The author with Marc Ellis at a Festschrift in his honor, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, April 14-16, 2018.
Marc Ellis’s death came as a profound shock to me because I have always relied on his presence in the world. I do not remember when or exactly where I first encountered Marc—we were friends and colleagues for over thirty years—but his work was known to me long before I met him, and it had an enormous impact on my own. Marc gave voice and substance to ideas and arguments that were, at the time he articulated them, dishonored and repudiated, especially within the mainstream Jewish community. He broke through an imposed silence that demanded conformity and obeisance and the punishment for doing so was often severe. Yet, Marc persisted undeterred and unbowed, and through his determined effort produced an invaluable body of work that transcended the boundaries of thought to which Jews had long been entangled and confined. He cast a desperately needed light on a principled way forward in a post-Holocaust age with Israel as its center.
In 2011, I invited Marc to give the annual Hilda B. Silverman Lecture on Israel-Palestine at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Below is an excerpt from his brilliant and courageous lecture, “Mourning for Jerusalem: The Jewish Prophetic and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” which speaks to the core of his thinking, as relevant now—perhaps more so—as it was then:
Though mourning has turned some Jews toward power over others, it has also brought other Jews toward a deeper embrace of compassion and justice. Perhaps because of the breakdown of our self-identification as an ethical and just people, some Jews have thought again about what it means to be Jewish in the world. Thinking again has consequences. Sometimes it means being pursued by the Jewish establishment, defined broadly as those Jews in political, religious, economic, cultural and academic life who use the Holocaust as an instrument of Jewish ascendancy in the post-Holocaust/Israel oriented world. Over the years, the Jewish establishment has driven dissenting Jews into exile, maligning them with accusations of self-hate and bearing the stripes of encouraging another Holocaust. Who among Jewish dissidents has not been so accused? . . .
Strange how far Jewish thought has devolved, in our actions first of all, then in the defense of the actions that we know are wrong. The Constantinian formation of contemporary Judaism—in whose Golden Age we live—is militarized in ways unheard of since Biblical times. Even then there were prophets—what today I would call Jews of Conscience—who warned that the Constantinian path for Jews was death to our destiny as a people and death to a future that would only be exilic. . .
Constantinian Judaism meant then and means today a scattering of ethics and personhood that can only be recovered through justice, especially to our Other, the Palestinians. As it turns out, the Jewish Palestinian Other isn’t only Other but, through oppression and exclusion, is now and forever a part of our community as we are part of theirs. Could it be any other way? The violence against the Other ultimately means a new and expanded community where the Other becomes neighbor.
Over twenty years ago, I was asked by the Journal of the American Academy of Religion to review three of Marc’s books under the title “Searching for the Covenant: A Response to the Work of Marc H. Ellis.” I found much of what I want to say about Marc in this piece. Some slightly edited excerpts and ideas follow below.
In his work, Ellis takes us on an extraordinary journey that many, perhaps most, Jews (and Christians) would never embark upon on their own. This journey begins with his own profoundly committed life and those people who influenced it, but it then expands into a religious, philosophical, and political examination of Judaism and Jewish life (and Christianity and Christian life) after the Holocaust and following the creation of the state of Israel, two events of singular and defining importance in modern Jewish history. His journey is exilic—few among us would walk with him—and prophetic, often painful, sometimes wrenching, but so essential because Ellis forces questions on us that are seldom asked but which demand answers if Judaism and its ethical tradition are to survive, and the covenant is to be restored. These questions are many . . . and emanate fundamentally from the changing nexus of Jewish identity in the twentieth century: from a people victimized by a Europe that was Christian to a people in control of their destiny—and that of others—in a state that is Jewish. For Ellis, the imperative is reflection, not celebration.
At the heart of Ellis’s work is a concern with the moral end of Judaism and with the question, what does it mean to be Jewish and be free after Auschwitz and within a Jewish state that is empowered? With Israel, contemporary Jewish life has been framed by many realities, among them the struggle for rebirth after the Holocaust, remembrance of the Holocaust, and Jewish power and sovereignty. The latter, however, has a critical corollary: the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. Today, Jewish identity is linked, willingly or not, to Palestinian suffering, and this suffering is now an irrevocable part of our collective memory and an intimate part of our experience, together with the Holocaust and Israel. (668–69)
In this regard, Marc asks some questions few before him had the insight and courage to ask: How do we celebrate our Jewishness while others are being oppressed and now, slaughtered? Is the Jewish ethical tradition still available to us? Is the covenant present or absent in the face of Israeli cruelty and genocidal actions?
In posing these questions, Marc compelled Jews to ask another one: Are we seeking empowerment or renewal? If we are pursuing empowerment, then we must ensure that we remain blameless while causing suffering to others, where our innocence is restored as injustice continues. If it is renewal that we seek, then we can no longer accept injustice in defense of peace. For Marc, renewal was tied to repair, itself bound in the creation of a shared reality where, in his words, “distance becomes proximity and separation becomes embrace” (91). This is how our broken covenant can be reclaimed.
Given the unrelenting horror of the 2023–24 Israel-Gaza war, Marc’s entreaty seems impossible to imagine, let alone realize. Yet, it is more important now than ever before. As he did throughout his life, we, as Jews, must not accede to injustice, but must continue to resist and aspire to a world where, in Marc’s words, “affirmation is possible and . . . dissent is mandatory,” where our capacity to witness is restored, where we refuse to embrace actions we know to be immoral (123). The challenge, as Marc so often wrote, is fidelity—to our tradition—the prophetic—and to our values.
Marc taught me many things but if I had to summarize in one sentence all that I have learned and continue to learn from him, it would be this:
Sara Royis an Associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University specializing in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism, and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. She is the author of numerous works including her most recent book, Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance (Pluto Press, 2021) and “The Long War on Gaza,”New York Review of Books Blog (December 19, 2023).
Since he died earlier in June 2024, many words have been spoken about Marc H. Ellis (1952–2024). He was a tireless advocate for Palestinian rights and a tireless critic of the Jewish and Christian thinkers who, to protect their self-interested arrangements, justified the subordination of Palestinian lives. The combination of his early insights into the structure of post-Holocaust thought and political arrangements, along with his dogged refusal to accommodate himself to more moderately palatable perspectives, won Ellis an admiring audience of readers interested in understanding and resisting the theopolitical matrix of ideas and commitments sustaining the tragedy of Israel and Palestine. At the same time, those prophetic stances won him disdain and vitriol from the Jewish and Christian defenders of that version of the post-Holocaust global order.
That’s why I couldn’t wait to study under him. I had the privilege of learning post-Holocaust ethics and Jewish-Christian relations while Prof. Ellis (I still called him that even after earning the PhD) was still directing the Center for American & Jewish Studies at Baylor University.
I first met Prof. Ellis during an event organized by my denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), in early 2003. I was in my final year of seminary, completing studies toward becoming an ELCA pastor. Building on an additional MA I had completed in Islamic Studies, I had made my first visit to Palestine/Israel in November 2002, taking part in an International Solidarity Mission (ISM) olive harvesting program in the West Bank village of Kafr Qaddum. This trip also involved blocking construction crews building the first sections of the Israeli “Separation Barrier” near Jayyous. Rachel Corrie, another ISM volunteer from the U.S., was murdered under the blade of an armored Israeli bulldozer on March 16, 2003 while seeking to prevent human rights abuses in the Gaza border town of Rafah.
We met just after Prof. Ellis completed a public dialogue in a living room setting with three Palestinian Christians, a group including Rev. Dr. Munib A. Younan, at the time Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land. The tone and content of the conversation got my attention and immediately won me over. Up to that point, I had not heard a constructive, respectful conversation in which a Jew and a Palestinian consciously recognized one another’s humanity. Moreover, I was surprised that Ellis was challenging Bishop Younan (with whom I have now worked for decades) to move beyond calling for the implementation of a two-state solution. Ellis was recognizing something that far deeper and more final was already afoot with the Zionist project.
In this heady time of teach-ins against the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq and concern for a just resolution to the Second Intifada, I was immediately drawn to Ellis’s combination of academic rigor, forthright speech, and uncompromising principles. I soon found myself in Waco, Texas, beginning PhD studies at Baylor University. As several other students—Santiago Slabodsky and Jessica Wai-Fong Wong among them—can attest, being Ellis’s student was far more than a classroom learning experience. We were regularly welcomed into the Ellis home, where we hosted film screenings, engaged in raucous debates, and shared intimate Shabbat meals. I went to Waco to learn Prof. Ellis’s ideas; what I received was a welcome into his life and his network of relationships.
Prof. Ellis utilized his relationships to create meaningful experiences with students. Some of those experiences—for example, with renowned liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, who we hosted for a Rosh Hashanah retreat—were filled with warmth and mutual admiration. Other visits to the Center ended less harmoniously. One time, the special appearance of one of the founders of Rabbis for Human Rights ended in acrimony and name-calling. These moments, I think, are when I learned the most from—and about—Prof. Ellis. Sometimes, I experienced those moments directly.
More than once, I was on the receiving end of what I would describe as Ellis’s incisive skepticism. He operated with a hermeneutics of suspicion similar to that described by African American theologians like Mitzi J. Smith and Josiah Ulysses Young. As with Smith and Young, Prof. Ellis’s suspicion was especially piqued when assessing politically progressive Christians like me.
In the period immediately following the Second Intifada, this suspicion harmed his relationships with denominations like the ELCA and Presbyterian Church, USA, which were seeking to craft policy statements that would “do the right thing” in relation to Palestinians without jeopardizing their carefully crafted interfaith relationships with Jewish organizations.
I learned the most from Ellis at this nexus of interests: Israel, Palestine, and post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations. In my years of work in that field, even as a denominational representative to the National Jewish-Christian Roundtable Dialogue, I have read no more insightful study than Ellis’s 1990 book, Beyond Innocence & Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power.
Ellis’s historical method produced several books of enduring quality, as relevant to future generations as they were when first published. In Beyond Innocence & Redemption—his more analytical follow-up to 1987’s Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation—Ellis took aim at the ways state power corrupted both Christianity and Judaism, but with the specific concern for how the post-Holocaust “ecumenical deal” (a term he coined in 1991 and which he would ruminate on under the theme of “Constantinian Judaism” throughout the rest of his life) between Zionists and the Christian political economy of the North Atlantic led inexorably to the theft of Palestinian land and lives.
As concerned as he was with the moral corruption state power was having on Jews and Judaism, he was deeply offended by Christian attempts to regain both innocence and the possibility of redemption through instrumentalizing support of Jewish empowerment. The skeptical disdain with which he read the liberal Christian Zionism of Paul van Buren and Alice and Roy Eckhardt awaited me as I identified topics for doctoral seminar papers and, eventually, my dissertation.
The first icy reception came when I began a more intensive study of the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) was a Lutheran pastor, theologian, and leader in the Confessing Church movement during the Third Reich who was eventually executed for his role in plots to assassinate Hitler. For Lutheran theologians today, he is little less than a demi-god. Ellis, however, was skeptical. How could a Christian theologian who deployed anti-Jewish categories even in his writings defending Jews (as Bonhoeffer did in his famous April 1933 essay, “The Church before the Jewish Question”) make helpful contributions to post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations? He was convinced that Bonhoeffer, at the time recently denied the status of “Righteous among the Gentiles” at Yad Vashem, while an interesting figure of resistance, was too convenient (and anomalous) a hero.
As concerned as Ellis was with the moral corruption state power was having on Jews and Judaism, he was deeply offended by Christian attempts to regain both innocence and the possibility of redemption through instrumentalizing support of Jewish empowerment.
I persisted in the topic, continuing to write not for the grade in a seminar paper but for Ellis’s approval. He eventually took my point, which was published as my first academic article. In the intervening years, however, though I have remained committed to studying Bonhoeffer, I have most often done so with a focus on his limits. Gutiérrez, for instance, points out that Bonhoeffer demonstrates precious little class awareness, much less consciousness, although he offers grace because his liberationist forebear was cut down in his prime. Recently, I revised my initial article on Bonhoeffer with greater attention paid to Emil Fackenheim’s critical assessment and was pleased to be able to share that with Prof. Ellis while he was already ill but not yet unable to read. Toward the end of his life, it seems, our perspectives began to more explicitly converge.
