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Cultural Obstacles to Jewish Evangelism in Modern American Society
Amy Karen Downey Chosen People Ministries
Evangelical Theological Society 14 November 2001
In Conroe, Texas, a prototypical town in the buckle of the Bible Belt, you can find a
church on every corner and two Bibles in every home. And while there is a mixture of ethnic
groups and religions, Conroe fits the classic definition of WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant).
Even so I still was taken by surprise when one of my students after meeting her very first
Jewish person asked me, "What's the difference between Jews and everyone else?" Knowing
that she truly believed that Moses looked like Charlton Heston and that Jesus had to have been
6'2' with eyes of blue, I flippantly answered her question by stating, "the New Testament."
Looking back after almost ten years and a missionary call later, I have often considered
how I might now phrase my answer to her. Would I go into a lengthy historical explanation of
the Diaspora and the cultural differences between the Sephardic Jews of Spain and the countries
of the Mediterranean and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe? Would I highlight the various
religious denominations within Judaism Reform as compared to the Hasidic Lubavitch? Or
would I still answer her question, while removing the tone of flippancy, by saying, "the New
Testament?"
This paper, even though it will only be able to touch the complex issue of cultural
obstacles to Jewish evangelism in modern American society, will attempt to uncover some of the
most basic issues that lie between American Jews and the promises of Jesus. For today after
nearly two thousand years of the Christian story, there is to borrow with hermeneutical apologies
from the parable of the rich man and Lazarus a great gulf fixed between the Jewish people and
the reality that the Gospel is to be "for the Jew first, and also to the Gentile" (Rom. 1:16b).