Zone. The group, which includes 11 faculty and staff members from across the university, will meet throughout the school year to read and discuss Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Harvard University Press, 2022), written by Israeli historian Karma Ben-Johanan.
Ben-Johanan’s book seeks to complicate the idea that the fraught legacy of Catholic anti-Judaism came to an end with the publication of Nostra aetate in 1965. Her study traces the ambivalent reception of this declaration and the doctrinal challenges it posed to traditional Church teachings. The second part of her book explores the resistance to dialogue on the part Orthodox Jews, who perceive this gesture as “another attempt to force a Christian agenda and a Christian timetable on them, this time with a liberal flavor.” Members of the UD community are invited to consult Ben-Johanan’s study, which is available with a UD login through our library.
The reading group has taken up Ben-Johanan’s book as an opportunity to celebrate Nostra aetate — a document that plays a defining role in UD’s Catholic-Marianist mission and identity and is required reading in all REL 103 classes — and to consider the challenges of interfaith dialogue. Ben-Johanan is scheduled to give several public lectures at UD in the spring of 2025.
— Abraham Rubin is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies. Photo by Julie Fisher.