This is a new category that previously had been included with documentation. The need to split the category reflects, I believe, that the dialogue is reaching a period of consolidation and practical implementation.

A volume well-suited to the undergraduate classroom as well as ongoing teacher education and adult dialogue groups is Michael Shermis and Arthur Zannoni's Introduction to Jewish-Christian Relations (Paulist, 1991) which includes essays on the Hebrew Scriptures by Zannoni, the New Testament by Michael Cook, the Holocaust by Michael McGarry, Israel by Robert Everett, Antisemitism by Christine Athans, Religious Pluralism by Philip Culbertson, Jesus and the Pharisees by John Pawlikowski, Intermarriage by Sanford Seltzer, Feminism by Susannah Heschel, and Education by S. Samuel Shermis.

Jews and Christians: A Troubled Family (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990) represents an extended dialogue between a major Protestant theologian and Biblical scholar, Walter J. Harrelson, and a widely respected Jewish leader, Rabbi Randall M. Falk of Congregation Ohavai Shalom in Nashville. A Jewish and Christian "outlook" is provided for eight topics: The Other, Historical Perspectives, Scriptures, God Concepts, Jesus, Antisemitism and the Holocaust, the State of Israel, and Covenant and Mission. The presentations, designed for a course jointly taught by the authors at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, include suggested reading lists and provide a thoughtful basic introduction to the dialogue.

The next volume brings us from the Protestant American South to the Church of England. In Time to Meet: Towards a Deeper Relationship between Jews and Christians (London: SCM Press and Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990) Rev. Marcus Braybrooke, Vicar of Christ Church, Bath, and former director of the Council of Christians and Jews, first summarizes the statements of the Churches, Catholic and Protestant. In this, he seeks to draw out the level of consensus that exists among various statements and also the "unanswered theological challenge" still awaiting official Christian response. Part Two, "Explorations," takes up such challenges as "the Jewish Jesus," Christology, Covenant(s), God and Jesus, "Dialogue or Mission?," Shoah, Israel, and "Together to Pray."

Braybrooke's approach is well-informed and irenic. I recommend this book highly, although on some points I would personally take a different tack. While eminently fair-minded, for example, he is a bit tortured on the issue of "forgiveness," by which he means primarily Jewish forgiveness of Christians for the latter's many violent sins against Jews over the centuries culminating in the Holocaust. He wants to argue, if I read him correctly, that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness is different and that the Jews could learn from this and, by forgiving, begin to heal. It is not so much that I disagree with Braybrooke's theology. He is correct in his understanding of Christian doctrine, of course. But I disagree with the way the issue is joined in this book (and elsewhere among Christians). For me, the issue is not "Why don't Jews forgive?" but "Have Christians repented?" For Christians no less than for Jews the former is dependent, in God's grace, on the latter. The situation that precipitated the discussion upon which Braybrooke reflects, after all, was the "reconciliation" ceremony at the Bitburg cemetery between American President Ronald Reagan and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In this carefully staged encounter two Christian leaders came together in a Nazi cemetery to forgive each other for crimes committed primarily against Jews, hardly an adequate symbol of Christian repentance that would in any reasonable fashion call for a Jewish response, much less one of collective forgiveness such as Braybrooke appears to be seeking. No, I do not think we Christians should look to the Jewish people to let us off the hook of our own sins, and the consequent obligation, in Jesus' words, to "repent and sin no more" against the Jewish people.

Where Braybrooke comments insightfully on the documents and topics of the contemporary dialogue from the perspective of the Church of England, John Rousmaniere, writing in the context of the American Episcopal Church, attempts an historical introduction in A Bridge to Dialogue: The Story of Jewish-Christian Relations (Mahwah: Paulist, Stimulus 1991). Starting with the first century and including as an appendix a brief survey of "Jewish Foundations of Christian Worship," Rousmaniere provides a succinct popular- level overview of the history of the relationship with its tragedies and misunderstandings, from a Christian point of view. Together with the Braybrooke volume, Bridge to Dialogue will provide Episcopalian parishes and seminaries with a solid set of textbooks for study and discussion of the history and contemporary topics of the relationship.

