The author, Jessica Wong, pictured With Marc Ellis.
I first met Marc Ellis as an undergraduate at Baylor University and, unlike his graduate students, had no idea who he was. I had no knowledge of his scholarship or his standing. I was too ignorant to be impressed or intimidated. To me, Ellis was simply my teacher and mentor. It was only later that I came to realize that this opinionated and somewhat peculiar Jewish man who rode a recumbent bike around his neighborhood and was a fixture of my life at Baylor was also a significant figure within the field of liberation theology.
One common characteristic of liberation theologies is that they are born of particularity. Such theologies arise out of specific times and places to address the particular forms of oppression being experienced by particular people. It is a theology steeped in context. In the work of Latin American theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the primary context is the struggle of the poor in Latin American who have been disenfranchised to the point of being rendered subhuman. In the work of feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, the primary context is the plight of women, the patriarchal nature of traditional approaches to religion and theology, and how women might claim space for themselves. In the work of Black theologian James Cone, the primary context is the plight of Black Americans within a White-dominated racial economy undergirded by a White Christian imagination. Each of these theologians advocates for more than the liberation of the people occupying these particular contexts, having a more expansive message of freedom embedded within their vision of a redeemed society. What is notable about Marc Ellis’s work, however, is that this capacious and inclusive move toward liberation is not simply an aspect of his theology, it is the very heart of it.
Throughout his career Ellis sought Jewish liberation. Yet, his position moved beyond the claim that the Jewish people are God’s chosen and, therefore, God is with them in their suffering. He believed this to be true, but the liberative message he offered was far more challenging than that. For him, Jewish liberation did not mean deliverance from an external oppressor. Rather, Jewish liberation meant release from the Constantinian complicity of the Jewish state, a political project that has resulted in the domination, displacement, and dehumanization of the Palestinian people.
Driven by fear and a desire for survival that emerged in response to the atrocities of the Holocaust, Ellis believed that the Jewish people have come to idolize their own safety and security at the expense of the authentic and vulnerable relationality to which God has called them. And so, in an effort to secure themselves, Jews have inflicted upon Palestinians the very oppressive strategies from which they have sought to protect themselves. From the ghettoization of the Jews in Nazi Germany to the ghettoization of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; from the walled Nazi concentration camps to the Israeli West Bank Barrier; from the destruction of Jewish homes to the dispossession of the homes of Palestinians; from the plundering of Jewish assets to the discriminatory regulations that have decimated the livelihood and economy of the Palestinian people—Ellis recognized these parallels with a level of clarity that compelled him to denounce the injustices perpetrated by the State of Israel, a decision that made him particularly unpopular among certain Jewish and Christian leaders who preferred his silence.
For Ellis, Jewish liberation did not mean deliverance from an external oppressor. Rather, Jewish liberation meant release from the Constantinian complicity of the Jewish state.
His critique of Israel, however, was not an indication that Ellis was somehow inauthentically Jewish or antisemitic, as some would claim. On the contrary, it was, in part, his deep connection with the Jewish tradition—with Jewish philosophy and the prophets—that moved him to condemn Israel’s actions. His time meditating on the writings of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber led him to understand the sacredness of encounter. “All real living is meeting,” Buber writes in I and Thou (11). There is divinity in our authentic connection to one another. Through encounter, we are met by the divine. God “becomes ever nearer, increasingly near to the sphere that lies between beings, to the Kingdom that is hidden in our midst, there between us” (119–20). By encountering another person as Thou, we are met by the ultimate Thou. We are met by God.
This sacredness of meeting was a guiding principle in Ellis’s life. It was this holy encounter that he believed to be missing from the State of Israel’s view and treatment of the Palestinians. Without it, the Jewish people turned a blind eye to the real struggles and suffering of their Palestinian neighbors. And, in this way, they alienated themselves from God. It was from this self-alienation that the Jewish people needed liberation. As such, Ellis’s rebuke of the Israeli government was born not from a lack of care for his own people, but from his deep and abiding love for them.
Rebuke as an expression of love has an important place within the Jewish scriptural tradition. We see it in the prophets’ words of condemnation, warning, and call to repentance and transformation. Prophetic rebuke, while perhaps caustic in tone, is nonetheless an invitation into right relationship with God, often through the restoration of right relationship with others. And so it was with Ellis’s own prophetic speech. Though at times off-putting to those on the receiving end, his words of caution and calling almost always stemmed from a place of love, as they invited the recipient into deeper knowing, more profound connection, and truer faithfulness.
This sacredness of meeting was a guiding principle in Ellis’s life. It was this holy encounter that he believed to be missing from the State of Israel’s view and treatment of the Palestinians.
I remember being called out by Ellis on more than one occasion over the course of our friendship: once for having missed Shabbat dinner at his home, and a second time regarding my attitude toward myself and my identity. As a biracial kid growing up in predominantly White circles in the South, I had learned that whiteness was both normal and preferred. As a Christian growing up in Dallas, I had learned that race didn’t really matter. After all, as the Apostle Paul once wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28–29). From this, I had concluded that, if my true identity was in Christ, then my racial identity was inconsequential. And so, I saw myself as White and largely ignored my Chinese identity, perhaps secretly hoping that others would do the same. While I had yet to admit any of this to myself, let alone to Ellis, he somehow saw the truth of my situation and, in that moment, spoke a challenging, prophetic word over my life. He told me that unless I came to know and accept my Chinese identity, I would never truly know myself.
Initially, his words struck me as patently false. Steeped in American individualism’s story of the “self-made man,” I struggled to see how my sense of self could be bound up with a history, family, and culture that, at that time, felt fundamentally foreign to me. Nonetheless, Ellis’s words stayed with me, prompting me to think deeply about the nature of identity beyond individualism. What did it mean to be constituted by people and places from which I had been separated not only geographically, but also linguistically and culturally? What did it mean to be constituted by people whose stories I had not been told? I now wonder whether it was perhaps because of Ellis’s own diasporic identity that he so readily recognized and spoke to the diaspora that I, too, was navigating.
Whether in his writing, his relationship with students, or his routine exchanges, Ellis sought to live a life of encounter. He was a person of presence. Being present was of course, for him, a profoundly spiritual practice that entailed seeing and witnessing. Retiring to Cape Canaveral, Ellis cultivated this practice of presence in his landscape photography, painting, and poetry. Each day, he strived to see, to acknowledge, and to be present with the world, both in its beauty and in its painful loneliness. He chose not to look away from any of it.
He also practiced presence in his relationships. He was someone who loved to joke, was quick to laugh, and refused to take himself too seriously. When Gustavo Gutiérrez visited Baylor, Ellis convinced this world-renown scholar—who, albeit a giant within the field of liberation theology, is a man of decidedly modest height—to hoist himself up into a full-sized pickup truck wearing a Texas-sized cowboy hat. I still remember the photo. In it, Gutiérrez looked like a child trying on his parent’s clothing. He was lifting the brim of the hat so that he could peer out from beneath it and was grinning from ear to ear. Ellis tended to his friendships. He was the kind of person who kept in touch. Even after illness restricted his movement and sapped his energy, he stayed connected and as present as he could with the people in his life.
I was able to speak on the phone with Marc three weeks before he died. We talked about a lot of things: sickness, death, anger, but also love and family. We talked about the beauty of life and fear of the unknown. I told him that I loved him. I told him how much he meant to me. And he told me how thankful he was that we had encountered one another. The influence of Ellis’s life extends beyond his scholarship and prophetic witness. For those of us who knew him, it was his life of authentic encounter that impacted us the most. Marc Ellis encountered us, and in the sacredness of meeting, we were forever changed.
Jessica Wai-Fong Wong is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Azusa Pacific University and works in political and liberation theologies with a focus on race, gender, society, and visual theory. She is an ordained ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and holds degrees in Christian theology and ethics from Duke Divinity School and Duke University. She is the author of Disordered: The Holy Icon and Racial Myths(Baylor University Press, 2021) and co-author of the curriculum Lamenting Racism: A Christian Response to Racial Injustice(MennoMedia, 2021). Her current research project—Black Monsters, Yellow Ghosts—considers the racial and sociopolitical dynamics of Asian American invisibility and Black hypervisibility as they function to create docile subjects and maintain established systems of power.
Codex Ephraemi Rescript, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. This manuscript contained a medieval saint’s life written over text from a Biblical text, which is therefore difficult to decipher. Via Wikimedia Commons.
