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Presbyterian Study Guide Equates Zionism with Racism
(Religion News Service-Washington Post) Lauren Markoe - Major Jewish civil rights groups are denouncing a new publication distributed by the Presbyterian Church (USA) that rejects the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. "Zionism Unsettled," a study guide published last month by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network, a group chartered by the church, writes of the "pathology" of Zionism, the movement undergirding the founding of Israel as a Jewish homeland. The publication laments that the major streams of Judaism - Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist - have included the "Prayer for the State of Israel" in their prayer books. Rev. Chris Leighton, executive director of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, wrote in an open letter to the church: "to suggest that the Jewish yearning for their own homeland - a yearning that we Presbyterians have supported for numerous other nations - is somehow theologically and morally abhorrent is to deny Jews their own identity as a people."