Teaching Christians to Confront Antisemitism

By The 36 AwardOct 19, 2026

The 36 Award elevates and supports courageous individuals pursuing new ideas to confront antisemitism and hate more broadly. Read full bio →

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Brendan Murphy, founding director of the Bearing Witness Institute at Marist School in Atlanta, has been named an honorable mention for The 36 Award in its inaugural year. For three decades, Murphy has worked from a simple conviction: confronting antisemitism requires more than telling people it is wrong. People must understand its historical roots, build relationships with those it targets, and recognize their responsibility to challenge it.

Murphy attended Catholic schools his entire life and never had a Jewish or Muslim classmate. He said faith-based schools can unintentionally become religious silos, where students learn about other traditions without getting to know those who practice them. “It is much harder to reduce Jews to a stereotype when someone from that community has become your friend,” he said.

Murphy created a Holocaust seminar at Marist, a Catholic school, in 1996. Each year, he leads two groups of students, 64 in total, to Munich, Prague, and Kraków, with visits to Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau. He frames the journeys not as historical tourism but as opportunities for reflection and the formation of conscience.

Over time, he came to believe Holocaust education is incomplete without confronting centuries of Christian anti-Jewish teaching and the transformation in Catholic teaching ushered in by Nostra Aetate, the landmark 1965 Vatican declaration that repudiated antisemitism and affirmed a new relationship with Jews. “In thirty years of teaching, I have never had a single Catholic student who had even heard of Nostra Aetate. We are changing that,” he said.

The Bearing Witness Institute grew out of a question Murphy could not shake. About five years ago, he led an effort to install a sculpture on campus called Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time. For centuries, Christian art showed the Church triumphant and Judaism blindfolded and defeated. This sculpture depicts the two figures sitting side by side as equals, studying their sacred texts. For Murphy, the sculpture was not the culmination of his work but the inspiration for something much larger.

He considered leaving Marist to establish an independent institute. Instead, he proposed creating one within the school, envisioning a national center for Holocaust education and interreligious dialogue. School leadership agreed. Such institutes are common at universities but rare in high schools. Murphy believed the work should extend beyond a single classroom or campus, helping educators bring Holocaust remembrance and interreligious encounters to their own communities.

Today the Institute runs Peace by Piece, a national interfaith dialogue program building relationships among students and between Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim schools. It is exploring expansion to Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and other communities. In partnership with The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights (TOLI), it also offers We Remember, a five-day professional development seminar for Catholic school educators led by Jewish and Christian scholars, previously held in Miami, New York City, and Oakland. Murphy has also delivered the Institute’s national lecture series on Christian antisemitism and Nostra Aetate in more than 50 cities. In 2025 alone, the Institute reached nearly 4,000 people through lectures in multiple states and trained more than 60 educators from nine states. Murphy said his goal is not a larger organization but a multiplying one: equipping schools and communities elsewhere to develop their own programs.

Murphy said the relationships those programs build matter most in moments of crisis. After the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, he delivered more than 700 messages from the Marist community to The Weber School, a Jewish school in Atlanta whose students had come to know Marist students through Peace by Piece. “Our students were not expressing support for some distant or abstract Jewish community,” he said. “They were reaching out to people they knew.”

The same has happened between institutions. When Atlanta’s Cathedral of Christ the King and Ahavath Achim Synagogue co-hosted his lecture series, about 550 people attended, almost evenly divided between Jews and Christians. Murphy taught the first session in the cathedral and the second in the synagogue. For many, it was their first visit to the other community’s sacred space. The partnership continued, and Archbishop Gregory Hartmayer was later invited to speak at Ahavath Achim during Yom Kippur services.

His nominator, Staci Brill of the Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, said that after October 7, 2023, as many interfaith efforts frayed, Murphy expanded opportunities for dialogue rather than retreating. Murphy said the Institute’s name reflects what he asks of everyone who participates. “A witness is not simply someone who sees something,” he said. “A witness is someone who is changed by what they see.”