I again encountered Prof. Ellis’s skepticism when I began honing in on my dissertation topic: Christian Zionism. He was disinterested since, at the time, the phenomenon appeared to make only marginal contributions to U.S. foreign policy (despite my proselytizing to drum up academic interest in the topic in the first decade of this century, John Mearsheimer shared Ellis’s assessment). The core of Ellis’s skepticism, it’s now clear, was with my motives: was I simply attempting to criticize evangelical fundamentalists with the hope of proving my own form of Christianity more informed, more ethical, more innocent, with a greater chance of redemption? Was I willing to follow the analytical trajectory of his friend, Rosemary Ruether, in also critiquing “liberal” Christian Zionism?
Again, his skepticism (along with more historiographic discipline) contributed toward a more incisive, analytical, and historically grounded project than most studies of Christian Zionism had produced up to that point. Working with Prof. Ellis meant that my approach to Christian Zionism offered no glib light at the end of the tunnel, only the recognition that an ideology developed contemporaneously with Anglo-American modernity itself would not be easily confronted or defeated. Nevertheless, standing on the outside of that mainstream, the prophetic critique must be raised no matter the consequences.
The core of Ellis’s skepticism, it’s now clear, was with my motives: was I simply attempting to criticize evangelical fundamentalists with the hope of proving my own form of Christianity more informed, more ethical, more innocent, with a greater chance of redemption?
Although never leaving behind my concerns for post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations and justice in Israel and Palestine, my academic research and writing has begun focusing on Critical Race Theory (CRT). As I have researched both the historical foundations and defined tenets of CRT, I have been struck by the movement’s commitment to what Derrick Bell called “racial realism.” For Bell, this realism resulted from his awareness that racism was a permanent component of the United States. When faced with that realist outlook, one must make a choice. If the struggle against racism is a permanent structural feature, do we give up and give in, or do we continue to struggle and fight even if the odds of victory may be near zero? For Bell and the prophetic Black church community from which he came and with which he identified throughout his life, the choice was to fight, even with the meager tools at our disposal.
In the same way, Beyond Innocence & Redemption closes by looking forward to the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s founding in 1998 by which time, Ellis writes, a choice to either “continue the expansion and militarism and its disastrous results for Palestinians and Jews, or to change radically and embark on a new road” will have been made. “The task before us thus is neither soothing nor encouraging,” Ellis wrote in 1990 of this bleak forecast. “Only a confrontation with state power and the legitimating force of that power—Zionism and Holocaust theology—hold forth the prospect of a faithfulness that is Jewish in context and efficacious in reality” (193).
This prophetic spirit of confrontation, the same spirit I identify in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and in Derrick Bell, is what I learned most from Prof. Ellis. I am saddened that he has left us, and in such a key moment in global history (and, as he would remind us, in the particularity of Jewish history), a moment when Zionism’s trajectory is wreaking ever more “disastrous results for Palestinians and Jews.” Let us together continue to travel down that new road Prof. Ellis, alongside so many others, sought to show us.
Robert O. Smith (Chickasaw) is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas, specializing in religious history, Indigenous studies, and critical race studies. Smith, an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, is ordained as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). In addition to many academic articles, he is the author of More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford, 2013) and editor, with Göran Gunner, of Comprehending Christian Zionism: Perspectives in Comparison (Fortress, 2014). Currently, he is co-researching and co-writing three book-length projects on the movement and discipline of critical race theory, which are under contract with New York University Press, the University of California Press, and Penn State University Press. Smith and Martinez draw on mixed methods, ranging from archival, to ethnographic, to literary and rhetorical analysis, to re-tell the stories of CRT’s origins within the broader scope of US history.
A painting gifted by Marc Ellis to author and used with permission of the Ellis estate.
One month before the passing of Marc H. Ellis, I visited his place nestled in his beloved Cape Canaveral, Florida. I had already felt familiar with his neighborhood. Until he fell ill, Ellis had posted his photos taken at the beach, paintings, poems, and meditative words on Facebook. Only a few visits to his Facebook page might make people feel closer to Ellis and Cape Canaveral, even if they have never met him. Ellis is known as a Jewish liberation theologian, ethicist, and philosopher. Less known is that he was the photographer, painter, poet, and essayist who endeavored to embody prophetic Jewish identity aesthetically. The aesthetic side of Ellis’s life and work sheds new light on his political theology.
During our last conversation, I asked Ellis whether being Jewish was a lonely business. He answered, “Yes. Being my version of the Jewish is a lonely business…a Jew of conscience faithful to the prophetic. I’ve never given up being a Jew, a Jew in exile, a diasporic Jew, and an American Jew.” Jewish identity, probed through the complex relationship between the prophetic and the Jewish, was central to Ellis’s life and scholarship. In his prolific writings, Ellis engaged two ontological and ethical questions: What does the prophetic mean after a history of suffering and struggle for Jews and now after a history of suffering and struggle for Palestinians? What does it mean to be faithful as a Jew? His search for Jewish identity is a process of responding to concrete political issues and global crises. Thus, the process is as spiritual as material and as theological as political.
Ellis critically reflected on the irony of post-Holocaust Jewish identity. In 1948, the state of Israel was founded for the sake of carrying out Jewish identity, which the Holocaust had almost destroyed. The Holocaust memories of suffering justified the birth of Israel on Palestine. These memories have required the disciplining of Jewish identity through the political and military racializing apparatus of the modern nation-state, along with the myth of Jewish innocence and exceptionalism: Jews are innocent victims who do not oppress others, and, thus, Israel uses violence against Palestinians only for self-defense. As a result, according to Ellis, Jewish identity is placed on two polarized spectrums: Constantinian Jews and Jews of Conscience. The former perpetuate Jewish innocence and exceptionalism, aligning with empire and (neo)colonialism alive in Israel and the United States. Even progressive and liberal Jews can be Constantinian Jews due to their uncritical colonial sentiments and sense of moral superiority to Palestinians and third-world peoples.
On the contrary, as Ellis notes, Jews of Conscience are courageously “abandoning normative Jewish life without the prospect of return,” living and practicing exile (186). Jews of Conscience live in deep exile from their religious and political tradition, walking together with others of conscience in exile. The practice of exile portends solidarity for seeking justice among people of conscience. For Ellis, exile distinguishes Jews of Conscience from progressive and liberal Jews, although their political positions look similar on a surface level.
Jews of Conscience live in deep exile from their religious and political tradition, walking together with others of conscience in exile. The practice of exile portends solidarity for seeking justice among people of conscience.
Ellis warns of how the memories of suffering, such as those related to the Holocaust, serve oppressive political agendas. Thus, the particular Jewish experiences of exile and memories of the Holocaust should be transposed to other marginalized communities to illuminate the conditions, suffering, and miseries of genocide and globalized exile. This transposition can generate new memories for mutual understanding and solidarity for justice. As he notes in Future of the Prophetic, others’ memories of genocide and exile (i.e., Palestinians’ memories) should also be transposed to the Jewish community. Since dispersed people live with fragmented memories of their cultures and traditions, in the practice of exile, people of conscience share “what is left” with one another. Ellis underscores that what is left to Jews of Conscience is the indigenous Jewish prophetic, which is found among God’s chosen prophets in the Torah. Their messages were consistent in God’s justice for the poor and the marginalized in Israel, including foreigners. In a world where Israel’s oppression of Palestinians seems permanent, Jews of Conscience find their community in the New Diaspora, “a global gathering of diverse geographic, cultural, and political exiles” (215). Jews of Conscience find their voice and embody the Jewish prophetic in its evolving form.
In his last book, First Light, applies Edward Said’s concept of “late style” to the prophetic. In interpreting the radical changes in the final works of musicians and writers (i.e., Beethoven), Said argues that in art and in human life, late style transgresses linear progress. Late works appear catastrophic and anarchistic, as they combine “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction” (195). Ellis probed the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic through Said’s lateness as “the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal” (195). In addition, one cannot go beyond, transcend, or lift oneself out of lateness but can only deepen it. At the end of ethical Jewish tradition, according to Ellis, the prophetic has entered its late style. The Late-Style Jewish Prophetic comes from an ancient tradition “while being performed anarchically in the present and is permanently exiled without a conscious desire to return” (196). In its lateness, the prophetic challenges Jews of Conscience, who already live in exile, to practice exile to its fullest. Contemplating the prophetic, Ellis refused the linear understanding of history and time. The Late-Style Jewish Prophetic is not the end of the prophetic. Instead, it disrupts and destroys the prophetic and simultaneously reemerges within the prophetic.
If Said’s memoir, Out of Place, is his late style, First Light exhibits Ellis’s. As his “love letter” to the prophetic, the book is filled with Ellis’s journals, poems, and paintings, suggesting how to embody the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic in the New Diaspora. The Late-Style Jewish Prophetic can only be embodied! For as long as he could, at dawn, Ellis walked more than a mile from his neighboring beach to what he named “The Chapel of Love” near Port Canaveral. At the chapel, Ellis welcomed the sunrise and meditated on Jewishness, Palestine, the beauty of life, his aching body, his two children, the prophetic, and more. His meditative words in First Light are combined with poems, beach photos, and paintings. Ellis was obsessed with painting. He painted everywhere with diverse materials—watercolor, oil, pencil, charcoal, and more. His favorite drawing spot was the back of the envelopes from random advertisers. Abstract images and prophetic messages frequently appear on Ellis’s canvases. Some of them look like palimpsestic pieces. His creative pieces deliver diverse moments of history and arouse memories of suffering, dystopia, lament, anarchy, and catastrophes. Simultaneously, they glow with hope, joy, healing, and beauty, as if the Late-Style Prophetic demanded alternative ways of revealing itself after its own “deconstruction and re-emergence” in the prophetic (xix). By walking, writing, painting, and taking photographs, Ellis took his whole person into the deepest solitude and found the fear there not to lose the prophetic voice. So, he could courageously practice exile and embody the prophetic in the face of the massive suffering, for instance, caused by a series of Israeli military campaigns on Gaza. The only way for Ellis to be Jewish was to become a Jew of Conscience who refuses the ideologies of empire but embodies the prophetic in the New Diaspora.
The New Diaspora reminds me of Gloria Anzaldúa’s nepantla, in-between space, where multiple worlds cross and collide, and, thus, alternative visions for justice grow while pain, uncertainties, self-transformation, decolonial thinking, and rebirth co-exist. Anzaldúa elaborates on nepantla as “a way of thinking, a mode of consciousness, and the ontological space where they occur” (161). Anzaldúa’s elaboration is applicable to the New Diaspora, and the aesthetic is an important language in nepantla. Ellis’s ontological and ethical struggle to be Jewish invites us to embody the prophetic aesthetically. Aesthetic embodiment requires our whole person—body, mind, spirit, and sensuality. People of conscience are connected in our deep yearning for wholeness and desire for liberation in the New Diaspora. Just as spiritual and material worlds intersect in nepantla, I now see the New Diaspora as a gathering of all people in exiles, including the living and the dead. We may find non-human living beings there, too. Hence, I can always see Ellis in the New Diaspora.
Keunjoo Christine Pae is professor of religion/ethics and women's and gender studies and chair of the Religion Department at Denison University, Granville, Ohio. As a Christian social ethicist, she specializes in transnational feminist ethics, ethics of peace and war, spiritual activism, sexual ethics, and Asian/Asian American feminist theologies. Many of her publications take U.S. military prostitution in South Korea as a critical site for producing feminist knowledge concerning militarized violence, faith-based popular resistance, and a theology of peace. She has authored A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and edited with Boyung Lee, Embodying Antiracist Christianity: Asian American Theological Resources for Just Racial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her edited volume with Kathleen Talvacchia, Searching for the Future in the Past: Renewing Feminist Theological Voices, is forthcoming from T&T Clark (2024).
Dr. Marc Ellis lecturing in Saskatoon, Canada. Photo by Santiago Slabodsky.
In the Winter of 2010 Marc Ellis was traveling through Canada on a speaking tour. Sponsored by the local chapters of Independent Jewish Voices, he was presenting his new book Judaism Does Not Equal Israel in all the major cities around the country. When I insisted that he pass through my little frozen prairie, the isolated city of Saskatoon, he resisted. At first, I was surprised. Given that he was a person who had traveled to remote places in the Global South to engage in intercultural liberationist dialogues, places “where no Jew cares to visit and/or was ever invited,” as he used to say, his resistance to visiting Saskatoon was puzzling. I thought perhaps it was the cold that was keeping him from accepting the invitation.