As a Christian social ethicist, I reflect on the issues of war and peace with an assumption that Christians live in two conflicted understandings of time: linear and palimpsestic. These two perspectives have shaped Christian discourse on God, Jesus, war, peace, and apocalypse. The linear frame sees time as one-directional from the past to the future. In contrast, M. Jacqui Alexander conceptualizes time as “neither vertically accumulated nor horizontally teleological.” Alexander frames time as a palimpsest, “a parchment that has been inscribed two or three times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased and, therefore, remaining still partly visible” (190). A palimpsest brings the past into the present and the future and casts the future into the present and the past. It leads one to scrutinize what has been erased, what has been rewritten on the text, and what traces will remain. War stories and memories move between these two frames of time, evoking and triggering the memories and traumas of different wars. It is based on this conceptualization of temporality that I approach the Israeli war on Gaza, searching for peace in the remains of war ruins. More specifically, in a world where no one knows peace free from war, is it possible to imagine a theology of peace that can sustain Christians of conscience in a firm belief in the God of peace, bring global citizens together in resistance to militarized violence, and renew our creative and strategic skills in building peace?
Memories of War across Time and Space: Gaza and Korea
The escalated war on Gaza is not an isolated, unique event. Instead, as the war has been revealed in the media since October 7, 2023, global spectators have processed it through their (collective) memories and experiences of other wars. In my case, Gaza evokes memories of the Korean War, known as the forgotten war in the United States. The full-blown Korean War broke out in June 1950 and ended in July 1953 when the United States/United Nations and the China-North Korea alliance reached an armistice agreement. The war killed as many as four million people, mostly Korean civilians. Although the Demilitarized Zone and the U.S. military’s presence in South Korea are constant reminders of the ongoing Korean War, I had no direct physical experience of the war. Nonetheless, like many Koreans and Korean Americans, I have emotionally and psychologically experienced the effects of the war because of transgenerational memories and trauma that have been passed on to me.
In the summer of 2012, I visited Nablus in the West Bank of Palestine as part of a political tour group organized by the Green Olive Collective. The tour exposed the participants to realities in the West Bank and the Negev desert. When my group walked through the ruins from the Second Intifada (2000–2005), memories of the Korean War were relayed: bombed buildings, half-fallen walls with bullet holes, and broken armored vehicles. The ruins were confined to a tiny area close to the city center. Although the day tour allowed me to explore the beauty of Palestinian art and culture, after facing the war ruins left by the Israeli military, I realized that I had walked through one of the world’s most militarized zones, if not a war zone. Palestinians have made their lives on the remains of war ruins and continue to constantly be exposed to one militarized episode of violence after another.
Damage in Gaza Strip during October 2023. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Grace Cho insightfully argues that “the trauma of militarized violence can traverse boundaries of time and space so that the effects of military bombing … can at once be embodied in two seemingly distinct geographical and historical locations,” such as Palestine in 2024 and Korea in 1950 (57–58). Cho’s argument allows me to see the war on Gaza as the reminiscence of the Korean War, or the Korean War as an evocation of a future Gaza. By studying a “one-hundred-year war” against Palestinians, I could investigate the Korean War and its necropolitical logic (politics of death) more critically. As Achille Mbembe argues, war is “a means of achieving sovereignty as much as a way of exercising (its) right to kill” (66). The Korean War allowed the Allied Forces, mainly the U.S. Armed Forces, to exercise their unregulated killing of Korean civilians, regardless of their political affiliations. Subsequently, the war structured a post-war Korean society and caged it in a permanent state of warfare.
“Brutality” may not justly describe the intense level of atrocities done to the collective body of Koreans. Like Palestinians in Gaza, Koreans experienced “fire and fury” seventy-four years ago. U.S. airstrikes and napalm bombings wreaked havoc on major cities in North Korea, such as Pyongyang, Sinuiju, Wonsan, and Hamheung. These cities had no standing buildings left at the end of the Korean War. The secret U.S. military files declassified in the early 2000s suggest that the U.S. armed forces knowingly killed civilians, including women, children, and refugees, even in the southern Korean peninsula. They justified these killings with the logic of preventing possible insurgencies by communists disguised among refugees or hiding in villages (aka “human shields”). The U.S. military considered all Koreans as (potential) communist enemies to be eliminated. A similar logic is manifested in Gaza. Suppose that mutilated, killed, and burnt bodies and towns during the Korean War illustrated the U.S.-led fear and hatred of dehumanized communists while the collective Korean body was equated with communism. In that case, Palestinians’ debilitated bodies and devastated Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafat are equated with religiously motivated terrorists by the Israeli government and its global allies.
War Logic
The present moment of the war on Gaza is accessible through traces of the Korean War because of not only the intensity of militarized violence but also the imperial logic behind the war and sovereignty’s impromptu response to armed violence. Indeed, like the U.S. Air Forces in the Korean War, the Israeli airstrikes and saturated bombing on every part of Gaza debilitated Palestinian civilians and their schools, homes, houses of worship, and hospitals. As Sharon Welch argues, “Cruelty can be intoxicating,” and, therefore, “the use of violence, even for noble ends, can spark excessive violence” (38). Images from Gaza since October 7, 2023, resonate with the shock doctrine used in many wars, such as those in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Pacific Gulf, Iraq, and more.
The genocidal aspects of the said wars are linked with colonial history in those regions and, more specifically, racial, cultural, and religious prejudices against formerly colonized people of color or colonizers’ sense of moral superiority. According to Jodi Kim, like the war in Vietnam, the Korean War could have been seen as a newly emancipated third world country’s anticolonial nationalist conflict; instead, the United States hijacked the war to consolidate its power in Asia Pacific, interpreting the war as part of communist attacks on the free capitalist world. Subsequently, the Korean War would enable the United States to intervene in various wars in a post-colonial world based on its geopolitical interests. Similarly, Israel and the United States have portrayed Palestinians’ various violent and nonviolent endeavors to reclaim their self-governance and sovereignty as religiously motivated terrorist attacks against liberal democratic states.
Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) from the South Korean side. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The war on Gaza has effaced memories of nonviolent peacemaking, making Palestinians, Jews of conscience, and global citizens in solidarity with Palestinians irrelevant in Israeli–Palestinian relations. For this reason, I encounter the ghosts of the Korean War in Gaza. Although the war on Gaza does not identically align with the Korean War, they share the historical roots of the colonial and Cold War logic and the prioritization of U.S.-centered international security over human security. The Korean War and the Nakba erupted in the global transition from territorial colonialism to neo-colonialism. More than seven decades later, Gaza still demonstrates the tenacity of territorial colonialism; the contemporary Korean peninsula meanwhile is marred with competition and conflict augmented by neocolonial empires (i.e., U.S., Japan, China, and Russia) and sub-empires (i.e., South Korea).
A Theological Reflection on Time: Memories of War and Peace
The logic of war relies on linear thinking about time: the beginning, the middle, and the end, the latter of which creates a clean slate for a new beginning. This logic aligns with the ideology of Christian triumphalism that depicts Jesus Christ as the mighty warrior who will accomplish the ultimate victory over evil and end human history. Christian triumphalism is an apocalyptic and Manichean vision that is shared among many evangelicals who see this world as a constant battlefield. For these Christians, violence is necessary and even holy because it eradicates evil and makes possible the creation of a new world. Christian triumphalist ideology interprets the death and resurrection of Jesus as a military tactic to win over evil. Emilie Townes points out the historical infusion of Christian triumphalism in American imperial desire. If the United States were called to become a new Jerusalem, City on the Hill, its theo-political responsibility would destroy one evil after another until the final battle. Christian triumphalism has been alive for many years in U.S. domestic and foreign policies. For instance, the United States justified the Korean War as a means to defeat “godless communism,” just as U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East often invoked the name of a Christian god.
Whenever militarized violence erupts, the linear time frame recalls past episodes of violence. Yet, memories of war and only partially erased stories of massacres and genocide constantly haunt linearly remembered war stories. Within this linear frame, peace is imagined only following war, violence, and killing. As a result, peace is often defined as an absence of armed conflict (negative peace) or as attainable only through military power. In a palimpsestic time, however, peace is always alive, creating multiple meeting points for past, present, and future peace activists. God’s time is palimpsestic, just as the name of Jesus Christ is invoked at the Eucharistic table, where the living and the dead are all invited, sharing meals in solidarity to realize God’s peace and justice or paradise on earth. The peace of Christ at the Eucharist is manifested through sharing bread and wine rather than through bloody crucifixion in the hands of the Roman Empire.
