A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance

by Zev Chafets

Overview

American Jews who support Israel have found themselves a very powerful and unexpected ally: Evangelical Christians. Zev Chafets, former New York Daily News columnist and onetime director of communications for Menachem Begin, explores this partnership in A Match Made in Heaven.

Over the course of a year, Chafets spent quality time with Jerry Falwell, visited Jewish cadets at West Point, attended the world’s biggest Christian retail show, journeyed to the Holy Land with a band of repentant Christian pilgrims, and broke bread with George W. Bush and five hundred Jewish Republicans.

A Match Made in Heaven is the often hilarious story of Chafets’s quest to get to the root of a very serious question: Why do Evangelicals support Israel so strongly? Equal parts history, comedy, travelogue, and political tract, it is a smart and adventurous religious and political odyssey.

Zev Chafets was born and raised in Pontiac, Michigan. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he moved to Jerusalem, where he spent 33 years in politics, government, and journalism, including a stint as director of communications for Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Chafets is a former columnist for the New York Daily News, as well as a founding editor of Jerusalem Report magazine and the author of nine books of fiction, media criticism and social and political commentary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061857485
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	245
Sales rank:	921,039
File size:	706 KB

About the Author

Zev Chafets is a founding editor of the Jerusalem Report magazine and the author of nine books of fiction, media criticism, and social and political commentary. He splits his time between Tel Aviv and New York.

Read an Excerpt

A Match Made in Heaven

American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance

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By Zev Chafets

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 Zev Chafets
All right reserved.

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Chapter One

Jews for Jesus

I've been keeping a sharp eye on Christians ever since an eleven-year-old first baseman named Monroe informed me that I, one of the Chosen People, would be going to hell when I died. It wasn't a threat, or a recruiting pitch. He didn't care. It was just a piece of information he had picked up at the Emmanuel Baptist Church Sunday school, in Pontiac, Michigan. We were Little League teammates, and he figured I should know.

The warning seemed absurd to me. I went to school with Christians. They were my neighbors. I learned to ride my bike in the parking lot of the Grace Lutheran Church, across the street from my house. The house was built by my grandfather in the 1930s, a place where my mother grew up before me. There were very few Jews around during my childhood. Mostly I knew Christians, and it had never occurred to me that, dead or alive, they were going someplace I wasn't.

Naturally I knew that Christians came in different varieties. The Sicilian kids went to Catholic school and put ashes on their heads every year around Easter. I saw different preachers on television on Sunday mornings, too. Oral Roberts was my favorite; I loved the way he pounded people on the skull, healing them in the name of Jesus and issuing dire threats to theunsaved. I regarded this as entertainment, plain and simple, something along the lines of pro wrestling.

But after Monroe's warning, I became interested in Emmanuel Baptist Church, and the more I leaned, the more interested I got. I found out it had its own football team, the Crusaders. The pastor, Reverend Tom Malone, owned a personal airplane--more than enough to qualify him as a celebrity in the Pontiac of the 1950s. In the summer, Malone held tent revivals in the empty lot next to his church. Sometimes I'd cruise by on my bike, just to hear the muffled shouting and singing going on inside. I didn't venture in myself, but I put it on my list of future adventures.

I was in high school when a traveling evangelist named Hyman Appleman came to town. He was a Russian-born Jew who found Jesus in Denver in 1925. I heard him tell his story on the local radio station in a Yiddish accent and I was determined to enter the big top and see him for myself.

I enlisted a friend, Jim Embree, as a guide. He was an Episcopalian who had never been to a Baptist revival in his life, but I figured he'd have some idea what to do. I figured he would give me a little cover, and possibly even some tent cred.

Appleman preached that night in his comical brogue, telling mildly sarcastic anecdotes at the expense of the Chosen People. My fellow worshippers guffawed, and I laughed right along with them. He struck me as a buffoon. Only later did I learn he was a world-famous evangelist and an early influence on Billy Graham. "Thousands of names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life because Dr. Appleman passed their way," Graham has remarked.

Appleman finished his stem-winder and instructed the congregation to close their eyes. "If there is anyone here who hasn't been saved by the Lord Jesus, I want him to raise his hand," he said. My friend showed his Protestant smarts by keeping his hands in his lap. I raised mine. I didn't know that spotters were deployed throughout the crowd. By the time I opened my eyes they were on me, half a dozen hyperexcited Baptists imploring me to come forward and accept Jesus. I tried to politely refuse but they didn't want to hear it. Someone handed me a little information card and a ballpoint. I could picture an evangelical posse turning up at my house the next day if I filled it out. So I did what any young. self-respecting Jew would have done--I wrote down the name and address of the local rabbi and hotfooted it out of the tent. I wasn't saved that night, but I came closer than any Chafets ever had, and I found the foray into foreign territory exhilarating.

