To: Christian-Jewish Allies,
Re: Support for Professor Marc Lamont Hill
Using our group protocol of consultation with a Quick Response Team, the following letter went out today to Patrick O’Connor, Chair of the Board of Temple University and Richard Englert, President of Temple University:
We are Christians, Jews, and allies committed to peace with justice in Israel/Palestine. We are clergy and lay persons from Episcopal, Presbyterian, Catholic, United Methodist, Unitarian Universalist, and Mennonite denominations, as well as people who identify as Quakers, Jews, Muslims, and secular.
Since 2009, we have been engaged in the Philadelphia area with faith-based and secular communities, offering educational programs on Israel/Palestine and encouraging advocacy based on human rights and international law. Our work is grounded in shared values that affirm ethical living, respect human dignity, and guide us to speak out against injustice. We stand against oppression and discrimination in all forms, including antisemitism.
It is in this context that we write in support of Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill. As an interfaith and secular group that promotes justice and human rights in Israel/Palestine, we understand the importance of using language that communicates perspectives that can be difficult to hear.
Justice requires an open and fair consideration of past and present realities as experienced by Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Access to such information about Israeli Jews is readily available. This is not the case when it comes to the experience of Palestinians. Therefore, to promote justice, our Palestine solidarity work carries an explicit intention to bring to light the voices, lived experiences, and information that is under-reported and often less accessible.
The conflation of criticizing oppressive policies of the Israeli government with antisemitism is a way of stonewalling education and advocacy for justice, since educating Americans on the plight of Palestinians living in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, inevitably includes presenting information that challenges pre-existing beliefs.
As a scholar and educator, Professor Hill advocates justice for all people. As part of this work, he is forthright about naming violations of Palestinian human rights under the policies of the Israeli government that limit those rights. Marc Lamont Hill is a vital member of the Philadelphia community. To marginalize or silence his voice is to imperil us all. Temple University should be proud to have Dr. Marc Lamont Hill as a member of its faculty.
Respectfully,
Susan Landau, Rev. Judith Beck, Bishop Allen Bartlett, on behalf of Christian-Jewish Allies for a Just Peace in Israel/Palestine