To convince him, without understanding yet his reasons, I tried to guilt-trip him, noting that I had survived the heat of Waco, Texas where I lived for a year studying under his guidance (from then on he insisted that I call him “Dr. Ellis,” a practice I maintain until today.) But then he told me he did not mind the isolation or the weather, rather he was worried about risking my job as a first-year professor in a tenure-track position. He wanted me to be safe. I became even more puzzled. For an intellectual who had brilliantly interrogated notions of Jewish safety—remaining steadfast in building a theology of solidarity with Palestinians inspired by the creative instability of Global South struggles, even when that led to him risking (and ultimately loosing multiple times) his job and livelihood—the concern for my job security in Jewish Studies in North American academia seemed a contradiction. Yet, it was not. Dr. Ellis was one of the intellectuals who was able to sustain a deep, audacious, and indefatigable commitment to structural critique and true care for the individual human beings he encountered. He was actually fascinated by the role that one single human being, whatever his/her/their positionality could play, as he used to say “when presented by a challenge at the right time.” This virtuous dialogical play between structural critique and deep interest and care for the individual who could intervene in history and make a difference was the basis of his pedagogy, his mentorship, and his scholarship, which aimed at a contemporary renewal of the prophetic.
Renewing The Prophetic
We spent uncountable hours over the years and across the world discussing—via e-mails, phone calls, skype, and then zoom meetings—what I understood as a tension in our views. Trained in structural critiques, I tend to minimize an understanding of history based on the actions of great individuals. Rather, I contend that historical changes require the right material and epistemological conditions of existence, are propelled by social movements that individual leaders interpret, represent, and systematize. But in only a few instances are these individuals the main factor in producing revolutionary outcomes. Furthermore, just to tease Dr. Ellis, one of the few Jewish scholars in the US who took thought emerging form Global South seriously, I called his understanding an “American trait” based on idealist individualism. Today, however, I am not so sure.
Dr. Ellis was one of the intellectuals who was able to sustain a deep, audacious, and indefatigable commitment to structural critique and true care for the individual human beings he encountered.
“I would love to think of Marc as a product of the American Jewish community” Susannah Heschel once wrote in the preface to a book honoring Dr. Ellis’s work that was co-edited with Susanne Scholz. “[B]ut I wonder if we deserved the credit” (i). In contrast to an American Jewish community fearful of contradictions, haunted by memories of not only their own dispossession but also their implication in the dispossession of others, “the stance of Marc is a prophetic one.” Heschel, one of, if not the leading voice in Jewish thought today, was making an illuminating point. Heschel, as a deserving inheritor of a longstanding tradition of Jewish conversations with some of the most dehumanized communities in the US—which included her father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, but has been reproduced in her own work until this day—simultaneously pushes us to interrogate both the contemporary role of the American Jewish establishment in global conversations about injustice and the variety of sources Dr. Ellis was employing to develop his prophetic stance beyond even the American context.
On the one hand, Dr. Ellis was deeply American. His model for the prophetic held a special place for individuals who can make a historical difference and is largely represented by the omnipresent figure of Bob Dylan (MLK Jr.—among others—was a close second). In his formal degrees he was trained in American religious history and sociology. He was deeply influenced by the anti-Vietnam protests, the Cold War, and the US Catholic tradition. The latter led him to spend a year working at Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker in New York City where his diaries became his MA thesis and first book. This influence is also clear in his biography of the priest Peter Maurin, his PhD dissertation, and later, his second book. But it was precisely his work among Catholics that led him to launch and direct an MA program in Peace and Justice Studies at the Maryknoll Seminary. Here, his Jewish conviction paired with the platform of an alleged Catholic universality helped him interrogate what had become a Protestant and Jewish American sectarian parochiality. After Maryknoll sisters were kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered by US-sponsored forces in El Salvador, Dr. Ellis may have understood that the struggle against poverty and racism in the US went beyond the “borders” of the nation-state. They needed to be encountered in the “frontiers” of US imperialism, both internally and externally.
Going Global
It is precisely his transnationalism and simultaneous deep commitment to where he was situated—i.e., the US—that propelled him to start developing the work that would lead him to becoming one of the leading global intellectuals of the last fifty years. He started copiously traveling through the Global South and having conversations with religiously committed leaders across the world. Many times, those engagements took the form of physical travel. He traveled to places where global struggles against imperial and/or colonial dominations were taking place, such as the Philippines, Costa Rica, South Africa, and India. At other times, such engagements took place through a deep reading of voices beyond US borders where, in its imperial aims, the country had extended its “frontier.” But none of his encounters was more provocative than his creative dialogue with colleagues, visitors, and especially students first at Maryknoll, then at Florida State, Harvard, and ultimately Baylor University. Some of the students he mentored would face imprisonment after crossing the geopolitically created borders between the Koreas, others would face exile for interrupting capitalist extractivism in the African continent, and yet others would “disappear” for protesting dictatorships and servile democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Drawing from his knowledge of American society and the active exploration of transnational struggles, Dr. Ellis started to follow two mutually reinforcing paths: transnational liberation theology—many times, given imperial extensions and the invisibilization of other cosmologies, in a Christian framework—and the creation of a contemporary Jewish partner for dialogue with liberationist forces.
Both Tutu and Gutierrez, because of their struggle against oppression in Africa and Latin America, were accused of antisemitism by those who had perpetuated western discourses that made possible the annihilation of Jews (among other others) for centuries. Participants in this western discourse were replacing their old antisemitism in the Global South by creating false analogies between antizionism and antisemitism. This new strategy, that Dr. Ellis entitled the post-Holocaust ecumenical deal between Christian and Jewish establishments, was able to perpetuate the same culture of death that justified events such as the crusades, the inquisition, the conquest of the Americas, and the kidnapping and enslavement of human beings in Africa, under new rhetorical disguises and policies of censorship. One only need to read the deep words of Tutu and Gutierrez to learn not only how these leaders were able to redouble the commitment to their struggles through a renewed interest in Jewish histories of struggle, resistance and re-existance (including and perhaps especially Jewish activism on behalf of Palestinian political subjectivity and their right to live) that Dr. Ellis was presenting.
Expanding the Legacy
These two prefaces from Desmond Tutu and Gustavo Gutierrez offer an opening to the legacy that Dr. Ellis leaves with us. A legacy can be obvious, but its acknowledgement may not always be present. This is one of the fruitful explorations that Sara Roy, Dr. Ellis’s longstanding dialogue partner and leading scholar in the study of the long destruction of Gaza, and Atalia Omer—who illuminates, via her concept of the “critical caretaker,” current Jewish movements who are in solidarity with Palestine—engage in when they discuss the thinking, praxis, memories, and forgetfulness present in the explosive and promising social movements that are emerging in the public sphere today. The legacy of Dr. Ellis in American Jewish movements in solidarity with Palestine—in liberationist, decolonial, or other forms—is hard to overestimate. Yet, sometimes his name does not appear in these discussions. This may be due to more than one factor, one of which includes the changes in the way discourses are presented through time. But we cannot underestimate that one of the factors is the years of harassment, what today may be called gaslighting, he encountered. This came, first, from the establishment Jewish community now employing the same strategies of domination that Jews suffered from in the past. It came second, from reactionary Christian forces represented by, for example, the czar of political purity, the infamous Kenneth Starr, when he became president of Baylor. After Dr. Ellis had been recognized as the highest level of professorship (university professor) by the previous administration, the new conservative president started to formulate unfounded reasons to fire Dr. Ellis for political reasons. The new president would eventually fall in disgrace after a proven sexual assault scandal led to a demotion from his position. Yet Starr was able to selectively enforce outdated rules of a Southern Baptist university and force Dr. Ellis to take an early emeritus status. This generated a movement led by prophetic intellectual Cornel West and feminist scholar Rosemary Reuther to reinstate Dr. Ellis in his position.
The legacy of Dr. Ellis in American Jewish movements in solidarity with Palestine—in liberationist, decolonial, or other forms—is hard to overestimate. Yet, sometimes his name does not appear in these discussions.
The fact is that Dr. Ellis was never safe. And it is likely he never intended to seek out safety. Or, what is possible is that he was unable to find safety while at the same time remain committed to his convictions about Jewish responsibility toward oppressed people in general, and Palestinians in particular. The unholy alliance between “Constantinian” versions of Judaism and Christianity deserved his audacious and indefatigable critique. This engagement is particularly well developed in one of his books that I teach in several of my courses, Unholly Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time. During our dialogues I repeated to him several times that this was the book where he was able to offer his most comprehensive and brilliant contribution. But Dr. Ellis, an intellectual of strong opinions, refused to agree (or disagree) with my choice. It is not that he disliked this book, but he repeated to me time and time again that every contribution had a time and place and represented a step in the journey. For an author to choose one text over another without being able to predict who will be influenced by the writing was breaking the open potentialities of a text. He clarified, however, that potentialities were not always positive. They could include both generous people opening to further faithfulness with the prophetic and upset people launching new censorship policies and generating a new round of insecurities for scholars committed to social justice. But since the future was open and somewhat uncertain, he encouraged me to put aside strategic qualification and let every text run its course, for the better or the worse.
The author with Dr. Marc Ellis in Saskatoon, Canada. Photo courtesy of Santiago Slabodsky.
Taking advantage of his admission that a strategy that predicts certainty about one’s personal safety was an illusion, in late 2009 I insisted we still have pending his visit to Saskatoon. So he admitted that he could not ask me to do what he was not doing for himself (predicting insecurity or privileging safety over commitment). So ultimately he did come to the frozen little city of Saskatoon and, along with some partner organizations, we set up a lecture on a cold February evening in the middle of the week. What happened then was a testimony to what Dr. Ellis generated as a public intellectual beyond the sometimes narrow scholarly debates. Over 350 people attended an electrifying lecture in an overflown auditorium. Dr. Ellis’s faithfulness to justice brought out not only multiple university constituencies, but also many immigrant communities that were not necessarily part of the university (with their kids bringing new life to the event by running across the over-populated aisles of the auditorium).
A few days after the event, an authority of the institution, very satisfied with the turnout, told me that Dr. Ellis was able to bring to the university communities that “were hidden” (though I would say that they were “unseen”) in the small Canadian city. But this little story in Saskatoon is perhaps an excellent point of entry into his legacy. Dr. Ellis, with his faithfulness to justice, was able to open doors for expression, exposition, presence, and visibility to that which has been rejected. The role of the prophetic discourse, therefore, is to identify what is being negated, what has been silenced, and mobilize one’s identity from one’s positionality to claim the possibility of another possible world. It is only then that the prophetic remains alive. And this is how we can truly celebrate his life and commitment to those figures who can change history.
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
DePaul University encampment in Spring 2024. Photo Credit: Nailah. Used with permission.
The Morehouse-Biden-Palestine Moment as Archetype of “Respectable” Protest
On Sunday, May 19, 2024, sitting US President, Joseph R. Biden delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College, an historically Black college in the heart of Atlanta, GA. Though the invitation to speak at the College’s 140thcommencement was extended in mid-2023, the Biden White House accepted the offer only a couple weeks prior to the 2024 ceremony. Between these two moments—the Morehouse College invitation and the President’s acceptance/ May 19th appearance—colleges and universities across the world had begun to erupt in civil resistance. The volume and intensity of these protests had not been seen since the anti-Vietnam War (and to a degree, the anti-Apartheid) student protests of the twentieth century. Student-led protests, labors strikes, and coalitional encampments had burst into existence to stand against the ongoing and (post-October 7) intensified Israeli military destruction of Palestinian life and land, demanding their universities to disclose financial portfolios and investments in the occupation and genocidal war and move toward divestment. These coalitional encampments, or tented communities emerging on college and university campuses, were often constituted by a vast array of student interests and affinity groups, which created for themselves micro maroon economies, that is, economies that recall the self-sustaining insurgent ecosystems of inspiration, strategy, and care that characterized Black resistance during any number of freedom struggles across the African Diaspora.
Immediately after Biden accepted the invitation to speak at the commencement, Morehouse faculty, alum, and students, reacted in widely different ways. Within each group, while some pleaded with the graduating class to show respect, not protest, and appreciate the opportunity to hear a sitting US president, others stood firmly within the historical lineage of Morehouse’s most famous graduate—Martin Luther King, Jr.—in indicting the College for welcoming a politician who belied, among other things, King’s vibrant critique of hyper-militarism. In some ways, students themselves led the dissenting critiques, particularly of both statist and racial uplift propositions. 2024 Morehouse graduate, Marq Riggins, and Spelman College rising Senior, Sydney Jael Wilson, note that after the accepted invitation was announced, “Biden’s team circled the college like a flock of vultures, frequenting our institutions for the social currency that comes with posturing themselves next to Black exceptionalism; he knows he’s at risk of losing our vote.” They go on to note, furthermore, that “Morehouse College President David A. Thomas’ decision to invite Biden illustrates a more extensive pattern where prioritizing profit and social currency takes precedence over listening to students and our families.”
