An established interfaith group is in danger of disintegrating as major American Jewish groups and prominent mainline Protestant churches differ over U.S. aid for Israel--a long-standing argument that the group was established, in part, to diffuse.

Leaders of Reform and Conservative Judaism, the American Jewish Committee, and other Jewish groups sent a letter Wednesday (Oct. 17) to their Christian counterparts on the Christian-Jewish Roundtable saying they would not be attending a long-planned Oct. 22-23 meeting.

At issue is an Oct. 8 letter that many Christian leaders--from the National Council of Churches, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and other denominations--sent to Congress, asking that U.S. aid to Israel be re-evaluated in light of the Jewish state’s alleged human rights violations.

Israel has long been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, almost all of which is military aid and contracts, according to the Congressional Research Service.

“As Christian leaders in the United States, it is our moral responsibility to question the continuation of unconditional U.S. financial assistance to the government of Israel,” the letter from the Christian leaders read, criticizing Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

“Realizing a just and lasting peace will require this accountability, as continued U.S. military assistance to Israel--offered without conditions or accountability--will only serve to sustain the status quo and Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

The Jewish groups withdrew from the planned October meeting and are now asking the Christian members of the roundtable for a different meeting: to discuss the letter and “reset the framework for ongoing dialogue.”

“There is no question in our minds that this is an unbalanced demonization of Israel completely lacking in context,” said Rabbi Noam Marans, the interfaith director at the American Jewish Committee.

“It pretends that Palestinian human rights violations do not exist, but above all, our concern is that when the world currently is focused on the Iranian nuclear threat, Christian leaders have chosen to mount another political attack on Israel,” Marans said.

Marans said he isn’t sure whether the eight-year-old roundtable will survive the congressional letter flap. “The current conversation with some Christian leaders is unacceptable and needs to change,” he said.

Representatives from the NCC, Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

After hitting his head in the New York City subway on Sept. 4, Jews for Jesus North American director Jahn Moskowitz died the next day. He was 64.

Family members buried Moskowitz in Chicago on Sunday, Sept. 9.

Moskowitz served as overseer for the organization's 10 U.S. locations. He initially directed the Jews for Jesus branch in New York, where he was born and raised as the child of Holocaust survivors. He also directed the Chicago branch for more than 20 years.

Austria's Justice Ministry has cleared the nation's doctors to resume infant circumcisions without risk of criminal charges.

Amid concerns that such circumcisions might become illegal after an appeals court in neighboring Germany recently ruled that religious parents do not have the right to circumcise their sons, the governor of an Austrian province had advised doctors to stop the practice.

A British judge has ruled that a 10-year-old Jewish girl is mature enough to convert to Christianity -- even against the wishes of her mother.

The somewhat complicated backstory: The girl was raised by Jewish parents, but her father converted to Christianity after the couple divorced in 2010. Her mother filed a court order last November after the girl requested to be baptized in her father's Anglican church after having an "encounter with God" at an evangelical festival.

A German appeals court has ruled that parents do not have the right to circumcise their sons for religious reasons because the parents' right to religious freedom does not justify the physical harm done to the human body.

The court, assessing a lawsuit brought against a Muslim doctor over a botched circumcision, said that circumcision "contravenes the interests of the child to decide later on his religious beliefs," as well as causes "serious and irreversible interference in the integrity of the human body." Despite the millions of Muslims and approximately 100,000 Jews that call Germany home, the court said religious freedom would not be impaired by its ruling because children could later decide on their own whether to be circumcised.

Germany's Jewish council condemned the decision as “an unprecedented and dramatic intrusion on the self-determination of religious communities.”

The ruling casts a legal cloud on doctors who perform infant circumcisions, but still gives male circumcision different standing in Germany than female circumcision because there is no law prohibiting it and the ruling isn't binding for other courts.

Prompted by a proposed ballot question in San Francisco last year, CT's David Neff has weighed in on criminalizing circumcision, arguing that America may have secularized the ancient Jewish rite but it is still inescapably religious.

A few weeks ago, I received a screener copy of Defamation, a documentary about anti-Semitism that was planned for theatrical release in the U.S. in the fall. The film, by Israeli director Yoav Shamir, looked at Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League in the states, and at educational trips for Israeli high-school students to the death camp at Auschwitz in Poland.

Using the confrontational techniques associated with Michael Moore (Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine, etc.), Shamir leads the viewer to conclude that while there may be occasional expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment at the street level, anti-Semitism is no longer a serious threat to Jewish well-being in the U.S. or Poland. It seems that Shamir also wants viewers to believe that the educational system in Israel and the ADL in America has a vested interest in maintaining a kind of anti-Semitism industry. These organizations need to work hard to keep the specter of anti-Semitism alive in order to justify their existence.

Yesterday's fatal shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum seriously undermines the basic thrust of the film.

Today was Holocaust Remembrance Day (or Yom HaShoah in colloquial Hebrew). On this day, Jews do not have a uniform ritual for memorializing those who died as part of the Nazi genocide. The observance was established too recently (inaugurated only in 1951), for any genuine tradition to have developed. Jews marked the occasion in different ways today. I have even less sense of what I should do, but I decided this morning to wear my kippeh (yarmulke) to work as a sign of solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters. It gave me a number of opportunities to remind my Christian coworkers of today's significance.

The key issue Christians face is trying to grasp the degree of Christian responsibility for the Nazi genocide. Clearly, many German Christians were utterly complicit, but certainly not all. Clearly, there are cultural links between this history of Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi anti-Semitism. But there is more to the story than that.

Here are three things to remember and to help us have a balanced, accurate view of Christians' relationship to this great horror.