WASHINGTON (OSV News) -- The Religious Liberty Commission held its fifth hearing -- with some tense exchanges -- to examine a rise in antisemitism Feb. 9, the same day a lawsuit was filed challenging the committee's creation as unlawful.
In the hearing, which took place at the Museum of the Bible, commissioners looked at an increase in cases of antisemitism and hate crimes towards Jewish Americans.
The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks antisemitic attacks, said in a 2025 report that it recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the U.S. the previous year, which marked a 344% increase over the groups' findings from the previous five years.
Father Thomas Ferguson, pastor of Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia, and a member of the commission's Advisory Board of Religious Leaders, said at the hearing that the Catholic Church affirms that the "human person has a right to religious freedom."
Since the Second Vatican Council, which took place 20 years after the systematic slaughter of 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust (known in Hebrew as the Shoah) during World War II, the Catholic Church has denounced "hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone," while affirming the "spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews," as stated in the 1965 "Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions." That conciliar document is better known by its Latin name "Nostra Aetate."
Specifically, "Nostra Aetate" states that Jesus Christ's voluntary submission to his passion and death for the redemption of humankind "cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today." The text also declared that "the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures."
Father Ferguson pointed to that document when he said, "for our purposes today, the church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews, decries hatred, persecutions and all displays of antisemitism directed at Jews at any time by anyone."
Pastor Franklin Graham, another commissioner, took specific aim at the trope that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, saying, "He is alive, he is risen." Father Ferguson applauded that line as "absolutely right," but stressed, "Who is responsible for the death of Jesus? We would say all of us."
Bruce Pearl, a former Auburn University basketball coach and founder of the Jewish Coaches Association, said in comments at the hearing, "History teaches us that when a society begins to scapegoat, exclude or target a group based on their identity, the decay rarely stops with that group."
"Unfortunately, we're seeing those warning signs right here in the United States of America," he said. "The poison is coming from across the political spectrum. On the far right, we see conspiracy theories about Jewish power and hidden Israeli influence. We see Holocaust denial and efforts to demonize Jews as enemies of Christianity. On the far left, the Jewish people's basic rights and sense of belonging are being attacked under the guise of anti-Zionism."
Shabbos Kestenbaum, a graduate student plaintiff in a lawsuit against Harvard University that alleged he and others experienced discrimination based on their Jewish identity, expressed particular concern about data suggesting a spike in antisemetic views among Gen Z (born 1997-2012).
Kestenbaum suggested that he thinks "antisemitism, or the hatred of the Jew," often takes root in "the absence of something else."
"Antisemitism is the moral abdication, or perhaps the permission structure, to blame others for your lack of personal fulfillment in life," he said.
But Commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller, a former Miss California USA and a Catholic, began a tense exchange with witnesses by asking if "speaking out about what many Americans view as a genocide in Gaza should be treated as antisemitic?"
Kestenbaum replied that he witnessed "students calling for Intifada" prior to Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and argued some now use "Palestinian civilian death, which is horrible" as a "prop."
"You want to protest Israel, great, go ahead and do it," Kestenbaum said, arguing that those protestors, like any, should still be subject to university policy.
Prejean Boller continued to press witnesses on whether they would consider her an antisemite for not supporting the political state of Israel, which she called "a foreign country."
But some witnesses argued that accusations that Jewish Americans have divided loyalty between the U.S. and Israel often feature in antisemitic rhetoric.
Elsewhere in the hearing, Prejean Boller also had a tense exchange with Seth Dillon, CEO of conservative Christian satire website The Babylon Bee. Dillon took aim at conservative media figures who he said have failed to speak out against antisemitism.
"The antidote to antisemitism is not to ignore it or to outlaw it, but to confront it with courage and conviction, and that means not just calling out the antisemites, but the cowards who can't bring themselves to join us," Dillon said.
Dillon pointed to podcaster Candace Owens as among those who have used such rhetoric.
When Prejean Boller argued that Owens -- who became Catholic in 2024 -- was not an antisemite, Dillon replied, "You should look up more of her statements."
Owens has encouraged her audience to read an antisemitic text by anti-Jewish German Catholic theologian August Rohling (1839-1931), who spread the libel that Jews ritually murdered Christians and drank their blood. Owens has accused Jews of being behind the slave trade, among her other conspiracy theories, and called leading Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro a member of the "synagogue of Satan."
Dr. Ben Carson, the commission's vice chair, later said, "I don't know how we would have become a country" without the input of Jewish Americans, who have "been here from the beginning." He praised the crucial role of Jewish Americans in the Civil Rights Movement.
"I just want to make the point that they are not a separate entity from Americans," Carson said. "They're a very important part."
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, a commissioner and director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, later pointed to George Washington's letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, dated August 18, 1790. The nation's first president wrote, "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."
"This country's founders embraced its Jews from the beginning, and decried Jew hatred as un-American," Soloveichik said.
In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating the commission, which included Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the now retired archbishop of New York, and Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, among its members. Neither were in attendance at the Feb. 9 hearing.
The commission was tasked by Trump with producing "a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in America, strategies to increase awareness of and celebrate America's peaceful religious pluralism, current threats to religious liberty, and strategies to preserve and enhance protections for future generations," the White House said when the commission was established and placed under the purview of the Justice Department.
But a federal lawsuit filed Feb. 9, a multifaith coalition including Muslim, Hindu and Sikh organizations argued that while the commission was "ostensibly designed to defend 'religious liberty for all Americans' and celebrate 'religious pluralism' it actually represents only a single 'Judeo-Christian' viewpoint."
"No members of the Commission represent other minority religions, such as Islam, Hinduism, or Sikhism, and none of the members on the Commission represent an interfaith organization, despite the Commission's mandate to celebrate America's history of religious pluralism," the lawsuit said.
"The Religious Liberty Commission isn't about protecting religious liberty for all; it's about rejecting our nation's religious diversity and prioritizing one narrow set of conservative 'Judeo-Christian' beliefs," Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argued in a statement. Americans United and the group Democracy Forward are representing the plaintiff groups. "The commission's public meetings -- most of which have been held at the Museum of the Bible and have been dominated by a very specific brand of Christian faith, Christian prayers, and predominantly Christian speakers -- are a vivid example of this favoritism. The commission's true purpose and operations can't be squared with America's constitutional promise of church-state separation."
In a joint interview with OSV News at the U.S. bishops' fall plenary assembly in Baltimore in November, Cardinal Dolan and Bishop Barron said the commissioners seek to protect religious freedom for Americans of all faiths. Cardinal Dolan said the Religious Liberty Commission's members and witnesses showed "the diversity of religious freedom."
