Billy Graham Receives the Ten Commandments: The American Jewish Committee’s National Interreligious Award and American Evangelical and Jewish Zionist Relations

• In Event: New Approaches to Intergroup Zionist Relations in the Americas

Abstract

In 1977, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, awarded Billy Graham the organization’s first National Interreligious Award. With the exceptions of Pope John Paul XXIII and Reinhold Niebuhr, Tanenbaum declared that evangelist Billy Graham served as “one of the greatest friends of the Jewish people and of Israel in the entire Christian world in the twentieth century.” The American Jewish Committee’s decision to present Billy Graham with its interreligious affairs award underscored the status of evangelical Protestant and Jewish Zionist relations in the United States by the end of the 1970s. That Tanenbaum presented Graham, a theologically conservative Protestant, with the award as opposed to a theologically liberal Protestant, revealed the shifting alliances in American interfaith Zionist affairs.

This paper investigates the rise of evangelical and Jewish Zionist relations in the United States in the late twentieth-century. It asks how American Jewish Zionists, who had previously developed strong ties with liberal Protestants, had come to align politically with evangelicals in support of American pro-Israel policies, despite differences in their social and religious outlooks. The paper argues that American Jewish Zionists’ ideological rightward shift, along with increasing liberal Protestant denominational support of Arab nationalism, led to the ascendancy of a Jewish-evangelical alignment. The “Zionization” of established American Jewish organizations in the post-World War II period further propelled organizations like the American Jewish Committee to seek out interfaith alliances. An examination of the correspondence between Marc Tanenbaum and Billy Graham, along with reactions from American Jewish Zionists regarding the AJC’s affiliation with evangelicals, reveals the contradictory attitudes among Jewish Zionists about forming intergroup relations with evangelical Protestants in the late-twentieth century.

Author

• Amy Weiss, The City College of New York, CUNY