Answers you can use in the conversation you are actually having

Criticism of policy is legitimate and normal. What is not normal is applying a standard to one state that is applied to no other, denying its right to exist, or holding Jewish people everywhere accountable for a government’s decisions. Those three tests — double standards, delegitimization, and demonization — are the line.

It borrows a European framework and applies it to a people indigenous to the land in question, with three thousand years of continuous presence, language, and legal record. Naming the mismatch is usually more persuasive than arguing the framework itself.

No. Nearly every claim circulating now has a documented ancestor — medieval blood libel, the Protocols forgery, Soviet-era propaganda. Showing someone the genealogy of a claim tends to do more work than refuting it point by point.

The covenant language of Genesis and Romans 11 is the usual starting place. We provide a short passage guide with the historical Christian readings, so students can speak carefully rather than from a single verse.

Start with dignity, not geopolitics. Antisemitism is a claim about the worth of human beings made in God’s image; that makes it a Christian issue before it is a foreign-policy one.

Say so, and offer to find out together. Overreaching costs you the next three conversations. Our briefs are short on purpose so that “let me send you something” is a real option.

Ask what they have read, and read it. Most students are repeating something they trust rather than defending something they have studied, and the difference changes what a productive reply looks like.

Yes. Everything in the guide, along with the shareable graphics, is free to reproduce with attribution to the Israel Institute at Regent University.