In 1987, after a biblical seven years of intensive labor and discussion, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) adopted "for study and reflection" a paper entitled, "A Theological Understanding of the Relationship Between Christians and Jews." It compares favorably, needless to say, with other Christian documents in the field. In 1989, the Ecumenical and Interfaith Office of the Global Mission Unit of the PC (USA) issued a series of very helpful "occasional papers" exploring the implications of the document by scholars such as H.J. Kraus, Bruce Robbins, and Judith Herschcopf Banki. The General Assembly mandated further study materials in 1989, resulting in a volume edited by Donald Dawe and Aurelia Fule for the Theology and Worship Ministry Unit of PC (USA) entitled, Christians and Jews Together—Voices from the Conversation (Louisville: Presbyterian Publishing House, 1991). Again, a wide range of Presbyterian and other Protestant scholarship is brought to bear on the subject, along with Jewish comments by David Novak and Michael Wyschogrod. The energy and wide involvement within the Presbyterian community illustrates a strength of Presbyterian polity in that it is able to involve so much of the intellectual core and "grass roots" of its community through the very process of developing and disseminating such a document. The Dawe/Fule volume contains handy "study guides" for several discussion sessions. While I hold great admiration for both the procedure and the high quality of the results, and would hold them up as models for other Christian communities such as my own, I did communicate to Rev. Fule a serious concern with the volume. This was the editorial decision to include, with no differing Jewish or Christian viewpoints, a single essay on "Messianic Jews" which uncritically favors a style of organized "witness" aimed at the Jewish community that many Christians would question as inappropriate.

In the fall of 1990, Fordham University, run by the Jesuit Order in New York, began the celebration of its sesquicentennial with a major symposium on Catholic-Jewish relations. The resulting papers have been brought together in a special issue of the Fordham University Quarterly, Thought: A Review of Culture and Idea (Vol. 67, No. 267, December 1992), edited by Rev. Donald J. Moore, S.J., who also contributed a paper on Jewish Spirituality. Authors include Elie Wiesel and John T. Pawlikowski, O.S.M., on Nostra Aetate; Celia Deutsch, N.D.S., and Norman J. Cohen on the New Testament and the Parting of the Ways, respectively, David Burrell, C.S.C., on the State of Israel and Rabbi A. James Rudin and myself projecting our "dreams" for dialogue together into the 21st Century.

A lovely and insightful dialogue, actually the edited transcript of a four-hour television conversation for NBC, can be found in Elie Wiesel and John Cardinal O'Connor, A Journey of Faith (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1990). The two speak their personal memories of their fathers and their reflections on topics ranging from antisemitism to Zionism, picking up a number of contemporary controversies and hopes on the way.

A handy reference tool for beginnings in dialogue is found in Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok's A Dictionary of Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia Trinity Press International, 1991), with brief entries on topics and terms ranging from abortion and Abraham to Yom Tov and Zionism. The work could have been improved by the active collaboration of a Christian scholar. The treatment of "Catholicism" as K'lal Yisrael, with more weight given to Anglican and Orthodox Christian objections to Roman Catholic claims than to providing insight into Catholicism as a tradition in its own right, while interesting to some, may not give the non-Catholic reader much understanding of her Catholic neighbors. Also, the copy editor for the back cover got a little carried away when he or she claimed that "This is the first dictionary to explain and compare the key concepts, beliefs and practices of both Judaism and Christianity." That distinction should go to Leon Klenicki and Geoffrey Wigoder for their A Dictionary of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue (Paulist/Stimulus, 1984), a project that did involve Christians giving their own perspectives on each of the thirty-four terms included.

While the conversation among "mainline" Protestants, Catholics and Jews has been moving along at a pace marked by official statements and dearly measurable progress, readers of this Journal may also wish to know the status of the dialogue wity torotestant Evangelicals. Pioneered by the late Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum along with his American Jewish Committee colleague Rabbi A. James Rudin and Evangelical scholar Marvin R. Wilson with conferences which resulted in two volumes of collected essays on Evangelicals and Jews (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1978, 1984) and A Time to Speak: The Evangelical-Jewish Encounter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), the relationship has more recently been chronicled by David A. Rausch, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Ashland University in Communities in Conflist: Evangelicals and Jews and Fundamentalist Evangelicals and Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991 and 1993, respectively).

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