Nevertheless, Biden’s decision to speak, in this moment, staked an important racial-political claim about the viability of Black dissent and, ultimately, Black knowledge-production. Stated differently, in a graduation cycle in which the President planned only two commencement appearances (West Point Military Academy and historically Black, Morehouse College) his advisors would almost certainly not greenlight travel to any institution—especially during a political moment shot through with campus unrest significantly because of the Biden Administration’s complicity in the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza—unless they, in their risk assessment, waged the institution posed little to no threat for viable dissent.
I foreground this vignette because it opens us into a set of ideas—presumptions—that help cohere arguments about racial Blackness, Black engagement with foreign policy, theological anthropology, and certainly, how historic Palestine and Palestinians exist in modern world imaginaries of global order and hierarchies of humanity. This key event of our time opens us into the ways that a significantly diminished protest, in a setting that many would expect to exemplify the moral protest tradition, directly resulted from a convergence of discursive forces functioning to silence Black dissent. Not insignificantly, King himself, an importantly non-static thinker—volleying between Black integrationist and Black radical commitments—can be considered an interesting conceptual prism through which to situate the convergence of discursive forces mobilized against Black dissent. The Morehouse-Biden-Palestine moment both re-inscribed and allowed fertile ground for certain Black voices (distinct from, but certainly alongside, “state” discourse) to traffic Black accommodationist sensibilities; though imperfect, the Black radical tradition continues to inspire and mechanize conceptual frameworks that challenge these very logics. Ultimately, I turn toward the sacred, claiming that formulations of Black sacrality can be considered among the conceptual tools—informed by Black radical thought—useful for thinking through unthinkable kinds of knowledges: in this case, the role of Palestine in the Black US imagination.
This key event of our time opens us into the ways that a significantly diminished protest, in a setting that many would expect to exemplify the moral protest tradition, directly resulted from a convergence of discursive forces functioning to silence Black dissent.
Black radical sacrality here is less about signaling any essentialist phenotypical category and more about offering a way to think through some of the conceptual and embodied interruptions and continuities that connote a contemporary marronage that calls back to some of the self-sustaining resistance communities of old, such as the Black Seminoles of Florida, the Maroons of Jamaica, or the famous Palmares of Portuguese Brazil.
King’s Tightrope
In the present-day, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy in relation to Palestine-Israel is heavily contested. The now-notable October 2023 online dialogue between comedian Amy Schumer and Dr. Bernice King, daughter of the slain civil rights leader, was a microcosm of precisely this point. Schumer, weeks after the October 7 attack, shared on X (formerly Twitter) a decades-old video clip of MLK advocating for Israel’s right to exist, celebrating it as one of “the great outposts of democracy.” [Bernice] King, intervening against Schumer’s implication that her father would have therefore somehow supported Israel’s contemporary indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, noted, “my father was against antisemitism, as am I. He also believed militarism to be among the interconnected Triple Evils. I am certain he would call for Israel’s bombing of Palestinians to cease…” Bernice King and Amy Schumer, in this scene, represent the divergent, yet rather prominent ways that MLK’s legacy is taken up in relation to Palestine-Israel. In part, this somewhat fractured legacy is rooted in MLK’s own schismed, or at least antagonistic, thought. This is what Michael Fischbach notes as “the tightrope” that King walked: on the one hand, he was a man committed to both his American Jewish allies and the belief that the formation of Israel was an important culmination of a people’s democratic self-determination (which was not inconsistent, by the way, with any number of earlier Black nationalist/separatist thinkers in relation to political Zionism and later, Israel); on the other hand, Israel’s increasingly violent military expansion—especially during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War—made it progressively more difficult for King to stand, with integrity, on his anti-militarist, non-violence platform (81). He held these positions simultaneously, but was ever encouraged by his top aides—chiefly, Bayard Rustin—to not let any of his sympathies for Palestinians alienate or unsettle his American Jewish friends.
Indeed, King imbibed a kind of split consciousness on Palestine, between accommodationism with his American Jewish allies and a more progressive, anti-militarist sensibility. Recognizing this sometimes tensioned interplay between impulses opens a window into the ways that the policing of Black internationalist dissent is the result of a number of different discursive convergences—including nation-state discourses along with, as King signals, civic discourses internal (i.e., Black admonitions of other Black figures to act “acceptably”) and external (i.e., non-Black mobilizations of power to stoke Black fears) to the Black American collective psyche—all taking on a uniquely anti-Black racialized character.
Black Internationalist Dissent
To account for the discursive universe in which this Morehouse-Biden-Palestine moment circulated, I situate it within a broader trajectory of the management and mismanagement of Black internationalist thought.
In a keynote address, “The Challenge to Live in One World,” at the 1979 national meeting of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, African American Christian leader, Jesse L. Jackson, noted, “in a cold war, it would be black people who lose their jobs and homes first; in a hot war, blacks would be the first to be drafted, put on the front lines, and the first to die.” His point was clear: Black folks have a vested interest in Middle East peace and justice. Jackson was among a cadre of Black religious leaders who, in late 1979, rushed to the public defense of then-Ambassador Andrew Young, after Young’s resignation from the Carter Administration for taking an “unauthorized” meeting with a PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) official at the United Nations. He felt this point necessary to mention in the first place because, in real time, a host of Black and non-Black leaders scolded him, and others, that their focus must remain on the domestic concerns of civil rights, not international issues.
This was an historical moment in which Black activists and non-state actors partnered with state actors to police Black dissent. While “the question of Palestine” certainly was and remains an important flashpoint regarding the US management of Black internationalist dissent, it has been nestled within an enduring Cold War international-turned-domestic warmongering. Invoking the deep displeasure that some notable Black civil rights leaders had with African American activist, Paul Robeson’s increasingly leftist commitments and 1949 alignment with the Communist Party USA, Richard Iton notes, “Rustin [King’s adviser mentioned previously] would invoke an expanded version of the dirty laundry principle and contend, ‘there’s a sort of unwritten law that if you want to criticize the United States you do it at home; it’s a corollary of the business where you’re just a nigger if you stand up and criticize colored folks in front of white folks—it’s not done…We have to prove we’re patriotic’” (37).
This kind of intra-racial “housecleaning,” as Iton calls it, both mirrored State desires and scripted Black awareness into a broader US state need-desire “domesticate blackness and prevent racialized subjects from interacting across national borders, [as well as] disable leftist internationalism” (38). It is within this framing—coupled with the always-present potential for non-Black actors’ mobilizations of power, vis-à-vis the weaponization of antisemitism accusations—that one must frame present-day backlash against any number of decipherably Black thinkers and leaders articulating any affirmative position about Palestinian human rights, critique of disproportionate Israeli military force, or historic Palestine itself. For example: the scathing public reception that Marc Lamont Hill received following his 2018 speech at the UN’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People; the rescinding of Angela Davis’ human rights award from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute the following year; the ad hominem attacks against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in response to her critiques of the Israeli State; or most recently, the AIPAC-funded defeat of incumbent NY congressman, Jamaal Bowman. The list goes on.
Framing the management of Black internationalist dissent in this way accents analyses of the power already embedded within the US-based higher education ecosystem. With the increased corporatization and bureaucratization of US higher education, along with an increasingly production-driven neoliberal education model, necessarily comes increased securitization. Borders and boundaries are more heavily policed. Bodies are more surveilled. Dissent is more precarious. On some level, this is ideological terrain; particular kinds of ideas and epistemological starting points are snuffed out, made to die, while others are allowed to live. This is the case generally across the broad spectrum of US higher education, made all the more poignant in discourse about historic Palestine—typically under the guise of the “free exchange of ideas” and the “protection of civil liberties.” The 2024 suspension and investigation of White American political science professor, Jodi Dean, is a case-in-point. Dean’s punishment highlights the ways that the US higher education landscape manages pro-Palestine dissent broadly—a landscape that figures Black dissent, dissent from more racially precarious bodies, within it. Following an April 2024 blogpost, authored by Dean, discussing the liberationist sentiment felt by some in response to the October 7 Palestinian fighters (i.e., a particular idea assigned to be silenced by university knowledge-production structures), Dean’s institution condemned her remarks, removed her from the classroom, and launched an investigation to determine if the professor was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on national origin (i.e., thus, sacrificing Dean in the name of protecting others’ civil liberties). In response to questions about if taking action against Dean infringed upon her own academic freedom protections, the institution’s vice president for marketing and communications noted their receiving direction from the US Department of Education “that tells us that in order to comply, we need to take action when we know or should know of a hostile environment based on national origin…In our preliminary estimation this could potentially fall within that.” In an unrelated moment, anthropologist Thomas Abowd notes, innumerable scenarios “underscore the rank hypocrisy that many schools—in their claims to racial equity and academic freedom—display when…a myriad other expressions of racism and harassment, institutional and noninstitutional, committed against Arabs, Muslims, African Americans, and other targeted groups” arise (183).
President Joe Biden delivers the 2024 Morehouse College commencement address, Sunday, May 19, 2024, in Atlanta. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz). Via Wikimedia Commons.
In other words, I’m suggesting that to wrestle with this Morehouse-Biden-Palestine moment is to simultaneously also wrestle with the management of a Black internationalist thought project, already presumed fugitive, within a US higher education landscape that is, at core, always already profoundly imperial (against both precarious and less-precarious bodies). Stated more thoroughly, the admonition directed toward Morehouse College students to respect and not protest the speech of a sitting US president; the college president prioritizing—in a somewhat Rustin-esque way—the social currency, proximity to power, and prestige that attend such optics of respect; and the same college president promising to shut down the commencement ceremony “on the spot” if severe disruptions (presumably, either protest or police intervention) were to occur during Biden’s remarks all point toward the discursive management of a Black internationalist dissent. Such dissent, and particularly Black dissent regarding Palestine, as Abowd and Dean signal, is necessarily racialized and bounded within a higher education political machine that securitizes and crushes the presumed fugitive to maintain order.
Black Radical Sacrality
If, as J. Kameron Carter suggests, a guiding principle of the Modern world is that the nation-state articulates itself and functions theologically—that is, deeply steeped in the “philosophical…[and] metaphysical claim to the rightness, the purity, the would-be gravity of the state as the telos of society…the horizon of order…[and that which] securitizes the world”—formulations of a Black sacrality come into view as a viable mode of resistance (170). According to Carter, “Black radical sacrality…unsettles, is ever poised to incite volatility with regimes” of the political as we know it (169). Black sacrality threatens the Modern world’s economy of racial capitalism insofar as this sacrality belies the violent oppositional hierarchies that structure it.
This Black radical sacrality—conceptually and embodied—is that un-articulable, ungrammaticized pulse that disrupts the terms of order. And it implicates how bodies show up in space and the epistemological groundings that such bodies, by showing up in space, build and trouble.
Black sacrality threatens the Modern world’s economy of racial capitalism insofar as this sacrality belies the violent oppositional hierarchies that structure it.
This is why emergences of encamped communities on college and university campuses—those campuses being, in an important way, the nuclei of nation-statist thought projects, and indeed, appendages of the state—have, of late, so profoundly disrupted university operations and respectability claims. The ungrammaticized, deviant excess always disrupts order en route to building new worlds. It is for this reason that historian and activist, Russell Rickford notes, of his institution’s Palestine solidarity encampment, “I witnessed a safe, dynamic, radically inclusive space…an expression of what civil rights workers once called ‘the beloved community,’ a society that enshrines the practice of fellowship, mutuality and agape love” amidst the institution’s “ongoing effort to criminalize solidarity with those the western world deems disposable [and] administrators portray[ing] the encampment…as a center of aggression and hatred.” Again, Black radical sacrality points us toward the conceptual and embodied interruptions that characterize contemporary resistance.
In the end, when President Biden delivered the 140th Morehouse College commencement address, there existed no mass-scale demonstration during the ceremony, no student encampment, but modest, yet no less important, individual student interventions: displays of Palestinian flags on graduation caps, backs turned during the Biden remarks, valedictory commentary calling for the assembly to remember its commitment to freedom dreams the world over—even within those whom we imagine as unimaginable.
