I am Peter Holland, and I have, for nearly ten years now, served as Associate Dean for the Arts in the College of Arts and Letters here at Notre Dame. And why, you might well be wondering, is the Associate Dean for the Arts the person who is welcoming you here today? There are two reasons, as far as I can see—though, given the penetrating intellects of Bill Donahue and Steffen Kaupp, it would not surprise me to learn later that they had other motives in mind. The first is purely technical: the office of the Dean in Arts and Letters has three divisional associate deans, one each for Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities; since Humanities has by far the largest number of departments, three of those report to me, and one of those three is the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures. So that makes me a straightforward choice as an administrative rep for this pleasurable task.

The second needs a little more explicating. Those of you—and I am sure there are quite a few—who attended the Fifth Biennial Workshop here at Notre Dame in 2017 (if I have got the numbering of the workshops correct) would have heard John McGreevy, then Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, speaking on “Jewish Studies at a Catholic University.” John kindly sent me his talk, and, since it is a perfect example of his rich scholarship as a historian of American Catholicism, I did think for a moment about simply ventriloquizing his paper. He even said I was welcome to do so, generous soul that he is. He pinpointed both the general shift in the Church's relationship to other faiths, including the Jews, embodied in the document Nostra aetate proclaimed by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as part of the Second Vatican Council. And he also identified the disturbing earlier twentieth-century continuation of antisemitism within the Church, from its vocal exponent Fr. Coughlin in the 1930s to the identification of Jews as “killers of Christ” in textbooks used in Catholic schools as late as the 1950s.