I’m a Christian researching antisemitism, and I keep ending up in Jerusalem.

This last time it was after presenting survey research on theology, digital media, and antisemitism among young Christian men at a Contemporary Antisemitism Conference in Haifa. But Jerusalem is always where the questions catch up with me.

Maybe it was when I was 15 and was cast as Anne Frank’s mother, Edith Frank, in our high school play. I dyed my hair black for the role.

But it wasn’t only my hair color that changed.

It was something else, something that didn’t reverse when the stage lights went dark and we turned in our costumes. These people, except for Otto Frank, had not survived. They were gone. Murdered. For a brief moment, we brought them to life. But in the end, it didn’t matter how well we amplified their voices. We couldn’t change what had already happened to them, but I kept thinking about all the people across Europe who knew what was happening and said nothing.

That experience playing Edith Frank would switch on a new broadcast in my heart, one about a people whose lives were cut short during the Holocaust but whose story never was. The same hatred that murdered Anne Frank and her family also drove Jewish communities from their homes across the Middle East into Israel.

My upbringing had been tuned toward that frequency for some time. My Christian parents instilled in me a love and honor for Israel and the Jewish people from an early age. As a young reader interested in (and baffled by) stories about the Holocaust, I peppered my parents with questions: How did people in Europe allow this? Where were the “real” Christians?

During my first month long visit in 2013 Israel captured my heart in a way other lands have not. Being in Israel feels like home, and I never get tired of the way the ground still echoes with the past and present miracles of redemption, rescue, and hope.

I meet so many people in the States who don’t have the whole story about Israel.........

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