Karma Ben Johanan, "Shifting Ground," September 15, 2026

Source: Boston College Ctr for Christian-Jewish Learning

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

Prof. Karma Ben Johanan delivered the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning’s 14th Annual John Paul II Lecture in Christian-Jewish 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 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).

Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College

The Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College is dedicated to the growth of new and mutually enriching relationships between Christians and Jews. The Center applies the scholarly resources of a Catholic university to the task of encouraging mutual knowledge between Christians and Jews at every level.

he Center for Christian-Jewish Learning is devoted to the multifaceted development and implementation of new relationships between Christians and Jews that are based, not merely on toleration, but on full respect and mutual enrichment. The building of new, positive relationships between Christians and Jews requires sustained collaborative research. Under the Center's auspices, scholars and thinkers representing diverse Christian and Jewish perspectives engage in intense and ongoing study of all aspects of our related yet distinct traditions of faith and culture.

Mission

The Center for Christian-Jewish Learning is devoted to the multifaceted development and implementation of new relationships between Christians and Jews that are based not merely on toleration but on full respect and mutual enrichment. This defining purpose flows from the Mission of Boston College and responds to the vision expressed in Roman Catholic documents ever since the Second Vatican Council.

The building of new, positive relationships between Jews and Christians requires sustained collaborative academic research. Therefore, under the Center's auspices scholars and thinkers representing diverse Jewish and Christian perspectives engage in intense and ongoing study of all aspects of our related yet distinct traditions of faith and culture.

Educationally, we are committed to the goal that "Jews and Judaism should not occupy an occasional and marginal place in [Christian religious education]: their presence there is essential and should be organically integrated" (Notes, 2). We are convinced that Jews and Christians enrich and deepen their respective identities by joint educational endeavors. The Center is thus dedicated to conducting educational research and to offering programs, both in the university and the wider community, in which Christians and Jews explore their traditions together.

In short, the Center applies the scholarly resources of a Catholic university to the task of encouraging mutual knowledge between Christians and Jews at every level (Notes, 27).

[Notes = Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Teaching in the Roman Catholic Church (1985).]

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