Memories of war and only partially erased stories of massacres and genocide constantly haunt linearly remembered war stories. Within this linear frame, peace is imagined only following war, violence, and killing.
A palimpsestic approach traces peace as it is embodied and practiced by ordinary people who have left cracks in the imperial history of war. Palestinian Christian activists such as Jean Zaru illuminate nonviolent peacemaking as an embodied practice rather than a theory, principle, or noble idea. Zaru interweaves her multiple social identities of being an Arab, Palestinian, Quaker, and a woman with practicing nonviolence as a practical way of everyday living. Her aim is to achieve justice and peace without losing the practitioner’s integrity. Memories of Gaza are not simply about killed, mutilated, and debilitated bodies of Palestinian women, men, and children but also their persistent resistance to Israel’s militarized violence.
Different war stories should be read together critically, comparatively, and relationally. By doing that, we can interrogate the complexities of militarized violence and the banality of evil. Peace is never erased from human history but is often hidden and palimpsestic. Even if peace activism is documented, peace activists’ embodied spirituality, steadfastness, and imagination cannot be captured in written documents. This embodied peace only remains in our memories, which can be accessible only when we consciously embody it. If we can ever talk about a theology of peace in Gaza and in Korea, this theology is grounded not in the remains of the war ruins but in the palimpsest of peace.
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).
On August 5, 2024 Students cheering the victory at the Raju sculpture at Dhaka University area after the fall of Sheikh Hasina. Photo courtesy of Sudeepto Salam. Used with permission.
Bangladesh stands at a crossroads, experiencing what many call a “second liberation” after the ignominious exit of Sheikh Hasina, its long-serving ruler. Hasina’s 16-year authoritarian streak ended abruptly in August 2024 after a month of student-led protests triggered by a non-partisan resistance against quota reforms for government jobs. These protests have now led to the formation of an interim government headed by Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus. This new administration faces the challenge of guiding Bangladesh towards better governance and participatory elections, although no election timetable has been set.
As Bangladesh transitions from autocracy to popular governance, it faces numerous political, social, economic, and legal challenges. Yet, many Bangladeshi youth remain cautiously optimistic about this moment’s potential to build a better future. These street-hardened young men and women, who often bore the brunt of Hasina’s oppressive regime, are now poised to create a system that prioritizes human dignity, equality, and fundamental rights—marking a sharp break from repression, corruption, and nepotism of the past.
The Bangladeshi youth have every reason to be hopeful. Their country, with the world’s eighth-largest population, also boasts the seventh-largest youth demographic globally. This newfound zeal for active participation in social, political, and economic processes empowers them to drive democratic reform, social justice, and economic stability. Bangladesh’s students have initiated a successful revolution, drawing lessons from movements like the 2011 Arab Spring. Now, its administrators must learn from the failures of those past movements to ensure lasting change.
Reasons for Hope
In a recent address to the nation, Professor Yunus placed renewed trust in Bangladesh’s youth. He and his team of advisors seem to recognize the critical role these young people will play in rebuilding the country and driving proposed reforms. If there was ever a time for Bangladesh to affirm the power of its own people over foreign or capitalist influences, it is now. Fulfilling these promises may also require drafting a new constitution—a demand gaining traction among legal experts and intellectuals. Many Bangladeshis believe that the 1972 constitution, tarnished by opportunistic amendments, no longer reflects the aspiration of the Bangladeshi people or adequately safeguards their rights.
On August 4, 2024 students and others took to the streets in Dhaka to demand the resignation of Sheikh Hasina. Image courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.
Bangladesh’s recent experiences provide valuable insights for politicians, policymakers, rights advocates, and scholars of Islamic politics. With a population of 171 million, 91% of whom are Muslim, Islamic political parties have wielded notable influence since the 1990s, when the country began its transition into democracy. Despite this influence, electoral politics have been largely dominated by two secular centrist blocs—the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Awami League. During this period, support for Islamic parties ranged between 5% and 15%, with Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) historically leading the Islamic political bloc, while Hefazat-e-Islam (HI) emerged later as a pressure group, closely supported by madrasa students and teachers.
Islamic parties in Bangladesh faced challenges even before Sheikh Hasina’s return to power in 2009. Frequently overshadowed by the two dominant political parties, they struggled to balance religious and democratic ideals, often failing to find a viable middle path. When Hasina returned to power in 2009, she exploited this situation by separating secular and religious factions within the opposition and implemented a divide-and-rule strategy to weaken them. She frequently branded her adversaries as extremists, despite their status as legally registered political parties within an electoral democracy.
The Impact of Hasina’s Authoritarian Rule
Sheikh Hasina’s administration systematically targeted and prosecuted both BNP and JI leaders after 2009, with a particular focus on JI. Between 2012 and 2014, the administration used the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) to neutralize JI’s leadership, handing down death sentences that were widely criticized as politically motivated. The BNP, then JI’s coalition partner, also suffered, with one of its former members of parliament executed by the tribunal. Other Islamic parties were similarly targeted. In May 2013, Sheikh Hasina’s security forces violently dispersed a Hefazat-e-Islam sit-in using live ammunition, resulting in numerous fatalities. Human Rights Watch reported that at least 150 people were killed by security forces in Bangladesh between January and May 2013 alone.
On August 2, 2024, students in the High Court Area of Dhaka demanded the resignation of Sheikh Hasina with a single-point agenda. Photo courtesy of Sudeepto Salam. Used with permission.
A particularly dark episode during Hasina’s tenure was the 2009 Border Guards Bangladesh (formerly Bangladesh Rifles, or BDR) massacre, in which 74 people, including 57 army officers, were killed. BDR soldiers launched a brutal assault on army officers and their families at their headquarters in Pilkhana, Dhaka, resulting in extensive casualties. The violence persisted for over 48 hours, with minimal intervention from the Hasina government. Instead of coordinating rescue operations with military officials, Hasina and her advisors opted to negotiate with a faction of the BDR personnel. Moreover, her decision to grant a general amnesty during the crisis allowed many perpetrators to escape, further exacerbating the situation. This incident significantly eroded the army’s trust in Hasina and her party.
Under Hasina’s rule, Bangladesh experienced a troubling culture of impunity, characterized by judicial murders and enforced disappearances. Since 2009, security forces have been implicated in over 600 enforced disappearances, with only around 100 individuals returned alive, and some detainees remained missing for years. Two recent cases highlight this pattern—a Supreme Court lawyer and a retired Brigadier General, both sons of former JI leaders, were abducted by plainclothes police in 2016 and only released in 2024, following Hasina’s departure.
How the Youth Revolt Took Shape
The current generation of Bangladeshi youth, who never experienced a free and fair election, were frustrated by high unemployment and an inequitable quota system in government jobs. As of 2024, 56% of these positions were filled based on quotas rather than merit, with nearly 30% reserved for descendants of freedom fighters—a small segment of the population. University students were particularly aggrieved by allegations that Hasina’s party officials exploited these positions for personal and political gain. Additionally, an executive order from 2018 abolishing the quota system was overturned by a High Court ruling in June 2024, leading students to question Hasina’s sincerity on the issue. In March 2024, the Dhaka University administration prohibited students from holding a Qur’an recitation ceremony, obstructing their religious practices. This led to increasing frustration among the students.
On August 5, 2024 people entered the premises of the Bangladesh National Parliament House. Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.
The student-led protests that evolved into a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in Bangladesh offer valuable lessons for global nonviolent resistance. The movement was notable for its nonpartisan and inclusive approach, with leaders focusing on solidarity around common issues. The protesters were deliberate in avoiding any religious motivations for their demands, contrasting sharply with attempts by Hasina’s administration and allies to portray the revolt as a conservative Islamist movement against a secular state, blaming Jamaat-e-Islami for the unrest. Hours before her abdication, Hasina ordered a ban on JI and its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, without providing specific allegations. In an interview, Syeda Rizwana Hasan, a current advisor to the interim government, praised the movement’s broad-based support, noting that it encompassed students from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds:
This [was] not a Muslim students-led movement; it was a movement that had students from the Hindu community, Christian community, and indigenous people.