Michigan in those days was a great place for a kid with an eye for exotic religious practitioners. I became a devotee of Prophet Jones, the ecstatic black spiritualist preacher who wore a crown and an ermine robe, spoke directly to Jesus on a disconnected telephone during Sunday night services, sometimes threatened to strike inattentive members of his congregation dead, and gave sermons with titles such as "God Don't Like Women." Eventually the Prophet was run out of Detroit by the vice squad for what was then regarded as illicit sexual activity, leaving behind a fifty-four-room mansion painted blue, a closet of expensive outfits, and a coterie of passionate admirers.

Father Charles Coughlin was another favorite of mine. During the Depression he had been a nationally famous radio preacher who specialized in railing against Jewish communists, bankers, and warmongers (1930s versions of the euphemism "neocon"). Coughlin's followers marched in the streets of Detroit chanting, "Send the Jews back where they came from in leaky boats."

World War II was hard on Father Coughlin. He bet on fascism and lost. By the time I caught up with him, in the 1960s, he was a spent force, a red-faced old priest who looked like he would be willing to drink hair tonic. I made it a point of attending Christmas mass at his Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak in suburban Detroit. I'd sit in the rear of the huge church and think, 'This guy would drop dead if he knew I was in the audience."

Around this time a local Reform rabbi named Sherwin Wine announced that he didn't believe in God and that he was starting a congregation for Jewish atheists. This seemed perfectly natural to me. Most of the Jews . . .

Continues...

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Excerpted from A Match Made in Heaven by Zev Chafets Copyright © 2007 by Zev Chafets. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Among the Christians
Jews for Jesus     3
In the Beginning     21
The Grocery Store at the End of the World     33
Cell Phone Conversion     45
Doc and the Pat     59
Revenge of the Mainline     77
A Fly on the Wailing Wall     89
Is It Good for the Jews?
The Kingdom Guy     117
Foxman's Complaint     135
Iraq: "It's Not My Problem"     155
Jews Are Democrats, Israelis Are Republicans     169
Eric in Wonderland     189
Afterword: Wartime
Summer Camp     199
Yes for an Answer     209
Acknowledgments     215
Index     217

Editorial Reviews

In this provocative study, Chafets, a journalist and former Menachem Begin press secretary, explores American evangelical support for Israel. Chafets interweaves reflections on the history of American Christians' embrace of Israel with contemporary reporting, visiting places like Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and tagging along on an evangelical tour of the Holy Land. Perhaps his most important point is that, despite American reporters' claims that only Israeli fanatics have accepted evangelical support, in fact "mainstream Israel" has welcomed the alliance. Chafets argues that especially in a time of war, American Jews need to realize that it is "Muslim fascists," not evangelical Christians, who are Israel's enemy. He acknowledges that much Christian Zionism includes belief in an end times scenario in which Jews don't fare well, but asks why Jews should care so much about their place in Christian eschatology, since Jews reject Christian accounts of the end times tout court . Altogether, Chafets's portrait suggests a great gulf between American Jewry and Israelis, and also points to great diversity of views among American Christians: liberal Protestants tend to be more equivocal in their support of Israel. This intensely readable book, which ends with a warning that evangelical enthusiasm for Israel ought not to be taken for granted and is sure to spark heated debate. (Jan. 9) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This book could have easily been called Strange Bedfellows, as Chafets, an American journalist who has lived in Israel for more than 30 years, takes on, through a series of anecdotal encounters, the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between American Jews and Evangelical Christians. In discussing Armageddon, for example, Chafets writes, "Evangelical Christians have long debated…but their eschatology was of no interest to the outside world until they became politically potent. Suddenly there was great liberal suspicion that George W. Bush, with his evildoers and his inexplicable love of Israel, was unduly influenced by the Bible." The author's encounters with leading Christian evangelicals as well as his own disagreements with liberal American Jewish leaders make up most of this short text. In an amusingly ironic final chapter (written before New Life Church Pastor Ted Haggard's infamous downfall), Chafets refers to Haggard's reaction to the charge that Evangelicals dominate the Air Force Academy and discriminate against Jews. Chafets quotes Haggard as saying, "The scandal at the academy was way overrated." Written with a keen journalistic eye, this book sheds light, often comically, on the strange alliances and suspicions between and among liberal Jews and conservative Christians; recommended.
—Herbert E. Shapiro

Library Journal