Karma Ben Johanan, "Shifting Ground: Theology, Politics, and the Future of Jewish–Christian Relations"

Prof. Karma Ben Johanan will deliver the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning’s 14th Annual John Paul II Lecture in Christian-Jewish Relations: "Shifting Ground: Theology, Politics, and the Future of Jewish–Christian Relations."

Sixty years after Nostra Aetate, the landmark Vatican II declaration that inaugurated a new era in Christian–Jewish relations, the foundations of Jewish–Christian dialogue appear increasingly fragile. This lecture examines how the changing political, cultural, and demographic conditions of the postwar world have transformed the reception of Jewish-Christian dialogue and complicated the assumptions on which it originally rested. Ben Johanan argues that the reconciliation between Catholics and Jews emerged within a particular historical constellation: a liberalizing and democratizing Europe, a Church learning to coexist with secular modernity, and a Jewish people rebuilding itself after the Holocaust in newly established centers of life in Israel and the United States. The common ground created by this moment proved extraordinarily productive, but it was also historically contingent and more European than its participants often realized.

The subsequent de-Europeanization of both Christianity and Judaism, as well as the secularization of Europe and the "religionization" of Israel and the global crisis of liberalism have exposed deep tensions concerning the relationship between religion and culture, competing understandings of what constitutes “religion,” and divergent collective memories of Jewish-Christian relations. Through an analysis of these tensions, Ben Johanan explores why the legacy of Nostra Aetate has become increasingly difficult to sustain. The lecture concludes by asking whether Jewish–Christian dialogue can be reimagined beyond the political and intellectual frameworks that originally enabled it, and what dialogue might mean in an age marked by globalization, and the declining authority of liberal Western consensus.

Karma Ben Johanan is an associate professor at the Department of Comparative Religion at the and head of the International Office at the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on contemporary Western Christianity, as well as on Jewish–Christian, religious–secular, and church–state relations. Ben Johanan was awarded the Dan David Prize for the Study of the Past in 2023 and the Mount Zion Award for her contribution to interreligious relations in 2025. Her book  Jacob's Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), received the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines (2023), the Catholic Media Association Award for a book on interreligious relations (2023), and the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History (for the Hebrew version, 2021). It was also a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (2023).