The student leaders demonstrated a keen understanding of the broader national context and carefully designed their protest. Despite pressures to call for Sheikh Hasina’s resignation, they initially focused on demanding that she fulfill her prior commitments. Only after seeing widespread popular support did they escalate their demands. As one young female activist aptly captured the prevailing sentiment:
There is no way we can go back [to the status quo]; the police may be chasing us now, but it is freedom that lies ahead.
The strategic acumen of the student leaders was clear as they maintained pressure despite setbacks. In late July, when six top leaders were detained and forced to halt the protests abruptly, the next tier of leaders quickly stepped in to continue the demonstrations until the first group was released. Capitalizing on this momentum, they announced a “Long March to Dhaka,” originally planned for August 6 but moved to August 5 in anticipation of victory. Hasina’s security forces struggled to keep up, and the Army, which had supported the police with live ammunition against protesters, eventually withdrew and informed Hasina that soldiers would no longer enforce the curfew. This shift provided the unarmed students and protesters with the critical respite they needed.
Looking to Bangladesh’s Future
In the wake of Hasina’s downfall, questions have emerged about why the regime failed to foresee its collapse. Even Indian intelligence was caught off guard by the erosion of Hasina’s control over her security forces and the shifting political dynamics in Bangladesh. For those who did not closely follow the youth movement or were disillusioned by the perceived lack of social commitment among Gen Z, doubts remain about the true catalysts of this revolution. How did Bangladeshi youth manage to overcome dysfunctional politics, a near-silenced civil society, and widespread fear to shape their destiny? Was religion a factor? Were foreign influences involved? In this piece, we have argued that the student leaders emphasized a political vision centered on life, dignity, and economic justice rather than sectarian religious goals. Beyond that, we will now explore the impact of another significant factor: India’s outsized role in Bangladeshi politics.
In analyzing the dynamics of the revolution, foreign factors, particularly India’s support for Hasina, emerge as a crucial element. Many Bangladeshi youth viewed Hasina as a symbol of Indian dominance and sought to assert their nation’s independence. While their revolution was primarily driven by demands for employment, freedom of expression, and the right to protest, it was also fueled by a resolve to combat the corruption linked to India’s steadfast backing of Hasina’s regime. Both the BJP and Congress in India backed Hasina’s Awami League, largely disregarding the significant support for the BNP. Additionally, the youth were keenly aware of India’s role in endorsing and providing diplomatic cover to three contentious national elections in Bangladesh —2014, 2018, and 2024—two of which were boycotted by the main opposition and all of which were widely criticized as fraudulent.
Despite these external factors, it was the Bangladeshi youth who were the true driving force behind this revolution. Initially led by students from both private and public universities, the movement quickly grew to include young people from across the country and diverse socio-political backgrounds. United, these youth fearlessly engaged in a struggle rooted in opposition to the quota system, in whose undoing they found the seeds of their country’s freedom.
On August 8, 2024 Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus took the oath as the head of the interim government at Bangabhaban. Photo courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.
Prapti Taposhi, a student activist, succinctly captures the stakes: “With great powers comes great responsibility.” The interim government, now including two student advisors, faces the formidable task of navigating deep political divisions and stabilizing the nation. Key challenges include addressing systemic corruption, restructuring institutions, and ensuring that the revolution’s gains lead to a more just and equitable Bangladesh. Student leaders have called for a thorough overhaul of the political system, demanding accountability from future administrations. Given Hasina’s extensive control over state institutions—including the judiciary, bureaucracy, police, and military—meaningful reform will likely require a thorough re-evaluation of the administrative apparatus, potentially involving the removal of Hasina’s appointees. For Bangladesh, anything less may prove inadequate.
The military’s top brass have so far aligned with the new government’s efforts, while the role of India, the regional hegemon, remains uncertain. The Indian government is expected to adopt a cautious yet strategic approach in its dealings with Bangladesh in the coming months, as indicated by recent comments from the Indian Prime Minister. Additionally, the Bangladeshi government may request India’s extradition of Sheikh Hasina, who faces impending murder charges. Despite the challenges ahead, Bangladesh appears to have weathered a dramatic political storm, thanks to its guardian youth. One hopes that these youth will also steer the country to safety.
Mohammed Boshir Uddin is a journalist and educator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He holds graduate degrees in theology and social work from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet. He is also a participant in the University of Notre Dame's Madrasa Discourse Program. Currently, Bashir serves as a Sub Editor at Kaler Kantha, a national newspaper based in Dhaka. In addition, he teaches and coordinates curriculum for Darul Arqam, a premium Bangladeshi institution affiliated with Al Azhar University in Egypt. Bashir’s debut book, Master O Kata Tarer Golpo, was published in 2017, and his upcoming book, Partition, Independence, and Ulama of India, is set to be released in 2025.
Helal Mohammed Khan is a Lecturer of Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University. He earned his Ph.D. in Peace Studies and Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where he also served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar at the Center for Social Concerns. Helal holds graduate degrees in Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh (UK), Social & Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leuven (Belgium), and Defence Studies from Bangladesh’s National University. Helal's doctoral research focused on the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who resettled in the American cities of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Fort Wayne. He is currently working on a book project provisionally titled “The Abling Refugee and Regimes of Cooperation: The Burmese Rohingya in the American Midwest.”
War – 10/9/2023 (first in the series) by Marc H. Ellis. Used with permission.
For the eight months prior to Marc Ellis’s death on June 8, 2024, the war in Gaza had been raging. Though cancer ravaged his body, he continued to post on Facebook before he felt too weak to do so. His posts described his disgust and lament over the war, his reflections on life and death, his illness and treatment, and the dreams he had. Sometimes, they were like a long stream of consciousness. After Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip, Ellis also documented his responses to the war through painting. These posts had just one word, “war,” and the date with the accompanying painting below. He took up photography and painting during his later years. I imagine that when words failed, only art and the canvas could express the palimpsest of his moods and emotions.
As a Jew growing up in the United States, Ellis took up the plight of Palestinians and developed a Jewish liberation theology in solidarity with them. He argued that Jewish liberation could not be achieved without the liberation of Palestinians. For him, Jews cannot use the painful history of the Holocaust to justify the displacement, dispossession, killing, and harassment of another people.
It is a pity that Ellis did not live to see the liberation of Palestinians, but instead witnessed Gaza’s history taking a dark turn. His persistence and dedication to a cause that cannot be achieved in his lifetime reminds me of a Chinese saying, “知其不可為而為之” (Do something even though one knows it is impossible). This saying was originally used to describe Confucius, who persisted in persuading society to accept his moral values, even though he knew it was futile. Later, it was used to mean that when one decides to do something, one should consider whether it is right or wrong, not possible or impossible. One may not achieve the goal, but the process matters. One acts according to one’s conscience, though one may not succeed. Ellis worked with Jews of Conscience, and his decades of speaking truth to power inspired postcolonial theologians who fought for noble but distant goals.
War – 3/31/24 (Easter Sunday) by Marc H. Ellis. Used with permission.
I first met Ellis when he delivered a lecture on the day of Yom Kippur in 1991 at Union Theological Seminary. He spoke about his Jewish upbringing and explained his Jewish liberation theology. I remember leaving the lecture hall admiring his courage to speak truth to power. I had renewed respect for the Jewish tradition, which has continuously raised prophets who speak to the human condition. Jewish prophets offered wisdom and solace when the people were weak and oppressed, and caution and admonition when they had gained power but deviated from God’s commandment for justice.
A few years after I listened to Ellis, I began to study postcolonial thought because Hong Kong, where I was born and grew up, was going to be returned from the British to the Chinese in 1997. Some of my reflections and writings have been published in Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology and other works. I argued that theology in the past centuries has been impacted by modernity/coloniality, and that an essential task facing theology is to decolonize the mind and free Christianity from colonizing bias and structures.
Although Ellis did not identify himself as a postcolonial theologian, his thoughts contributed to the study of religion and empire, dispossession, diaspora, exile, the global prophetic, and interreligious solidarity—themes that postcolonial scholars care about. He spoke highly of the work of Edward Said, a Palestinian-American pioneer in postcolonial theory. Ellis wrote, “Said functioned as a contemporary prophet for Jews, warning us that our newfound power has become a form of idolatry” (139). He also contributed to a volume celebrating Said’s legacy of emancipation and representation. In turn, Said affirmed Ellis’s work and appreciated his activism for Palestinians.