Black dissent, particularly Black internationalist dissent, and even more specifically, Black internationalist dissent regarding historic Palestine must be considered within a particular matrix of boundary policing by various strata of disciplinary/disciplining knowledges—that are, at once, racialized and classed. Mobilizing tools from Black radical religious traditions can be a useful heuristic for imagining existences outside such death-dealing strictures.
Taurean J. Webb, Ph.D is the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University. A race studies scholar and historian of ideas, Webb’s research and teaching interests are in Black internationalism, Black-Palestinian transnationalism, Black religious history, religion and foreign policy, Black Renaissance-era visual arts, and visual arts and religious metaphor within contemporary social movements.
His published writing can be found in the Journal for Palestine Studies, Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy, Jadaliyya, and Black Perspectives—the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. Webb was recently named an arts fellow at Princeton University’s “Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” where he will produce his first documentary film—a project that centers Black, Palestinian, and Lebanese visual artists (follow the project on IG: @Marking_Time25). Currently, Webb is completing his first book—a genealogy of Black US religious presence within twentieth and twenty-first century Black-Palestinian social movement(s). X/Twitter: @AbolitionistDad.
Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi holds a copy of the Indian Constitution as he addresses a press conference at the party headquarters in New Delhi, India, Tuesday, June 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
In early June 2024, India completed its general elections, which resulted in a third consecutive victory for the incumbent Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) margin of victory, however, was substantially lower than expected and the party failed to win a parliamentary majority in the Lok Sabha, or lower house of parliament. The change in the margin of victory marks the return of coalition politics, as Modi must now rely on allied parties to form the new government under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which includes numerous center and right-wing parties. Conversely, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), led by the primary opposition party, the Indian National Congress (INC), stunned many observers as it secured a greater number of seats than expected. The demise of the INC and its leader Rahul Gandhi, the great-grandson of India’s inaugural prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, appeared to have been greatly exaggerated.
These election results produced a sense of jubilation amongst Indians who are against the politics of the Modi government. On social media and in news stories, people celebrated that Modi was “cut to size,” but more significantly, that Indians had reclaimed their “democracy” in spite of significant electoral malpractice. Within days, a plethora of analyses from Indian academics in particular circulated and proclaimed that something had fundamentally changed in India. Some argued that this election was a return to “a disinterested vision of the good society” over one that was a “politics of self-interest,” while others spoke of how “the pall of suffocation created by a decade of Modi’s strongman style…has lifted” and that this election “affirmed pluralism over populism.” The election, thus, was viewed as a “vote against hate.” Perhaps the title that succinctly summarized most reactions was that the elections brought “hope, even in defeat.” Therefore, even though the BJP retained power, the failure to reach its dominant majority in the 543-member Lok Sabha—‘ab ki baar char sau paar’ [This time with over 400 seats] as Modi’s campaign slogan went—signaled hope for Indian democracy as it was presumed that the relationship between state and society could undergo repair as the latter could renew the state.
The National Symbolic
In-depth electoral analysis and judgments of the recent Indian elections abound. Yet, is it possible to read these initial moments of hope as indicative of an Indian “National Symbolic”—what Lauren Berlant has defined as some “tangled cluster” of “the juridical, territorial (jus soli), genetic (jus sanguinis), linguistic, or experiential” that transforms individuals into national subjects? (5) The National Symbolic produces fantasy and, in particular, “a fantasy of national integration, although the content of this fantasy is a matter of cultural debate and historical transformation” (22). How do the celebratory, and indeed, jubilatory, declarations in response to the recent elections demonstrate an ongoing desire for an integrated Indian form? And how might that national fantasy affirm, rather than repudiate, Modi and his politics? We contend the celebration of Indian political forms—citizenship and the constitution, for example—reveals the perpetuation of an Indian national fantasy while it disavows the violent divisions that produce the very space of the nation.[1] Put differently, hope reaffirms the life and the narrative of the nation—signing and countersigning an Indian history, both a singular and plural one. Our goal, in contrast, is not to provide a more inclusive understanding of the Indian national fantasy, but to consider the theoretical underpinnings of the post-election relief that continue to make India a particularly powerful object of desire.
Shri Baboolal Mewra with PM Narendra Modi during the Vijay Sankalp Rally in Morena (M.P.) – Lok Sabha 2024 Election Campaign. Via Wikimedia Commons.
If this celebration, this hope, is tethered to an Indian national fantasy, what is this fantasy with all its multiple and contradictory meanings? For most liberal-left Indians, Modi’s tenure as prime minister since 2014 violates India’s foundation as a tolerant, multicultural nation that—while not perfect—strives towards a democratic and secular form. This tolerant form of India gains its coherence against the religious fundamentalist or the orthodox, which is known, notoriously in the historiography of South Asia, as the semiticization of Indian traditions—in which the introduction of proselytization and the assertion of religious difference during the colonial period created a “semitic” form against a tolerant “Indic” one. Numerous scholars have demonstrated that this racist framing accrues numerous adherents across the political spectrum. Sustained by historical analyses that privilege the fluid and multiple, national fantasies around India are thus bound to tolerance. It is a tolerance that functions in concert with “the will of an interventionist modernizing state in order to…supply, in the name of ‘national culture,’ a homogenized content to the notion of citizenship” as Partha Chatterjee writes—an integrated, whole, and unassailable national body.
The Role of the Indian Constitution
The Indian constitution plays a significant role in this national fantasy, and it certainly was invoked a number of times during the 2024 election. Rahul Gandhi appeared in a press conference with the constitution in hand; reports later commented on how sales of the constitution have skyrocketed since. After his victory, Modi, too, called the constitution a “guiding light.”
One reason for the Indian constitution’s critical role in national fantasy, especially on the liberal-left, is because of Indian federalism: the distribution of powers between the national government and the different states’ governments creates a political form that allows for the possibility of tolerance and inclusion for diverse peoples. To take one example, in his theorization, Partha Chatterjee contends that the federalism enshrined in the Indian constitution coupled with the unique character of Indian citizenship does not allow for nation-people-state to be collapsed together to create a whole integrated national fantasy. There can be no singular National Symbolic, although the BJP constitutes an attempt to create one. Instead, in India, Chatterjee contends we find remarkably diverse political communities that are “peoples-nation”—political communities not integrated into the nation-state, but in tense relation to the nation-state. This separation provides an opportunity for a redemptive politics that is tolerant of numerous narratives and peoples. For Chatterjee, this is the case because of the structure of India’s postcolonial democracy in which formal citizenship was granted to all before their inclusion in civil society, creating, what Chatterjee calls, an alternative political society. In short, the bourgeoisie are dominant, but not hegemonic.
The BJP’s ability to triangulate nation-state-people into a unified national fantasy, then, is countered by federalism and political societies, such as regional populist parties. But beyond these regional parties, Chatterjee argues that what is needed is a counter-narrative to Hindu nationalism’s claims to cultural homogeneity to bind regional mobilizations together in the center, “a vibrant federal republic.” Such a narrative would realign the relation between peoples-nation and nation-state by making it plural with “several civilizational narratives” (109).
In a strange twist, the very impossibility of unified India—the lack of hegemony—becomes a celebrated feature of India, integrated into the nation itself, rather than calling India into question. In their very impossibility, India’s constitution and democratic culture become redemptive, always already tolerant and inclusive. Chatterjee, therefore, reinscribes the very national fantasy he purports to critique by appropriating the fundamental deadlock in the national fantasy by making it plural and offering a more inclusive and hopeful narrative for India.
Following Chatterjee’s analysis, it is easy to see why the return of coalition politics was celebrated in the aftermath of the election. Coalition politics signals the possibility for coalescing a counter-narrative of peoples-nation and, therefore, a renewed sense of hope that functions within the Indian National Symbolic, no matter India’s sordid history. As Shruti Kapila stated, there was “new-found excitement at the return to old-style political jockeying.” The return of the old India thus becomes the promise of the new India. For Chatterjee, too, “It is time to restore [coalition politics] to its proper place at the centre of our political life.” Restoration and return signal hope for a better India to come—one that was always there.
Chatterjee, therefore, reinscribes the very national fantasy he purports to critique by appropriating the fundamental deadlock in the national fantasy by making it plural and offering a more inclusive and hopeful narrative for India.
Against this hopeful excitement that creates a theoretical distinction between people and state, one must ask: Why focus on “India” at all, especially when there are political movements that reject the idea of India and the fantasies it generates? Why, then, do academics continue to provide unifying narratives for India, reinscribing the aims of a nation-state? At what point do we have to rethink the constant attempt to narrate the history of the Indian nation-state-people(s)? Do we need only more robust histories of the diversity and tolerance of India and its constitution? Or do we have to question the very logic of history since the national imaginary cannot be reduced to historical content—plural or otherwise–but is, instead, history itself? These are especially important questions since, as Rahul Rao writes, “Calls to protect the Constitution cannot mean much to those who do not wish to be governed by it – unless the Constitution can contemplate a process by which it will no longer be applicable to unwilling subjects.”
Burned buildings in the wake of anti-Muslim pogroms in March 2020. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Recall that this is a constitution that has entrenched India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir and cemented the second-class citizenship status of Muslims in India. In an article written before he was arrested, the Muslim activist who was involved with the anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests in India, Sharjeel Imam, writes of how the “dismal figures among Muslims in relation to poverty, education, employment and political representation clearly demonstrate the lack of foresight regarding the minority issue during the constitution-making process.” He says that this occurred because of the articulation of the country as Bharat (a geographic imaginary derived from Sanskrit texts), which “reflects an exclusively Hindu imagination of Indian history” as well as the lack of safeguards for Muslims in terms of representation, cow protection, and finally, the definition of “schedule castes,” which excluded Muslims and led them to “further impoverishment, as they are hardly supported by any relevant programs for affirmative action at the central state level.” The very foundational moment of India then is premised on exclusion and the binding together of people-nation-state, even if scholars try to imagine otherwise. This binding reveals that the very distinction between the “state” and “political society” that makes it possible to locate hope in the latter is difficult to sustain.
Communalism and Coalition Politics
Another recurrent theme amid the celebrations was that the election revealed the limits of communal politics—a politics embodied by Modi and the BJP. During Modi’s re-election campaign, he repeatedly made a number of remarks against Muslims in India, accusing them of being “infiltrators” that depleted resources available to Hindus in order to galvanize his Hindu base. Against this Hindu-nationalist ideology, the return to coalition politics came to be seen as a return to an earlier and more tolerant secularism.
A wider historical view reveals anti-Muslim or minority hate or policies in India are not the sole property of the BJP; such exclusion has defined Indian politics since 1947. The Congress Party has engaged in communalism, and served as a source of violence or domination for minorities, including Muslims, Dalits, and Sikhs, or the occupied in Kashmir. During the election, the Indian National Congress did not directly address the Muslim question in India. In the press conference after election results came out, Rahul Gandhi thanked “the poor and marginalised people who came out to save the constitution. Workers, farmers, Dalits, adivasis [Indigenous] and backwards have helped save this constitution.” It was not lost on Muslims that they were not mentioned, despite the country’s 200 million Muslims coming out in droves to vote for the INDIA alliance, led by the Congress Party. The situation in India is such that an opposition party, ostensibly a party that is against the BJP, cannot even mention Muslims or address their fears and concerns, knowing that it will isolate India’s predominantly Hindu population.
A wider historical view reveals anti-Muslim or minority hate or policies in India are not the sole property of the BJP; such exclusion has defined Indian politics since 1947.
Anthropologist Irfan Ahmad told Al Jazeera English, “Since 2014, this electoral circus has passionately been staging Muslims as a threat against which people are asked to vote. While the BJP issues the threat openly, the non-BJP parties do implicitly: That is by remaining silent. No party has the courage to talk about the violence done to the Muslims.” Sikhs, too, have been violently targeted. Yet this violence was met with silence in the election across India even with the continued criminalization of dissent, arbitrary detentions of foreign nationals, as well as state-orchestrated murder abroad.
Yet a politics of hope that centers an Indian national fantasy means that amidst the flurry of pieces in the wake of the elections, no demands were made of the Congress party or the INDIA alliance to take stock of its communal past and present. Instead, the past and future of India always redeems the violent exclusions in the present. We must ask: If hope remains tethered to an Indian future, is the current iteration of anti-Hindutva politics rooted in a concern for the oppressed and the excluded? If so, how does such a politics contend with the Indian National Congress and India’s “secular” or “liberal” political formations without further entrenching an Indian national fantasy? To be sure, many privileged, upper caste liberal Indians have been embarrassed by the authoritarianism and Hindu nationalism of the prime minister who has harmed the national fantasy of a “democratic India.” The hope that stems from the election is particularly powerful and seductive for them since it keeps alive the “Incredible India” brand as it provides a route to self-correction: India can return to its original promise, improvements can once again be made.
