Yale chaplain’s resignation reflects larger mainline tensions over Israel

c. 2014 Religion News Service

(RNS) When an Episcopal chaplain at Yale University seemed to suggest that Jews were culpable for Israel’s actions against Palestinians and a related rise in global anti-Semitism, his comments not only led to his resignation but rekindled a debate within mainline Protestant churches about how to respond to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a letter to The New York Times responding to an op-ed by Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt about rising European anti-Semitism, Bruce Shipman wrote that “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.”