Said argued that Palestinians have the power and right to narrate their own stories because many of the reports and writings on Palestinian people, culture, and history are biased and skewed. In a certain sense, much of Ellis’s published work, commentaries, Facebook posts, and paintings are attempts to claim the power to narrate an alternative understanding of Jewish identity, history, and theology that is different from Zionism and collusion with the State of Israel. His fidelity to the prophetic tradition of Judaism and his outspoken stance made him a target of the Jewish establishment. He became an exile in his own community. Like the prophets of old who were rejected—Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—many Jewish people did not accept Ellis.
His fidelity to the prophetic tradition of Judaism and his outspoken stance made him a target of the Jewish establishment. He became an exile in his own community.
As a postcolonial theologian, I admired most his courage to attack what he coined “Constantinian Judaism.” Postcolonial and decolonial scholars and theologians have challenged the ways Constantinian Christianity has colluded with colonialism, imperial expansion, White supremacy, genocide, and the plunder of the earth. Ellis insisted that the collusion with state power is not limited to Christianity, for other religious traditions are not immune. Thus, there is Constantinian Judaism, Constantinian Islam, and so forth. He rejected the equation of Judaism with Zionism and challenged the view that if one does not support the policies of the State of Israel, one is antisemitic.
Ellis’s theological and political analysis provides methodological insights that are helpful for postcolonial theologians. He drank deep in the well of his Jewish tradition. He searched broadly for wisdom and inspiration from the Torah and other parts of scripture. He dialogued and debated with his teachers, such as Richard Rubenstein. He interrogated the works of Jewish luminaries—Ellie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas—to answer the question, “Are Jews destined to become conquerors and oppressors? Or, with our history in mind, can we change directions?” (11). Ecumenical in his thinking, Ellis read broadly outside the Jewish tradition and consulted the works of Latin American theology, feminist theology, Black theology, and other global theological movements. He demonstrated that those who are prophets withing their tradition and hence marginalized and in exile in their communities have much to learn from one another and with which to support one another.
Ellis rejected the equation of Judaism with Zionism and challenged the view that if one does not support the policies of the State of Israel, one is antisemitic.
Ellis shared the postcolonial position that identities are not rigid and should not be constructed in static and binary ways. The relationship between the self and the Other is fluidly constructed according to changing political and social situations. A binary understanding of colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed, White and colored, masculine and feminine, and Israelis and Palestinians hardens the minds and closes off possibilities for solidarity. An identity in flux allows adaptations to new situations and opens to future possibilities.
Kwok Pui Lan with Marc H. Ellis. Photo courtesy of the author.
Even when hope seems impossible, one practices defiance and daily acts of resistance. Ellis was constantly on the move: jotting down his thoughts on napkins, envelopes, and scraps of paper, writing journals, using social media to express his take on current events, writing voluminously, traveling to lecture around the world, responding to his critics, passing his legacy on to his sons, keeping Sabbath, studying the Torah, meeting visitors, painting, answering emails and requests, and visiting his “Chapel of Love” in nature near his beloved beach.
Ellis’s unfinished work will be carried on by his students and others who have learned and been touched by his life, scholarship, and activism. Confucius reportedly had seventy-two students who mastered his thought and helped to develop the Confucian tradition. I am certain Ellis has more students and admirers in the internet age who will continue to follow his model and do the impossible. His student Santiago Slabodsky learned from him about being a public intellectual and taking risks. He wrote, “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.” Jessica Wai-Fong Wong, an undergraduate student who took Ellis’s class, said that Ellis’s teaching and prompting helped her confront the idolatry of Whiteness. “Marc Ellis is the first prophetic voice to challenge the hold that whiteness had over my heart and my thoroughly racialized theo-political imagination” (49). As Ellis had helped her, she now tries to debunk the White mythologies in her students’ minds.
Even when he was dying, Ellis did not believe history is destiny, for it is open to change, though sometimes slower than we have hoped. Reflecting on the aftermath of October 7 in early spring of 2024, Ellis concluded his blog with the following: “History is open. It varies between nightmare and closeness. One never knows when a path forward will open. Those who want it closed will work toward that end. Those who seek an opening must continue on. It is our fidelity that we must pursue, with others. It is the only path we have.”
“Not in My Name” poster held during a protest the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual meeting in Washington DC, March 26, 2017. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
When Kamala Harris nominated Tim Walz for vice president, the New York Times ran a curious headline: “Harris’ Choice of Walz Over Shapiro Mollifies the Left but Misses a Chance to Reassure Jews.” As a headline (later slightly altered), it less reports on the news than it puts forward a telling chain of significations and oppositions. Why would Jewish voters need reassurance from Democrats? Are American Jews part of the left wing of the Democratic Party, or its opposition? What conflict is there between the Democratic Party’s left and the Jewish community? In short, in a sentence in which the opposition to “left” should be “right” or perhaps “center,” the word “Jew” has instead been substituted.
In his lecture “Old and New Identities,” Stuart Hall makes the observation that one has to be “positioned somewhere in order to speak” (72). The construction of identities is not only based in one’s history or communal belonging, but also in politics and ideology. Hall charts the decline of “class based” identities in the west and the decline of socialist movements alongside the rise of pan-African identities in the Caribbean such as “Blackness” as part of the global decolonial movements (75). In that new category, Hall suggests, he was called upon in his adulthood as very different kind of subject than he was in his youth in Jamaica.
Something rather similar, if also inverted, has been taking place within the category of “Jewishness” in the last several decades in the west. While “Jewishness,” at least since the advent of Christianity, has been constituted by a figural meaning beyond its halachic definition (which defines Jewish identity as being a member of the Jewish religion and/or a descendent of a Jewish mother), its meaning at least since the 19th century had been for a century rather stable. The Dreyfus Affair may be remembered as the beginning of modern political antisemitism; it is also marks one beginning of late 19th and early 20th century identity politics.
As historian Stephen Wilson pointed out, the Dreyfus trial was not immediately perceived as political. It was only after Emile Zola and several other prominent French intellectuals came out in defense of the Jewish artillery officer that socialist parties and liberals took up Dreyfus’s case as a cause. In response, the Right mobilized a populist campaign of anti-Jewish pogroms and street battles. As the French writer and socialite Baroness Steinheil commented, the trial “is no longer between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, but between the Republic and enemies of the Republic, between radicals and socialists on one hand, and Royalists and ‘anti-Semites’ on the other” (102). That Dreyfus himself was neither a radical nor a reactionary mattered very little: he and his “identity” had been abstracted, or perhaps conscripted, into an ideology: “antisemitism” was now an explicitly political conflict, taken up by the Right and the Left on opposite sides, for the first time European history.
As is well known, the association of Jews and the Left long precedes Dreyfus, going at least as far back as the French Revolution. After the revolution, the new government recognized Jews as full citizens, a first for a European state. And of course, long after the Dreyfus Affair, Jews themselves embraced, if not liberalism, radicalism, with a large and vibrant Jewish presence in the American socialist and labor movements from late 19th century to the Cold War, along with over-representations of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and in left parties in South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil.
Indeed, after the Enlightenment began the dominant antisemitic image of the Jew was transformed from a Christ-killer to a secular revolutionary: one who bears the perversions of modernity, whether in the form of global capitalism or communism. According to Paul Hanebrink, the imagery of the Judeo-Bolshevik often simply translated Christian iconography of the Jewish devil to a secular force of social evil: for instance, in the anti-communist propaganda poster featuring a satanic, red-fleshed Leon Trotsky on top of a mountain of skulls. The Jewish financier and the Jewish communist both embody and concretize the abstractions of capitalism and state management together.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Since the early 1970s however, there has been a steady campaign led by key organizations in the putatively liberal Jewish establishment to remake the concept of antisemitism and by extension, Jewish identity. In 1974, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the ADL issued its opening salvo in what would become a decades long attempt by the Jewish establishment to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Their argument in the influential The New Antisemitism (1974) had two parts: the first, that Israel is “the collective Jew,” in Antony Lerman’s phrasing, a representative of the Jewish people concretized into a state. Rather than view Israel as a military power and client of the world’s first truly global hegemon, the United States, Israel was framed as a schlemiel among nations: a target for the unquenched rage the world still bares against Jews. And perhaps more insidious still, The New Antisemitism made a subtle but important substitution: the Jewish state was now a figure for the global Jewish people; indeed, the former subsumed the latter.
Rather than view Israel as a military power and client of the world’s first truly global hegemon, the United States, Israel was framed as a schlemiel among nations: a target for the unquenched rage the world still bares against Jews.