Against hope, then, it might be time to interrogate these fantasies. If citizenship is marked by exclusions and colonial inclusions (Kashmir, Sikhs, and others), rather than formal granting and the creation of political societies, then India’s impossibility cannot be redeemed in coalition politics or counter-narratives. If violent exclusion and then forceful integration is at the center of India, why does it and its constitution remain the desirous object of history? How can one detach oneself from a hope and world that is not working? To detach oneself is not to escape fantasy altogether. To undo the world while making another, Berlant writes, “requires fantasy to motor programs of action, to distort the present on behalf of what the present can become” (263). But the fantasies generated by the Indian National Symbolic serve to install a singular vision of politics by seamlessly binding together the present with past and future in the promise of tolerance that always eludes.
Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. He specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of South Asia with a particular emphasis on Punjab and the Sikh tradition. His book, Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press (2024).
Hafsa Kanjwal is Associate Professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation(Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition.
A sign near Beitar Crossing checkpoint between Israel and the occupied territories. The sign declares that the crossing is designated for Israelis only (and also for those eligible to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return). Via Wikimedia Commons.
I argue in this short post that the Israeli legal order, in its attempt to establish a Jewish State, offers an especially rich site to explore 1930s Weimar-era jurisprudential debates regarding sovereignty, the rule of law, and the sovereign exception. As this short post will make clear, early Israeli judicial decisions (1948–1925) regarding citizenship in the new state, and Israel’s 1950 Law of Return and its 1952 Nationality Law suspended the operation of ordinarily applicable legal rules in a manner that recalls Carl Schmitt’s arguments about the nature of sovereignty. The subsequent history of the Israeli state, and its violent relationship with Palestinian Arabs and its neighbors, however, also vindicate the most prominent Weimer-era critics of Schmitt’s decisionism—Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller. Applying their critique of Schmitt to the Israeli legal order reveals it to be the moral equivalent of an ersatz, rather than a true, miracle. As a result, the Israeli state must rely on violence to make up for its irrational, even absurd legal claims. The magical nature of Israeli claims of exclusive sovereignty in Palestine—foretold in the early case law of its courts and its early legislation on Israeli citizenship—recently reached its apogee in the 2018 Nation-State Law. That law declares that only Jews may exercise the right of self-determination in Palestine, even though non-Jewish Arabs make up half of the population living in historical Palestine and living under Israeli control.
Carl Schmitt, the conservative, turned Nazi legal theorist of Weimar Germany, famously noted that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (5). For Schmitt, the sovereign decision was constitutive of the political and existed outside of the law’s positive rules. The sovereign’s power to suspend the ordinary operation of the law, as well its power to restore it, was indispensable to the existence of any legal order in Schmitt’s view. Liberal legality was a myth because it attempted to suppress the existence of the sovereign decision in law and reduce law to the mechanistic operation of rules.
Applying Kelsen and Heller’s critique of Schmitt to the Israeli legal order reveals it to be the moral equivalent of an ersatz, rather than a true, miracle.
Schmitt, when he wrote those words, had in mind the liberal German legal theorist, and defender of the Weimar Constitution, Hans Kelsen. Kelsen’s pure theory of the law, by contrast, made a categorical distinction between politics and morality, on the one hand, and legal rules, on the other, stating that only positive rules can be the object of a science. For Kelsen, sovereignty was not the will of a person, as Schmitt would have it, but rather is the property of a legal system that identifies particular persons as exercising various powers on behalf of the state. Conflating legal sovereignty with power, in the sense of “the capacity to bring about an effect,” according to Kelsen, is a result of a mistaken application of theology to political science, reflecting a basic confusion between the legal authority of a state and the theological idea of God as prima causa of the Universe (208).
Herman Heller, a leftist German legal theorist who was critical of both Schmitt, for his authoritarianism, and Kelsen, for his attempt to exclude the political from the legal, pointed out that Schmitt’s association of politics with the will of the sovereign was, in practice, a repudiation of Enlightenment rationality and a return to medieval conceptions of a personal deity who is free to suspend the rules of nature whenever it wishes, presumably, as a favor to the chosen recipient of grace. As David Dyzenhaus notes, the irrationality that Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty introduced did not mean that it would inevitably fail as a practical matter; however, it did mean that political projects grounded in non-rational appeals to the exception could only succeed through the deployment of “great violence” (175).
The miraculous/magical claims of Israel’s legal system are no where on better display than in its Nationality Law of 1952, and some early decisions of its courts (see year 1950, International Law Reports, 110–12) on the question of Israeli citizenship prior to the passage of the Nationality Law.[1] Three Tel Aviv district court cases disagreed on the fate of Palestinian citizenship in the period between the expiration of the Palestine Mandate in 1948 and the adoption of the Nationality Law of 1952. Two decisions, Re Goods Shephris and Oseri v. Oseri, held that Palestinian citizenship had come to an end with the conclusion of the Mandate. A third decision, A.B. v. M.B., affirmed the continuing vitality of Palestinian citizenship throughout this period. Israel’s Supreme Court brought an end to the conflicting lower-court decisions when it ruled in 1952 in Hussein v. Governor of Acre Prison that, with the establishment of the State of Israel, Palestinian citizenship ceased to exist, whether in the territory that became Israel, those parts of Palestine occupied by Egypt and Jordan, or “anywhere else in the world” (International Law Reports, 112).
Against the view that Palestinian citizenship had come to an end with the expiration of the Mandate, the judge in A.B. v. M.B. pointed out that it was a settled position of public international law that upon a succession in sovereignty, the persons in the territory, ipso facto, acquire citizenship of the new sovereign. To hold otherwise in the case of Israel would lead to the absurd result that Israel came into existence as a state in 1948 but had no nationals until 1952 when the Knesset passed the Nationality Law (International Law Reports, 111). Despite the absurdity of this legal result, the judge in Oseri argued that the citizenship regime put in place by the Mandatory authorities—which granted Palestinian citizenship to all persons who had been citizens of the Ottoman Empire and had habitually resided in Palestine regardless of religion—in reliance on the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne are “devoid of substance in the State of Israel” and are “inappropriate to the situation following the creation of Israel and the changes which that event has brought” (International Law Reports, 112).
Presumably, the “changes” to which the learned judge alluded, but did not make express in his opinion, was the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs and the decision of the State not to allow them to return to their homes, a decision that was reinforced by deeming Palestinian Arabs who sought to return “infiltrators” that could, and were, routinely shot and killed.[2] In order to create a Jewish state, the Israeli judiciary performed the miraculous/magical act of imagining Israel’s establishment as though it were an act of self-generation, creation ex nihilo, as it were.
Jewish Law of Return passport stamp. Via Wikimedia Commons.
So miraculous was the creative power of Israel as sovereign that even the citizenship of Jewish Palestinians could not seemingly survive its establishment. As a practical matter, however, the denationalization of Palestine’s Jewish citizens, like all false miracles, was an illusion: Section 2(a) of the Nationality Law gave Jewish citizens of Palestine the status of returnees under the Law of Return of 1950, thereby granting them Israeli citizenship on grounds of Jewishness rather than habitual residence in the territory that became Israel. Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, could only claim Israeli citizenship if they successfully resisted Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing by remaining continually present in the territory that became Israel until July 14, 1952, the effective date of the Nationality Law. The British law creating Palestinian nationality, by contrast, theoretically allowed any one otherwise eligible for Palestinian citizenship, but for whatever reason was not present in Palestine as of the effective date of the law, two years to apply for Palestinian citizenship from wherever he was located, even though in practice the implementation of the law deprived many Palestinians who were abroad of Palestinian citizenship because the steps they needed to follow to apply for Palestinian citizenship were onerous and impracticable given their circumstances.[3]
Section 18(a) of Israel’s Nationality Law provides that “The Palestinian Citizenship Orders, 1925-1942 are repealed with effect from the day of the establishment of the State.” By expressly canceling Palestinian citizenship for everyone, and denationalizing everyone who failed the Nationality Law’s strict residency requirements, without regard to race or religion, the law, like all false miracles, creates an illusion of articulating a facially neutral rule: Jewish Palestinians who lost their Palestinian citizenship—and only Jewish Palestinians—were, in Section 2(b)(1) of the same 1952 legislation that denationalized Palestine’s Arab population, granted Israeli citizenship through the legal fiction of treating them as “returnees,” even if they had lived their entire lives in Palestine. It provides as follows:
(B) Israel nationality by return is acquired:
(1) by a person who came as an “oleh [i.e., “returnee”]” into, or was born in, the country before the establishment of the State, with effect from the day of the establishment of the State.
Israel’s courts and its legislature, in constituting Israel as a Jewish state, operated as a Schmittian sovereign by suspending the ordinary operation of public international law that would have required Israel to grant Palestine’s Arabs citizenship in the new state, subject to their right to renounce it in favor of citizenship of another state (434). To avoid the charge of a racially discriminatory denationalization, Israeli courts gave the illusion of denationalizing everyone who failed an exacting physical presence requirement, knowing that Jewish Palestinians would be renationalized by the combination of the Law of Return and the Nationality Law. Israel, exercising the prerogatives of a Schmittian sovereign, could only achieve these results by acting against the immanent rationality of the principles of public international law governing citizenship in the context of a succession of sovereignty.
The artifacts of Israeli legal exceptionalism are paradoxical judicial decisions and anomalous statutory provisions. But their practical effect has been to normalize the death of Palestinians by rendering them, as a matter of Israeli internal law, foreigners, and in international law, stateless. While Jewish Palestinian “returnees” were the beneficiaries of the Israeli sovereign’s miraculous/magical grace, Arab Palestinians were transformed into “infiltrators,” who could, and were, shot and killed. Israel’s 2023–24 war in Gaza, meanwhile, is waged against a population the majority of whom are Palestinian refugees whom the Israeli legal order “miraculously” stripped of Palestinian citizenship as part of the founding of the state. Israel’s current war, therefore, can only be understood as a continuation of the Nakba that started in 1948. By suspending the rationality of law, Israel, as Kelsen and Heller predicted in their polemics with Schmitt, committed itself to a path of violence, a course that it has yet to abandon.
Mohammad H. Fadel is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Law, which he joined in January 2006. Professor Fadel wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law while at the University of Chicago and received his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Fadel was admitted to the Bar of New York in 2000 and practiced law with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, New York, where he worked on a wide variety of corporate finance transactions and securities-related regulatory investigations. Professor Fadel also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and the Honorable Anthony A. Alaimo of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. Professor Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism.
Collage depicting the loss and destruction from the Yugoslav Wars. Created for the Paris College Collective Challenge. Via Flickr User Joey Zanotti. CC BY 2.0 Deed.
“Balkanization” is a term that does not need much explanation today. It has dominantly, although not exclusively, become a shorthand in global political, cultural, social, artistic, and other circles for describing the violent process of the disintegration of sociopolitical entities such as the state, federation, union, nation, community, social identity, etc.[1] Meanwhile, Yugoslavia—which, during the nineties, became known for bloody disintegration through ethnic cleansing and genocide—has become a synonym for the Balkans as a whole within this framework. While I do not want to exclude the common definition of the term, this essay aims to shed light on an alternative perspective that delves deeper into the historical complexities of the region. Divorced from its geographical context, the concept has become synonymous with socially regressive policies along with ethnic, nationalist, religious, and other forms of fundamentalism. Contrary to the views held by many political, cultural, and social figures and theorists, divisive violence is not an exclusive characteristic of the Balkans or the former Yugoslav areas but is a feature of the modern European and global political history of nationalism in which this region is deeply immersed.
