David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer is an author and essayist, and a proponent of intelligent design. He is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, the organization that is the driving force behind the intelligent design movement. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review and a former columnist for the Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward, to which he still contributes occasional essays.

Klinghoffer has published a series of articles, editorial columns, and letters to the editor in both Jewish and conservative publications seeking to promote opposition to Darwinian views of evolution, stating that science can include a support for an underlying intelligent design in the development of living things and the universe as a whole, and indeed that some scientists hold to such views.Larry Yudelson has responded, in a piece directed at Klinghoffer, that rabbinical Judaism has accepted evolutionary theory for more than a century, and that Judaism has never rejected science. Yudelson also charges that Klinghoffer is paid to promote his ideas by his employer, the Discovery Institute, which Yudelson identifies as a Christian think tank that is funded by organizations that seek to promote a "Christian-friendly world view."

Klinghoffer is an Orthodox Jew who has written a spiritual memoir about his religious background. He was raised in Reform Judaism by his adoptive parents and formally converted to Orthodox Judaism, becoming ba'al tshuva (Hebrew, a newly religious Orthodox Jew). In his book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, Klinghoffer theorizes that Jewish rejection of Jesus allowed Christianity to separate from Judaism and become a multi-ethnic religion. Christianity was thus able to achieve a dominance in gentile Europe that would have been impossible for Judaism to attain. To Klinghoffer, this changed world history, because Christianity was able to serve as a bulwark against the spread of Islam into Europe.

...
Wikipedia