It’s important to note how much of a change the framing was: rather than understand the foundation of Israel as a conflict over land or geopolitical power, Forster and Epstein framed it as a question of Jewish identity. Israeli wars, including against the British, the 1948 and 1956 Arab-Israeli Wars, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants were historically framed as political questions over national identity, land, and citizenship. When Hannah Arendt wrote “Zionism Reconsidered” in 1944, she articulated the conflict as between the “Arab peoples” and European settlers—not antisemites against Jews (344). Likewise, there have been attempts by Netanyahu to retroactively blame Jerusalem’s grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini for the Holocaust. Such claims are not uttered because they are believable, but because they fit an uncomfortable past into a new framework.
While the association of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not new and is no longer news, with everyone from Jewish university presidents to anti-Zionist students to politicians and intellectuals smeared with the term for their criticism of Israel, such a construction has not only changed the discourse around Zionism, it has dramatically changed who and what is considered legibly Jewish, and thus what Jewishness has come to mean.
Perhaps most famously, the attack on Jeremy Corbyn while he was leader of the Labour Party in Britain not only targeted Corbyn as an antisemite, but also mobilized a new definition of Jewishness as a collective interest. This campaign denied Corbyn elected office; as importantly it reframed Jewish interest: Jews are supporters of the status quo and enemies of the Left. That this construction was primarily disseminated by non-Jewish activists and media personnel did not matter: the Jew as anti-communist and upholder of Western (neo)liberalism was complete.
Jeremy Corbin at a rally in solidarity with Palestine on May 15, 2021. Image via Flickr user: Revolutionary Communist Party. CC BY 2.0.
This brings us back to Josh Shapiro. He was clearly not the first Jewish presidential or vice-presidential candidate to be denied his Party’s support. For example, in dramatic fashion, Bernie Sanders was denied by the Democratic Party establishment during the 2020 primary. Yet this did not raise concerns in the New York Times or among Democratic Jewish commentators such, as Eli Klein. One can neither argue that Sanders does not publicly identify as Jewish, nor that Sanders lacks his own loyal base of Jewish supporters, from “Jews for Sanders,” to the progressive Jewish magazine Jewish Currents, from IfNotNow to the Jewish caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America. This difference between the Jewishness of Sanders’s candidacy and Shapiro’s has less to do with who is more Jewish; it has a great deal to do with the way the idea of Jewishness has been constructed in the last few decades. Or perhaps, to channel Hall, how Jews have been positioned to speak.
Increasingly, media outlets from The New York Times to Fox News the New York Post have run stories on the defection of American Jews from the Democratic Party over the Democrats’ selection of Walz over Shapiro. In another headline on the topic, the NYT speaks of “heightened concerns” Jews have over the decision; the NYP states frankly that Jews are abandoning the Democrats for the GOP over Shapiro; Fox News reports that Walz is a “far left nightmare” for “Jewish organizations.” The assumption in all of these stories is not only that Jews care only about Israel, but also that Jews are a singular ethnic force of conservativism within the Democratic Party.
This difference between the Jewishness of Sanders’s candidacy and Shapiro’s has less to do with who is more Jewish; it has a great deal to do with the way the idea of Jewishness has been constructed in the last few decades.
A problem with this construction is that few American Jews seem to agree. Not only has the overwhelming Jewish identification with the Democratic Party remained stable as of April of 2024 according to Pew, the nomination of Tim Walz has been reported to be very popular among Jewish Minnesotans. Walz is also the vice presidential pick most aligned with mainstream American Jewish values, especially on reproductive rights, gun control, and an expanded welfare state. It also needs to be said that Israel is consistently ranked as a low priority among 96 percent of Jewish voters—behind climate change, the economy, antisemitism, and health care. And further, it is no secret that the consensus over Israel in the Jewish community has long since ended: one-third of American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide; 60 percent of American Jews believe that the Biden administration should embargo arms to Israel; over one quarter of American Jews see Israel as an apartheid state. If one selects for younger Jews, the number is closer to half.
And while it is arguable whether Walz is a “leftist,” what is of note is the way American Jews are deployed as wedge constituency by media outlets from the nominally liberal Times to the conservative Fox News and Post. This is an intensification, or perhaps a concretization, of the “The New Antisemitism” thesis. While Shapiro’s Zionism is far more virulent than Walz’s—he infamously likened Palestine solidarity protesters to the “Ku Klux Klan”—there is no suggestion that Walz is an anti-Zionist, let alone that he supports calls to embargo weapons for Israel. Thus Jews have gone from a constituency less formed by a support of Zionism, to a constituency marked by an ethno-conservativism. While the choice of Walz over Shapiro was overdetermined, it is clear that Walz was perceived as the more progressive of the two and was more suitable to the left wing of the Democratic Party. Any shift to the left in the Democratic Party is framed no longer simply as a threat to wealthy donors or tax cheats, but also to Jews as an entire people. In this reading, it is Walz’ s and Corbyn’s leftism that is more dangerous to the Jewish community than Boris Johnson or Donald Trump’s antisemitic conspiracy theories.
As Stuart Hall noted, the appearance of new social phenomenon is often less a case of novelty than a shift in the political conjuncture. A conjuncture, Hall reminds us, is a “specific life in a social formation” that forms a “unity” among disparate, even contradictory formations (368). The articulation of a new identity, or new social actor, often occurs when the social formation and its unwieldy set of unities is suddenly in crisis. Hall offers as an example the emergence of the “mugger” in the 1970s Anglophone Atlantic as a figure that hails the crisis of social democracy, and points to a solution of carceral neoliberalism. In a similar way, I would suggest, the emergence of the “Jewish conservative” has little to do with changing Jewish loyalties or allegiances, and everything to do with the crisis of both Zionism and neoliberalism.
Capital and imperialism cannot speak out of universal interest: they have none. Suggesting that the U.S. supports Israel’s genocide out of geopolitics—even identification with the state’s colonial project—can no longer be said by any liberal (anymore than it can be said that Shapiro was a better pick for the NYT and Post as much because of his Zionism as his support for school vouchers and his questioning of public health measures such as masking and vaccines). The consensus around Zionism and the kind of racial politics it supports—let alone the U.S. imperial presence in the Middle East—is rapidly fraying: constructing constituencies for which the state acts to protect is far more palatable than naked self-interest.
This is not to say of course, that there are no Jewish interests in Israel: major Jewish institutions from the ADL to the Jewish Federation have become more fiercely Zionist and right wing in the last few decades. Yet like Hall also reminds us, a crisis is not simply marked by systemic failure: it is also the detachment of the ruled from their rulers; it is the de-alignment of part of a hegemonic bloc from its formation and the potential realignment with another. We are in such a moment of crisis. Even in the stories by Fox and the NYT such discord is visible under the headline: after the ADL or Democratic Majority for Israel is quoted, IfNotNow and Bend the Arc are featured much further down in the story. What we are seeing in the Jewish community is not altogether different from what we are seeing in the U.S. writ large: a polarization around the fundamental question of whether we should live in authoritarian, racially bound states or in multi-ethnic democracies. While Jews may have their own internal fights within their institutions, in temples, community centers, and in the streets over Zionism and socialist politics, it is incumbent upon us to refuse such identitarian conscription as part of that fight.
Benjamin Balthaser is an associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University, South Bend. He is the author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2016), and Dedication (Partisan Press, 2011), a personal history of growing up in a Jewish "red diaper" family. His forthcoming book from Verso, Citizens of the Whole World: The American Jewish Left and Cultures of Anti-Zionism, is due to be out this fall. His critical and creative work has also appeared in Historical Materialism, Boston Review, PMLA and elsewhere. He is an associate editor at American Quarterly.
National Cathedral, Bucharest, Romania. People’s Salvation Cathedral. Seen in reflection of glass building. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Scholars theorizing the connections among nationalism, religion, and violence have presented a wide range of perspectives. Atalia Omer and Jason A. Springs’s co-authored reference handbook on religious nationalism provides an overview of the subject with attention to critical analyses of secularism, modernity, and orientalism. Whereas Benedict Anderson’s influential work on the origins of nationalism—which defines the “nation” as an “imagined community” that evokes a sense of collectivity, communion, and common history across a people group—argues that nationalism developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Omer and Springs contend that “nationalism is not strictly a modern phenomenon” (26). They also argue that religious forms of nationalism are not inherently more volatile or “irrational” than presumably “secular” forms of nationalism, and further, that “secular” and “religious” forms of nationalism cannot be clearly distinguished from or contrasted with each other. Omer and Springs introduce the term “ethnoreligious nationalism” to describe the need for examining nationalism, religion, and ethnicity together, particularly in cases in which “religious identity markers blur or merge with ethnic identity markers” (15) and the language of authenticity and purity is mobilized in support of violence. This module takes Omer and Springs’ definition of religious nationalism as a starting point for an investigation across geographies, disciplines, and conceptual terrains that have been explored in blogs on the CM site.