Nationalism is not an ancient traitof the European Southeast. Rather, it is a classic Western European product, which, until the first decades of the 20th century, was generally a marginal phenomenon in the Balkan region. It only became prominent when it was imported into the region. Wars fought around issues of nationalism were common in Western Europe during the 20th century. Further, there were instances of significant violence and turmoil. Events such as World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II significantly shaped the continent’s political landscape before the Balkan conflicts gained momentum. While the Balkans indeed experienced “total war” from both historical and political perspectives, such a concept was not sui generis to the region, and indeed European regimes and systems prior to the Yugoslav case were the first to engage in it. This also extends to mass persecution and displacement of populations, a practice that was characteristic of countries in Europe long before the conflict in the Balkans, notably in Yugoslavia, where it escalated. This is evident not only in the world wars but also in events like the expulsion of Jews from today’s Spanish territory during the 15th and 16th centuries or in the repercussions of the Nazi concept of Lebensraum (“living space”). Similarly, in the broader discourse around “balkanization,” ethnic cleansing also emerges as a defining feature of the Yugoslav conflict despite the origins of the practice in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s ethnic cleansing of the Muslim-Ottoman populations in the 19th century. The rise of modern nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries saw a proliferation of such policies across Europe. There is evidence of this in events like the genocide against Armenians and the atrocities of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Third Reich. Additionally, the ethnic cleansing and genocidal targeting of Indigenous populations in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas by European empires since the 15th century further underscores the “non-Balkan” brutality inherent in these practices. Namely, ethnic, national, and religious wars are not solely confined to the 1990s in the Balkans and Yugoslavia, for such conflicts had occurred around the world long before the mentioned period, e.g., the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), the conflict in Burma following independence from British rule in 1948, the India-Pakistan war over Kashmir immediately after the partition of India in 1947, the Rwandan genocide (1990–1994), and the like.
Nationalism is not an ancient trait of the European Southeast. Rather, it is a classic Western European product, which, until the first decades of the 20th century, was generally a marginal phenomenon in the Balkan region.
Likewise, it’s also essential to consider the aspect of glorifying war as a form of martyrdom and the associated pursuit of revenge against perceived others, for this phenomenon also transcends the Balkans, resonating across numerous cultures and peoples worldwide in the modern era. Many cultures have elevated the sacrifice of one’s life for the sake of their ethnic, national, religious, or cultural community by shedding the blood of others in the context of nationalism, e.g., Japan in World War II, the fight against French colonialism in Algeria (1954–1962), the mujahideen’s resistance against the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in the 1980s, or the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921). Certainly, one should not disregard from this list religion’s influence on shaping and understanding the social and political landscape within a certain state, which also extends beyond the Balkans area. Religion played a pivotal role in numerous conflicts and political transformations globally ahead of the Yugoslav conflict. This can be seen in the Indo-Pakistani war, the Northern Ireland conflict of the latter half of the 20th century, the enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others. Lastly, there is the practice of inventing ethnic and national roots to confer greater historical legitimacy upon one’s own people, a tactic employed by many European peoples before it began to unfold in the Balkans. Moreover, nearly all European nations in the 19th century sought their ancestry and origins in the early Middle Ages to validate their national identities, drawing parallels with various groups of barbarian peoples who established settlements and kingdoms upon the remnantsoftheWesternRoman Empire.
Therefore, even though nationalism and war, labeled under the term “balkanization,” are associated with Yugoslavia, similar issues are evident in other parts of Europe and the world. This suggests that there is no unique sequence of events in the Balkans but rather a continuous thread of European and global sociopolitical movements. The parallel between balkanization and Yugoslavia more likely stems from the timing of the last Yugoslav conflict, which occurred during an era when many believed that the fall of the Eastern Communist bloc had ushered in a pro-Western liberal-democratic era. There was a widespread belief that humanity was transitioning into a new post-historical age and that the war in Yugoslavia was the final remnant of an old historical epoch. Yet, this perception was soon proven to be a delusion, as the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, amid ethnic and religious conflicts worldwide, rather than concluding an era, became a precursor to the tumultuous one that followed. Therefore, it is increasingly important to explore the roots of “balkanization” beyond simplistic explanations centered solely on the dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation.
Even though nationalism and war, labeled under the term “balkanization,” are associated with Yugoslavia, similar issues are evident in other parts of Europe and the world.
It’s crucial to uncover the obscured or overlooked aspects of this narrative in order to reveal Yugoslavia’s capacity to cultivate a sociopolitical framework capable of serving, figuratively, as a constructive bridge between the “Western” and “Eastern” ideologies, reflected primarily in social security, health security, free education for all citizens, inter-religious cooperation, mixed marriages, antifascists traditions, secularism, and other similar ideas. In this regard, I would go so far as to characterize Yugoslavia as the pinnacle of civilization in the Western Balkans, epitomizing the culmination of diverse cultural, political, and social influences that coalesced to create a distinct and vibrant society. This designation encapsulates its profound impact on the region’s history, evident in its nurturing of cultural diversity, geopolitical relevance, pioneering political structures, and notable advancements in gender equality, social welfare, worker empowerment, literacy, and other areas of social progress. Despite its evident flaws, Yugoslavia retained values worth pursuing and refining. A comparison between the era preceding and following the existence of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia underscores the undeniable truth of this assertion. Essentially, Yugoslavia embodied a framework for advancement and collaboration that seems unachievable in the current fragmented landscape of post-Yugoslav states. Paradoxically, while these aforementioned values are deeply ingrained in Balkan, especially Yugoslav, heritage, they are often overshadowed by the label of “balkanization,” which tends to focus on activities aimed at undermining humanistic ideals such as pluralism, secularism, social justice, and equality.
The communist regime of Yugoslavia, often misunderstood as solely authoritarian, actually embodied elements of a social state. This is a common oversight among scholars and politicianswho sometimes forget that Yugoslavia stood apart from the Iron Curtain sphere. Despite the authoritarian nature of President Josip Tito’s regime, it played a pivotal role in the Non-Aligned Movement; in supporting people in the Third World states in their anti-colonial movements for national independence; and, from 1950 to 1975, in building two million apartments for workers, offered at symbolic rents. However, all of this can be easily found in history books. Thus, I would like to highlight some points that speak convincingly about humanisticvalues in Yugoslavia and the Balkans, which I hope fosters a social feeling and sense that is not often documented. Namely, the Yugoslav regime provided education for the children of impoverished and uneducated families, enabling, for instance, their offspring to become engineers in prestigious companies within the state, and beyond it. It exemplified a societal ethos wherein the surgeon who operated on the president was the same individual who treated a wounded laborer. The Catholic church, the Orthodox church, the mosque, and the synagogue were practically located on the same street almost wherever these communities gathered in one place, etc. However, these aspects often remain overshadowed or unrecognized in discussions about the Balkans, i.e., Yugoslavia, despite their integral role in shaping its identity. So, if you ever wish to delve deeper into the topic of “balkanization,” don’t hesitate to ask, as the Balkans embody not just a collection of negative sociopolitical outcomes but also an extensive unexplored territory, fostering numerous social initiatives and a social consciousness that, as evident from global social and political movements, could be invaluable in shaping the future of human society.
[1] Some of the academics who resist portraying the Balkans solely through a negative lens and whose research is valuable in this context are Slavoj Žižek, Boris Buden, Žarko Paić, Siniša Malešević, Slavica Jakelić, Ksenija Vidmar Horvat, Vjekoslav Perica, Mitja Velikonja, Paul Mojzes, Rastko Močnik, Srđan Vrcan, and the like.
Branko Sekulić received his master’s degrees at the Theological Faculty “Matthias Flacius Illyricus” in Zagreb, Croatia (2011) and at the Ecumenical Institute of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine (2016), and obtained a certificate in peace education from the Center for Peace Studies in Zagreb (2009). He obtained his doctoral degree at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany (2020), where he has been a post-doctoral researcher (since 2021). He is a lecturer at the University Center for Protestant Theology “Matthias Flacius Illyricus” in Zagreb (since 2017), president of the Institute for Theology and Politics (since 2023), director of the Academy for Theology and Politics (since 2023), coordinator of the theological program of the Festival of Alternatives and the Left in his hometown of Šibenik (since 2014), and a fellow at the Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2024). He recently publishedThe Veils of Christian Delusion(Lexington Books/Fortress Press, 2022); “Towards the Balkan Theology of Political Liberation”, Political Theology Network, September 2023; “The Theology of the Ethnocultural Empathic Turn: Towards the Balkan Theology of Political Liberation”, Religions 15, no. 2 (2024): 191.; “Eyes Wide Shut – Orthodoxy and Democracy in Serbian Theology and Thought”, in Pantelis Kalatzaidis and Hans-Peter Großhans (eds.), Politics, Society, and Culture in Orthodox Theology in a Global Age(Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2022); and “Theology in the Spirit of Palanka: Catechism of Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox Ethnonationalist Imaginaria”, in Stipe Odak and Zoran Grozdanov (eds.), Balkan Contextual Theology: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2022).
Yousef Munayyer presents on the weaponization of antisemitism in the Israeli government. March, 5, 2024. Photo courtesy of Jena O’Brien.
On Mar 5, 2024, the Contending Modernities research initiative held the event “Antisemitism and Other Hates.” The title reflected a core contention of the event itself: a rejection of the prevalent and simplistic idea that anti-Jewish sentiment can be best located in individuals, rather than systems. Indeed, the lecture interrogated the assumption that modern antisemitism can be studied apart from the wider history of racism in Europe and its colonial enterprises, and apart from the dynamics of modern nation state formation and consolidation.
The second of a two-part event on Judaism and Palestine/Israel, “Antisemitism and Other Hates” explored the modern deployment of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe before tracing the way allegations of antisemitism have come into contemporary force through smear campaigns, lawfare, and legislation in service to nation-state ends. Featuring Yousef Munayyer, Head of the Palestine/Israel Program and Senior Fellow at the Arab Center, DC, the event challenged the ahistorical discourse around antisemitism and illuminated the ways in which minoritized communities are targeted and endangered by networked state campaigns relying on similar racial and colonial logics. Where the first event, a conversation between Mikhael Manekin and Rabbi Brant Rosen, explored the Jewish ethical tradition and their critique of the utilization and capture of religion by the state, this second event showcased how the logics of modern nation state power co-opt and hollow out such traditions in order to become the ultimate referent for a community’s identity.
Antisemitism and European Questions
Antisemitism, as well as its mirror, philosemitism, collapses Jews and Jewish life into ahistorical figures, i.e. projections of non-Jews’ ideas about Jews. As Brian Klug wrote on Contending Modernities’ blog, “From [the conversion to Christianity of Flavius Valerius Constantinus] on, Europe has used the Jews to define itself. The question, which we might rename “the European Question,” was this: What is Europe? Answer: not Jewish.” This negative self-definition, partnered with political and economic scapegoating and supersessionist Christian theology, was harnessed towards the creation of “nations” of people that then claimed territorial sovereignty in the states of modern Europe.
Contending Modernities has devoted numerous articles to the genocidal violences of European modernity; the campaigns for supremacy of one group instituted and reinforced through the mechanism of the state. The confluence of discourses of blood purity and civilization, imbricated with religious hierarchies, and imperial modes of political and territorial control are implicated in the erasure of communities across the world. Religious institutions have often participated: Scott Appleby writes of the Catholic Church’s alliance with fascist regimes in Europe in its opposition to secularism and communism, in spite of the horrors unleashed by these regimes. However, as Atalia Omer noted in her introduction to the event on March 5, antisemitism and the Shoah have been cast as unique in ways that invisibilize the role of these state and community-supported hierarchies. This framing obscures the need to interrogate antisemitism together with other forms of racism and prejudice. Its presumed uniqueness then justifies violence (narrated as “self-defense”) in turn.
Antisemitism and the State
The discourse around antisemitism has reached a fever pitch in the United States, notably taken up and mobilized by politicians on the right of the spectrum to target speech at universities related to the ongoing Israeli assault in Gaza and the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. Anti-Jewish sentiment and attacks have seen an uptick in the US, along with hate crimes against Blacks, Muslims, Arabs, and others.
Allegations of antisemitism have also increasingly been used to vilify and silence outcry regarding the treatment and killing of Palestinians, an effort which seeks to collapse the distinction between anti-Jewish sentiment and criticism of Israeli state policy. This mobilization banks on ignorance of geopolitical and historical realities such as European Christian Zionists “giving” and partitioning land on which Palestinians were already living to Jewish Europeans at the turn of the 20th century. Allegations of antisemitism tap into orientalist imagery of the violent, barbaric (terrorist) Muslim Other. Omer continued in her introduction:
In other words, we seek to grapple with how the weaponization of antisemitism, (turning it into a weapon authorizing violence against Palestinians and erasures of Palestinian narratives) also thrives on Islamophobic tropes and imperial designs: the narrative twist redirects our attention from a focus on territory to terrorism while also projecting onto the native Palestinian the European Nazi imageries and persistently reproducing a narrative of Jewish powerlessness, even though Israel is a sovereign nuclear state that controls every facet of Palestinian lives in the land—having even the ability to turn off running water in Gaza for 2 million people.
