Jewish communities worldwide are feeling an "increasing sense of emergency" due to the recent spate of anti-Semitic attacks. In 2018 alone, according to Tel Aviv University researchers, there has been a 13% increase in such attacks upon Jews and Jewish communities, with the most dramatic cases occurring in Western Europe, and recently, in the United States.

I—a girl schooled by the Sisters of Loretto and a phalanx of Jesuits—have found my sense of the divine animated by the sacred Jewish lens of wonder and wisdom.

In preparation for the gathering in Abu Dhabi, I find myself asking why my conversations with the future Pope Francis so powerfully affected both of us.

"A Christian cannot be an anti-Semite; we share the same roots. It would be a contradiction of faith and life."

For almost 20 years Polish scholars have been at the cutting edge of Holocaust research. But a law proposed this year threatened to change all that.

First, we need to address the very image of God we present in our worship.