Understanding Our Jewish Neighbors

Rabbi Mark S. Diamond

I was born in Chicago and grew up in a southern suburb, Park Forest. I attended public schools and the local Reform temple, where I celebrated Bar Mitzvah and confirmation ceremonies. My B.A. in Liberal Arts is from Carleton College in Northfield, MN. I received a Master of Arts in Jewish Studies, rabbinical ordination, and an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. I completed postgraduate studies at Jerusalem's Shalom Hartman Institute, a pluralistic center of higher learning and one of Israel's leading think tanks.

My career includes serving as a rabbi of Conservative Jewish congregations, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, and director of the Los Angeles region of the American Jewish Committee. Currently, I am a Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles, where I teach core curriculum courses in interreligious studies, Jewish thought, and Israel studies. In addition, I am a professor of Practical Rabbinics at the Academy for Jewish Religion California (AJRCA), Los Angeles. At AJRCA I teach graduate students practical skills to prepare them for careers as rabbis, cantors, chaplains, and educators.

Interfaith dialogue has been at the forefront of my rabbinate. The first non-Jewish religious leader to reach out to me in Oakland, CA, was a Latter-day Saint bishop who warmly welcomed me to the community and introduced me to local interfaith projects. My subsequent move to Southern California offered new opportunities to engage in interreligious and intergroup relations, including two terms as president of the Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders. I organized and led delegations of judicatory officials, clergy, diplomats, community leaders, academics, and students on interfaith study and service tours to Israel, the Vatican, Germany, the US/Mexico border, and the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There is no better way to build interreligious bridges of understanding and fellowship than to bring people of faith on missions to the Holy Land and other regions of our country and the globe.

I have participated in a wide variety of interfaith projects, including Catholic-Jewish, Protestant-Jewish, evangelical Christian-Jewish, and Muslim-Jewish dialogues. My interfaith work in academia includes thirteen semesters teaching courses in Interreligious Experience and Engagement at LMU. I enjoy teaching undergraduate students about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, their respective interfaith declarations, and relations between the three Abrahamic faith communities.

I first met Shon Hopkin when we were seated near one another at a luncheon at Brigham Young University. I sensed that I was in the presence of a devoted man of faith and intellect, and the ideal partner to launch a new chapter in interreligious engagement. Our bonds of friendship and collegiality have served us well as two of the cofounders of the Jewish-Latter-day Saint Academic Dialogue, a project that has spawned this book, an academic volume, and a wealth of memorable interfaith encounters. I am truly honored to share the writing and editing of Understanding Our Jewish Neighbors with Prof. Hopkin.

I have been married to my wonderful wife, Lois, for four decades. We have three grown children--Adina, Ariella, and Jeremy--as well as son-in-law Jason and daughter-in-law Sara and an adorable and active grandson, Matthew. I am indebted to them for their abiding love and support.

Professor Shon Hopkin

During my father's time in graduate school at the Eastman School of Music, he served as a soloist at Temple Emanuel during worship services. He tells a warm story of how his time concluded there. The rabbi brought him out in front of the congregation and introduced the goy who had been singing the past several years, expressing admiration for the devotion with which he sang the ritual chants and the spiritual warmth it had fostered in the rabbi's own worship experiences. My own attendance as a very young boy at some of the worship services when my father sang, along with the treats he would bring back home from the Oneg Shabbat services, may have already warmly disposed me to Jewish interfaith appreciation as a child.

I grew up in Ft. Worth, Texas, and this time was also important to my interfaith religious and spiritual development. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were not well trusted or appreciated by much of the Christian community at the time, and my teenage years gave me numerous opportunities to interact with many who were good people and who shared their faith and religious beliefs with me, but who were mostly antagonistic to my own beliefs. These experiences, both the need to explain my own faith as clearly as possible and the desire to find peaceful ways to understand and cooperate with good people from other faiths, has continued to impact my academic career and choices.

I received an undergraduate in Ancient Near Eastern studies with an emphasis in biblical Hebrew at Brigham Young University and a master's degree in the same subject, with an emphasis on Arabic. In the middle of my undergraduate studies, I served a mission in northern Spain. My experience with Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic pointed me to doctoral studies at the University of Texas in Austin that focused primarily on medieval Jewish, Muslim, and Christian literature from the Iberian peninsula, again pointing me toward interfaith interests. These different areas of focus also led to many months studying abroad primarily in Israel, Syria, and Turkey.

After my bachelor's degree, I was hired by the Seminaries and Institutes program of the Church, teaching scripture-based religion classes to high school and later to college-aged youth in the Church. While teaching and working on my doctorate at the University of Texas, I became a member, and later president, of the University Interfaith Council, a group of religious leaders who supported the religious faith of college-aged students.

All of these experiences led to my current position as an associate professor of Ancient Scripture in Religious Education at Brigham Young University. I have served on the Religious Outreach Council at BYU since it was formed, most recently serving as its chair, engaging in interfaith dialogue efforts with Evangelical, Pentecostal, Muslim, and Jewish academics and religious leaders. During that service, I met Rabbi Diamond while he was visiting BYU. As he has described, we quickly learned of each other's interest in interfaith work, which led to a warm friendship and a plan to cooperate in the Jewish-Latter-day Saint Academic Dialogue project. My dialogue experiences with Rabbi Diamond and many others from the Jewish community have been some of the warmest academic and religious experiences of my life.

My wife, Jennifer, and I have been married for twenty-five years and currently live in Orem, Utah. We have four children--Connor, Makaeli, Bryn, and Ethan--and have recently been blessed with a daughter-in-law, Katy, and later with our first grandchild, Bennett. My family relationships, along with my religious convictions and associations, are the source of my greatest joy in life.