Guest lecturer Dr. Yousef Munayyer brought the conversation on allegations of antisemitism back once more to the nation-state system and narrative framings meant to legitimate the state. A political scientist by training, Munayyer traced the development of Israeli government responses to international pressure for Palestinian civil and human rights through Israeli government and pro-Israel network reports and event recordings. After early bumbling responses to the Gaza war of 2010 and Gaza flotilla, Munayyer shared, the Netanyahu government restructured the “Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy” (MSA) in 2009 to manage global dissent. Seeking to create a network to fight the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other activism, the ministry organized a global network of pro-Israel organizations, pro-Israel attorneys, and pro-Israel social media influencers. These networks soon moved away from reactive postures towards offensive attacks, in many instances framing critics of Israeli policy as “terrorists.”
The utilization of antisemitism allegations, however, did not come into full force until 2019; Munayyer traced a jump in MSA report references to antisemitism from a dozen to nearly three hundred in the space of that year. In MSA network event recordings, speakers made the rationale for this increase explicit: classifying opposition to Israeli policy as “anti-Israeli” was a matter of political disagreement, and therefore protected speech in the United States and other places. However, classifying opposition to Israeli policy as harassment and antisemitism got around US First Amendment protections; this approach, one speaker noted, “is the most important weapon in our arsenal.”
Vice President Mike Pence delivers remarks at the Christians United for Israel Washington Summit in Washington, D.C. Monday, July 8, 2019. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen). Public Domain.
This approach, unsurprisingly, comes at a high cost to Jews in the US and Europe who speak out against Israeli policies, particularly policies that endanger Palestinians. It generates a logic where Jews are accused of antisemitism, where allegiance to a government’s policy determines who is a “good” Jew and who is a “self-hating” Jew or “un-Jew”–with very real consequences. It validates those who use caricatures of Jewishness to push the “great replacement theory” and other violent rhetoric. This creates, to paraphrase Munayyer, marriages of mutual political interest between Christian and Jewish Zionists and people who are ethnoreligious nationalists and white supremacists who can use the validation of pro-Israel voices as cover for own antisemitism. As Michelle Goldberg elaborated in the New York Times on March 7, 2024,
There’s also a tendency for some in the Jewish establishment to overlook antisemitism among supporters of Israel. That’s how we ended up with the end-times preacher John Hagee, who has said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their rightful home in the holy land, speaking at a major November rally against antisemitism, and the Anti-Defamation League praising Elon Musk, despite both Musk’s own antisemitic posts and the platform he’s given to virulent Jew haters.
It comes at a higher cost, however, for US and Europeans racialized as Muslim or Palestinian: the example of three college students shot in Vermont while walking through a neighborhood wearing keffiyehs is just one instance of such deadly violence. And, of course, it silences and embattles legitimate efforts to protect life, leaving the United States largely silent in the face of a “plausible” genocide now counting the deaths of over 13,000 children in a shocking 8 month time span, with famine and starvation setting in.
In Service to State
The Jewish tradition has historically been deeply skeptical of state power, guest lecturer Mikhael Manekin, former director of Breaking the Silence and now leader with the Faithful Left movement in Israel, shared on March 4th. Political Zionism, and its very recent religious Zionist turn, are departures from centuries of tradition and were the source of heated discussion and opposition at the turn of the 20th century.
It is notable, then, how the contemporary weaponization of antisemitism allegations illuminate the work done to collapse the distinction between Jewish identity and the State of Israel. It is the realization of an ethno-religious state project where ultimately, the only way to imagine Jewish community is as, first and foremost, an exclusionary political project predicated on the domination of Palestinians. The community of people become subsumed by the state, where antisemitism allegations are predominantly used to defend not Jews or Jewishness, but a state’s international and legal standing.
Dania is Program Manager at the Contending Modernities research initiative, where she oversees operations and contributes to program development. Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies. She is active in efforts to establish restorative justice pathways in her local community, and volunteers to advance grant making for community-led social cohesion programs globally. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Atalia Omer, Mikhael Manekin, and Rabbi Brant Rosen in conversation at the March 4, 2024 event, “Reimagining Jewish Ethics and Politics in Palestine/Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.” Image courtesy of Jena O’Brien.
Introduction
On March 4, 2024, members of the Notre Dame community and wider South Bend public gathered together for a conversation on the relationship between Judaism and state power. Under discussion was Mikhael Manekin’s book End of Days: Ethics, Tradition, and Power In Israel. The author is a key organizer of a new Jewish Israeli movement called the Faithful Left. He also served as a former director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israel Defense Force veterans. Manekin was joined by Brant Rosen, the founding Rabbi of the anti-Zionist Tzedek Chicago synagogue and a co-founder and co-chairperson of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council. In a wide-ranging conversation, these two Jewish scholars and activists discussed the relation between state power and Jewish ethics, the place of land and home in the Jewish theological imagination, how their different positionalities shape their thinking, and the importance of rediscovering the Jewish tradition as one that is informed by a longer and more dynamic history than modern Zionism suggests.
In her introductory remarks, Professor Atalia Omer noted that the death toll from Israel’s assault on Gaza then stood at more than 30,000 and has since increased to more than 35,000. This number, along with the 1200 that were killed in Israel on October 7th, 2023, Professor Omer noted, required us to engage in difficult conversations about the history of occupation, the ongoing Nakba, and the role of religion in the conflict. Just a few days prior, on February 29, 2024, in what has been called the flour massacre, Israeli soldiers opened fire on desperate Palestinians who had gathered to collect aid from a truck convoy, killing 118 people and injuring at least 760. This tragedy, along with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s continued claim that it would be necessary to invade Rafah, where so many Palestinians from the north of the territory had fled, lent the conversation renewed importance. Faced with an unfolding genocide in Gaza the conversation offered an intimate window into the internal contestations within the Jewish community by two prominent members of that community. Despite their differences, both strive for Palestinian equality and ground their visions in the Jewish ethical tradition.
Judaism, State Power, and Positionality
In End of Days, Manekin aims to recover the gentler tradition of Jewish virtue ethics that has been lost in the twentieth and twenty-first century to a militant and chauvinist version. This loss occurred as a result of the establishment of the State of Israel via the Zionist movement and the absorption of Jewish religiosity into machinations of state power. A key difference that emerged between Manekin and Rosen through the course of the conversation concerned how those critical of Israeli policies should relate to the modern Zionist movement, a movement focused on the establishment of a nation-state which would place Jews in a position of power rather than “weakness.” For both speakers, it was quite clear that the right-wing Zionist ideology currently shaping Israeli politics was one that needed to be challenged and called out for its racist and apartheid policies towards the Palestinians. This means challenging those whose “loyalty is not to the tradition, but an ethnic state” (80). For Manekin, however, leaving Zionism behind entirely was not an option. This is because in his position as an Israeli, for whom Zionism was a “lived experience,” one could not simply ignore it or critique it from afar. It is the “air” one breathes, the very logic behind his family’s presence in Israel. The structures that govern his life, in other words, were saturated in Zionism. For Rosen, on the other hand, Zionism was something he knew only through his experience growing up in a Jewish household in the US and on extended visits to Israel. While support for the State of Israel was encouraged in his community, the wider political structures that governed his life were not shaped by Zionism in the same way as a citizen living under US law. This difference made possible the creation of an anti-Zionist synagogue that would largely be unimaginable in Israel. Here, then, the positionality of each interlocutor laid bare the possibilities and limits of their theopolitical imaginations.
For Manekin, however, leaving Zionism behind entirely was not an option. This is because in his position as an Israeli, for whom Zionism was a ‘lived experience,’ one could not simply ignore it or critique it from afar.
Rosen and Manekin spoke of a shared desire, nonetheless, to recover a Judaism that de-centers force, domination, and revenge. Those characteristics are the upshot of Christian European modernity, one which underpins the reduction of Jews into a statist project and claims to offer a redemptive storyline at the intersection of the Shoah and the Nakba. Rather than power, they advocated for a Judaism of humility; rather than sovereignty and domination, they argued that Jewish teachings require followers to side with the marginalized and oppressed. For Rosen, these commitments have meant organizing and putting pressure on elected officials to stop funding the Israeli government’s war efforts and occupation. For Manekin they likewise have meant organizing and putting his body on the line to defend Palestinians who face dispossession from their homes and livelihoods. These actions are rooted in a vision of Judaism centered on the uplifting of the marginalized against those who would cynically wield power in the name of God. Manekin notes, “Viewing government decisions as an expression of God’s will subordinates God to the will of the political ruler and prevents the religious person from discerning this will” (111).
The Loss of Tradition
For both Rosen and Manekin, what often goes by the name of the “Jewish tradition”—both in Israel and in the diaspora—has been shaped by a recent ahistorical rendering of the past. In his comments during the conversation and in End of Days, Manekin demonstrates how prominent rabbis and scholars in Israel have reread the centuries, if not millennia, of tradition so that it conforms to the modern Zionist project in Israel. In doing so, however, they often ignore the vast majority of rabbinic commentary that might challenge their reading. For example, in critiquing one modern rabbi’s interpretation of the Torah to justify the killing of innocent children in defense of the state of Israel, Manekin writes,
Rabbi Yisraeli’s interpretation has no precedence in traditional halakha; the entire tradition pushes in the opposite direction, that is, towards the view that it is forbidden to kill innocent people for revenge. So why does he depart from the rabbinic tradition and treat it as irrelevant? Because of his desire to justify the sovereign State of Israel and its military activities (48).
Such examples reveal, Manekin suggests, the hollowness of the so-called tradition espoused by many on the religious/political right in Israel today.
Rosen also lamented the way that a focus on buttressing the modern State of Israel has sidelined more liberative readings of the Jewish tradition. He suggested that it was in diaspora that what is now thought of as the “classical” Jewish tradition flourished and that the ethics and values built during this period were being lost because of the subsuming of the Jewish community to the State of Israel. Unlike those who see a sacred connection between God and the land on which the modern state of Israel sits, for Rosen, “God is with us wherever we go.” While Manekin would not necessarily disagree with this claim, he does maintain that there is a holiness to the land that cannot be replaced in diaspora settings.
Land and Home
A common thread running throughout the entire conversation concerned the location of home and the role of land in the Jewish theopolitical imagination. As already noted, for Rosen, Jews develop a unique sense of home wherever they are in diaspora. This connects to the Bundist concept of Doykayt, which animates much of the reclaimed anti-Zionist Jewish tradition born in Eastern Europe. Indeed, Tzedek Chicago, a self-defined anti-Zionist synagogue, embodies this ideal by itself congregating in different physical spaces across the city and in its online platform.
City of Hebron, with Tombs of the Patriarchs at left. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Even as Manekin agrees with Rosen that traditional Jewish practice—i.e., living out the ethics and norms in practice that have been developed over the centuries of interpretation of the Torah and rabbinic texts—has been lost in the era of the Jewish nation state (see 16–17 in End of Days), he remains tied to the land in a way that is different from Rosen. For Manekin, there are sacred sites in the land of Palestine/Israel that remain central to his religious practice and identity. As he was careful to note however, retaining access to these sites does not require that they be held by a Jewish ethno-nationalist state, with its neoliberal logic of ownership. They could also be retained in a binational state where one group’s access to the land is not precluded on another group’s exclusion from it. Here, Manekin reminded the audience that there is no singular theory of land, and that ideas of “ownership” are not the only way to understand our relation to it. Indeed, such conceptions of exclusionary ownership claims are grounded in modernist ideas about sovereignty that misread how the interpreters of the Jewish tradition across millennia connected to the land.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, we might note that the push and pull between tradition, nationalism, and a connection to land is not unique to Jews nor to the state of Israel. Indeed, within US Christianity there are those who desire to step back from exercising state power in the name of protecting the prophetic role of the Church, while in India the dominant political party in power wishes to create a Hindu nation state that reshapes classical Hindu traditions in the name of state power.
None of these examples are perfect mirrors to Palestine/Israel, nor to each other, yet they form a pattern that is indicative of how modernity has shaped the relationship between religion and state power. What that pattern reveals is that allowing religion to be hollowed out by the institutions of the state—either by conservative religious nationalists or neoliberal secularists—will not result in the liberation of the oppressed, but rather their marginalization by other means.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
On the one hand, he contributed to the history of transnational liberation theology in a Christian framework. As was explored before, he trained hundreds of priests and nuns who would become community leaders against oppression in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. 
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