Michael Schulson considers why Evangelicals love Jews so much more than Jews love Evangelicals, arguing, “The real issue here is not that evangelicals don’t love Jews enough. It’s that certain evangelical communities sometimes love Jews way, way too much – or, more accurately, love an image of what they believe Jews to be”:
There’s a term for this flavor of affection: philo-Semitism, or the love of Jewishness and Jewish culture. For some, this kind of love may represent an unmitigated good – especially in contrast to the anti-Semitism that has haunted so much of Jewish history. More often than not, though, evangelical upwelling of philo-Semitism seems to have little to do with actual Jewish people, and more to do with Jewishness as an abstract theological concept.
A lot of evangelical support for Israel, for example, grows out of certain strains of dispensationalist theology, in which the Jews’ return to Israel is seen as a prerequisite for the Second Coming. Meanwhile, in a 2004 address, televangelist Pat Robertson didn’t even try to hide the degree to which his understanding of Jewish history served his own theological ends: “You are the living witnesses that the promises of the Sovereign Lord are true,” he told an Israeli audience, after suggesting that the last 2,500 years of Jewish survival served as “primary evidence” for the existence of God. … When evangelicals speak about Jews this way, they shouldn’t be surprised if their love goes unrequited. At its core, philo-Semitism has much in common with anti-Semitism. Both approaches view Jewishness as an abstract monolith, and both endow Jews with particular historical roles – roles, it seems, that are rarely of the Jews’ own choosing.
The Dish 