Omer and Springs’s critical approach to “secularism” resonates with the influential works of anthropologist Talal Asad, which highlight the dynamic and ongoing construction of “religion” and the “secular” as categories and critique the use of the “secular” as a designation for that which is considered rational and acceptable in public spheres. Asad challenges the ways that the “secular” is often imagined as a modern successor to “religion,” arguing in particular against the idea that nationalism should be understood as secularized religion. Further complicating the presumed “religious”/“secular” divide, Asad writes that secular states should be understood in terms of their efforts to regulate—not eliminate—violence and intolerance directed against “religious minorities.” Similarly, historians of religion such as Tisa Wenger have described the ways that discourses of religious freedom, pluralism, and tolerance—particularly in the context of the ostensibly “secular” U.S. empire—have been mobilized by the dominant White Christian population to naturalize and reinforce White Christian norms, which in Omer and Springs’s terminology may be understood as a form of ethnoreligious nationalism. Wenger notes, however, that discourses of religious freedom have also been reappropriated by minoritized and colonized groups to challenge racial and religious forms of violence and exclusion. These studies question assumptions of particular, bounded, stable “religions”; complicate the division between “secular” and “religious”; and discuss the divergent political uses of presumably tolerant approaches to religion in “secular” national contexts.
This educational module introduces teachers, students, and practitioners to three major themes pertaining to religion, nationalism, and conflict: the deployment of narratives of victimization to support a dominant ethnoreligious group’s maintenance of power within a particular context, the mobilization of various Islamophobic discourses across geographies, and proposals for interreligious conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The examination of such themes provides an assessment of how religious nationalisms shape global politics and allows readers to examine the convergences and divergences among various forms of religious nationalism in diverse contexts. This module also highlights constructive postcolonial/decolonial efforts towards religious pluralism and peacebuilding.
Theme 1: Religious Nationalism and Narratives of Victimization
These pieces explore the role that narratives of victimization serve in various manifestations of religious nationalism. Philip Gorski’s post identifies victimization narratives as one key element of religious nationalism, particularly in “western” contexts, but which are also applicable elsewhere. Jason A. Springs’s post describes narratives of persecution and marginalization that inform White evangelical Christian ethnoreligious nationalism in the United States. Raz Segal discusses the weaponization of discourses of antisemitism to silence legitimate critiques of apartheid in Israel/Palestine. Ather Zia’s post reveals how Hindu nationalists construct Muslims as threatening “invaders” in order to maintain a position of dominance in the Indian subcontinent. Lastly, Gladys Ganiel’s piece addresses competing narratives of victimization between Protestant-Unionist-Loyalists and Catholic-Nationalist-Republicans in Northern Ireland. Together, these pieces offer diverse examples of the ways that religious nationalisms from different contexts mobilize narratives of victimization in order to construct a threatening ethnoreligious “other” and to justify violence against this “other.” Importantly, claims of victimization, marginalization, and oppression are not always false. These pieces, however, point to the ways that a community that in fact comprises a dominant ethno-cultural majority might employ narratives of victimization to justify their own moral superiority and maintenance of power and domination within a particular context—a phenomenon that Gorski’s post identifies as a key element of religious nationalism.
Photo Credit: Flickr user Ted Eytan. MAGA hats sold at Trump rally in DC in 2017. CC BY SA 2.0.
This post by Philip Gorski examines the nature of right-wing populism and its affinity with religious nationalism. Although Gorski begins by considering White evangelical Christian nationalism and Trump’s ascendancy in the American right, he notes that connections between religious conservatism and right-wing populism go beyond and before Trumpism in the United States (with Hindu nationalism in the Indian subcontinent being an example from another context). While nationalism was once theorized as a secular, modern version of religion, Gorski argues that religious nationalism is a distinctive variant of modern nationalism—a perspective that contrasts with that presented in Omer and Springs’s reference handbook—and that connections between religion and nationalism also existed before modernity. He identifies blood tropes, apocalyptic narratives, victimization narratives, and messianic expectations as four key elements of “western” versions of religious nationalism, which are historically rooted in Jewish and Christian scriptures, but notes that these elements are also commonly found in “non-western” Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist religious nationalisms. Gorski then describes right-wing populism as a narrative in which a “pure” people are betrayed by a “corrupt” elite who has allied with an undeserving other. Because of this narrative of corruption, they place hope in a messianic leader who “promises to restore the people to its birthright.” Significant overlaps between this populist victimization narrative and the key elements of religious nationalism—which are evident, for instance, in the portrayal of the dominant ethno-cultural majority as a supposedly morally pure yet persecuted religious minority—may explain the attraction of religious nationalists to right-wing populist movements and of right-wing populists to religious nationalism.
While Gorski notes that further comparative work is needed to contend with other forms of religious nationalism, he writes that much of this framework could apply in “non-western” contexts shaped by other religious discourses. His discussion of narratives of victimization can be applied to White evangelical Christian nationalism, as Jason A. Springs’s post details further, but also to other examples of religious nationalism that are discussed throughout this educational module. While Gorski’s emphasis on the distinctness of religious nationalism—implying an acceptance of the separability of “religious” and “secular” forms of nationalism—might be critiqued by other schools of thought regarding the relationship between nationalism, religion, and violence, his framework provides a useful analysis of the connections between particular religious discourses and the key elements of populist, nationalist narratives.
Zombies as portrayed in the movie Night of the Living Dead (1968). Via Wikimedia Commons.
This post by Jason A. Springs examines the role of apocalypticism and messianism in White Christian evangelical nationalism. While elaborating on his concept of “zombie nationalism”, Springs writes that the continual reoccurrence and reanimation of this form of religious nationalism is driven by “U.S. White evangelical Christians conceptualizing themselves as an increasingly marginalized remnant in a society that (putatively) originally did, and (allegedly) should still, reflect their central identity and values” and imagining themselves as a “perennially marginalized—and progressively more endangered—victims of an aggressively anti-Christian ‘secular’ society.” This post contends that the tropes employed by QAnon—particularly its assertions that the Democratic party is controlled by an anti-Christian elite, that Trump is a messianic figure whose actions have apocalyptic significance, and that America’s “true” Christian identity must be retrieved—have precedents in the White evangelical movement in the United States. Springs argues that “QAnon conspiracy ideology symbiotically feeds upon populist White evangelical impulses toward apocalypticism and messianism” and fuses them with Republican political ideology.
Springs’s attention to the recurrent pattern of White evangelical Christian nationalists conceptualizing themselves as a “victimized-yet-faithful and long-suffering” chosen people elucidates the role that narratives of victimization serve in the context of U.S.-based White Christian nationalism. This post and others in Springs’s series on “zombie nationalism,” such as “Race, Ressentiment, and Nihilism in White Evangelical Christian Nationalism,” show how narratives of White Christian victimization—particularly in relation to anxieties around White majority status diminishing, America’s “Christian values” being lost, and heteronormative sexual politics being challenged—are mobilized as “a covert means of conjuring and asserting power” and maintaining a position of ethno-cultural dominance.
Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, 8 June 2020. The Jerusalem Municipality offers Palestinian residents of Jerusalem two options: to demolish their own homes or wait for the municipality’s heavy machinery to do it. The latter will force them to pay huge fines. Photo: ‘Amer ‘Aruri, B’Tselem. CC 4.0.
