For Love of the Jews covers the entire history of the International Missionary Council's Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews (IMCCAJ)--from the conferences that generated it in Budapest/Warsaw (1927) and Atlantic City (1931) to the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches at New Delhi (1961), when the Committee was integrated, along with the International Missionary Council (IMC), into the World Council of Churches (WCC). It documents the change from a theology that focused exclusively upon Jews as individuals to an awareness of "the Jews" as the Jewish people, who remain the Chosen People of God (though still in need of the gospel of Christ).

The primary mechanism for this change was the "parish approach," which emphasized dealing with Jews as a normal part of the parish ministry of the Church instead of separating them out for particular attention by specialized missionary societies. A natural consequence of this method was a desire on the part of the IMCCAJ to be associated with the WCC.

The theology of the missionaries to Jews as it came to bear on the crisis of the Nazi period and, then, on the changed situation following 1945 and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, is set forth in detail, often in the missionaries' own words. The result is a theological history that reveals the context from which today's Jewish-Christian dialogue could emerge.