Giving Compass' Take:

• Tisa Wenger, Associate Professor of American Religious History at Yale University, argues that religious freedom is a powerful tool, however, appeals for religious freedom can be exclusionary - especially with growing antisemitism in America. 

• How can funders work to combat hate in American culture? Where in your community are their opportunities to bring people from different backgrounds? 

• Here's an article on how schools should respond to antisemitism in schools. 

Americans recently observed the first anniversary of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 were killed and six wounded.

A year earlier, white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted the slogan, “Jews shall not replace us.”

Synagogues around the country have also been defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti. Last month, during the Jewish High Holy Days, a swastika and the word “Trump” were spray-painted on the steps of the law school at Yale University, where I teach.

This is not the first time that hate speech and violence against Jews and other racial and religious minorities have flared in the U.S. Recent events mirror the situation in the early 20th century, when white Christian nationalists in the United States demonized immigrants and treated Jews as a danger to the nation.

Then, as now, people on all sides of these disputes invoked the American ideal of religious freedom. As I show in my book “Religious Freedom,” while some Americans used this constitutional protection to justify a politics of exclusion, others drew a widening circle of inclusion.

Read the full article about antisemitism in America by Tisa Wenger at The Conversation.