In this post, Raz Segal uses the 2022 confirmation hearing of Dr. Deborah Lipstadt for the role of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism as a case study in how apologists of the Israeli state reframe critiques of Israel’s policies as antisemitic attacks. Segal, who studies the Holocaust, Jewish history, and antisemitism, argues that those who defend Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians “distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel [and not in the case of criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example], as an attack against a people.” In response, Segal provides evidence to support Amnesty International’s claim that Israel has created and maintained a system of apartheid against Palestinians, and to show that critiques of Israeli state violence are legitimate. He writes that the weaponization of discourses of antisemitism to silence criticism of the Israeli state “abus[es] the historical struggle of a vulnerable people, Jews, under attack by powerful states to blur the attack of a state, Israel, against a vulnerable people, Palestinians.” Segal argues that such conflations lead not only to a false picture of the reality faced by Palestinians, but also risk reinforcing the segregationist logic of antisemitism that the apologists claim to combat—that is, the idea that Jewish people belong in Israel and only in Israel.
In this context, the use of narratives of victimization—specifically, the weaponization of the charge of antisemitism in discussions of Palestine/Israel—serves to conceal realities of settler-colonialism and apartheid and to actually reinforce antisemitic logics. For more information about this topic, see posts by Atalia Omer and Moshe Behar that critique how the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has weaponized discourses of antisemitism in ways that stifle legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel and cause important manifestations of antisemitism to go overlooked. Also see Brian Klug’s posts on Europe’s “Jewish Question” and the need for its “unasking.” Klug argues that shielding Israel and Zionism from critique positions Jewish people as “the valorized Other of Europe” (thus reinforcing Jewish otherness and failing to treat Jewish people as normal human beings). He also asserts that critiques of Israel and Zionism must contend with histories of antisemitism in Europe rather than “fold[ing] Zionism completely, without remainder, into the history of European hegemony over the Global South, as if this were the whole story.”Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s and Raef Zreik’s contributions to the book symposium on When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism also address Zionism and Palestine/Israel.
The Khanqah-e-Moulla, or Shah-e Hamdan Shrine, in the Old City of Srinagar, is one of the oldest examples of Kashmiri wooden architecture. Photo Credit: Mike Prince.
This post by Ather Zia details how the 2019 revocation of Article 370—which had previously acknowledged the special status of Indian-administrated Kashmir and maintained the autonomy of the region in formulating laws—serves the Hindu nationalist agenda, which envisions a unified social fabric built on a conception of “Hinduness.” Zia notes that the ideology of Hindu indigeneity in the Indian subcontinent “casts Muslims living in India as invaders and foreigners”; thus, “Kashmiri Muslims are doubly marked as the demonized other: first as Muslims, and second as Kashmiris who are longstanding dissidents committed to the fight for a UN [United Nations]-mandated plebiscite, democratic sovereignty, and freedom from India.”
The post also provides a brief overview of Kashmir’s recent history and religious demographics and explores how past events and recurrent narratives of victimization shape the current conflict dynamics. Zia covers the 1846 Amritsar Treaty in which the British Empire sold the land and people of Kashmir to a Hindu warlord, the Kashmiri movement for sovereignty and independence that first rose in prominence around 1931, the UN-arbitrated bifurcation of Kashmir into Indian- and Pakistan-administered territories around 1947–1948, and the drafting and later revocation of Article 370. Zia writes that the RSS (Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh)—a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization—had rejected the special autonomous status of historically-Muslim-majority Kashmir because they viewed it “as an appeasement of Muslims and a threat to Indian unity.” Zia’s account shows how narratives of victimization (or anticipated/feared victimization) have enabled Hindu nationalists in the subcontinent to construct Muslims as threatening others, to justify Indian settler colonialism, and to support the passage of legislation that discriminates against Muslims.
Banner from July 12, 2021 Orange Parades crossing Donegall Square South, Belfast, Northern Ireland (Ballysillan Loyal Orange Lodge 1891). Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
In this post, which is part of a book symposium on Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian’s edited volume When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, Gladys Ganiel analyzes examples of religious nationalism in diverse contexts and shows how states have invoked religious claims in order to justify assertions of sovereignty and legitimize violence. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) Ganiel’s post focuses on Northern Ireland’s Troubles and points out that, although some scholarship on this issue downplays the role of colonialism and religion, When Politics are Sacralized helpfully foregrounds settler colonialism (particularly the role of the British state as a colonial power that informs Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist versus Catholic-Nationalist-Republican conflicts) and religious claims.
Ganiel’s post recognizes that conflicting narratives of victimization shape interpretations of the conflict in Northern Ireland: “Loyalists [Protestant, Unionist] identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans [Catholic, Nationalist] identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.” Her contribution valuably explores the complexities of victimization narratives that are mobilized on both sides of a conflict, while emphasizing that such narratives must be evaluated through an awareness of historical power dynamics. Although one must acknowledge the migration of some Protestants to Northern Ireland as a result of their experience of structural violence in Catholic-dominated Republic of Ireland, it is also true that Protestant Unionist elites have constructed colonial political structures in Northern Ireland since its creation in 1921. (For more on the latter, see Cathal McManus’s discussion of the Orange Order.) Like the Hindu nationalists explored in the previous post by Ather Zia, Unionists in Northern Ireland also fear future victimization and have drawn on that narrative to sustain their position. Here, their fear is that a unification with the Republic of Ireland will result in their oppression as a Protestant minority in a Catholic-majority state. For more information on the complexities of colonialism and decolonial thought in the context of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, see this post by Maxwell Woods, which shows that decolonization alone is not sufficient for guaranteeing justice.
Theme 2: Religious Nationalism and Islamophobia
These pieces examine the ways that longstanding, global discourses of Islamophobia and more recent deployments of language of “terrorism” have functioned to support religious nationalisms in various contexts. Jason A. Springs’s post points to the subtle manifestations of Islamophobic European nationalisms in presumably “secular” laws that advance anti-Muslim discrimination. Similarly, Uzma Jamil critiques the ways that the idealization of “secularism” within White Quebecois nationalism contributes to both a systemic context of Islamophobia and a determined refusal to acknowledge this Islamophobia. Julia Kowalski shows how Muslim women protesters in India have challenged the stereotypes about Islam and gender that Hindu nationalists have promoted. Rachel Harris discusses the Chinese government’s campaign of cultural cleansing against the Turkic Muslims of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, which has drawn upon the United States’ post-9/11 rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism as well as Islamophobic discourses from other sources. Perin Gürel also discusses violence against Uyghurs, but focuses on complicating the idea of a unified “Muslim world” by examining the ways that different Muslim-majority countries have responded to the oppression of Uyghur Muslim communities in China. Together, these posts address multiple discourses and manifestations of Islamophobia—including and beyond the U.S.-led “war on terror”—and the ways that images of Islam being incompatible with both secular modernity and notions of cultural/national authenticity have informed religious nationalisms in different contexts.
The top portion of the frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In this post, which is an abbreviated overview of an article that was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Jason A. Springs observes how many rulings by the European Court of Human Rights point to the idea that “the expanding presence of Islam throughout Europe presents a pronounced challenge to Western conceptions of secular law and human rights.” He writes that European nationalisms identifying and scapegoating an inassimilable Muslim “other” seem to underlie this idea. Noting that the consideration of only the most extreme or radical manifestations of Islamophobic European nationalisms can obscure more surreptitious and pervasive varieties, Springs attends to subtle European ethnoreligious nationalisms that occur as modes of anti-Muslim “exclusion, inequality, and humiliation.”
Springs warns that human rights discourses have been mobilized in Islamophobic European nationalist ways. Turning to recent French headscarf bans as a case study, he shows that even some avowedly secularist state laws represent subtle forms of ethnoreligious nationalism that advance anti-Muslim discrimination. At the same time, Springs presents international human rights norms and institutions as insufficient yet indispensable sites of potential for guarding against religious nationalism and protecting religious freedom in contemporary European contexts. He argues for a corrective approach to human rights discourse which would contend with the political and cultural power dynamics “that inevitably influence adjudication of human rights cases,” and in response, intentionally incorporate “analytical tools that guard against [human rights discourse’s] unjust applications.”
A sticker from a post in Montreal taken on May 20, 2019 likely in reference to the Quebec ban on religious symbols enacted by Bill 21. Photo Credit: Flickr User Ingrid Cold. CC BY-SA 2.0.
In this post, Uzma Jamil critiques the systemic context of Islamophobia reinforced by Quebec’s idealization of “secularism,” focusing particularly on the tendency of White politicians and citizens to deny the role of Quebec’s secularist Bill 21 in creating conditions for Islamophobic violence elsewhere in Canada. Such denials indicate a “refusal to know and to see Islamophobia,” which Jamil argues “is ultimately a refusal to accept the political claim by Muslims to be treated as equal citizens” and “a refusal to see how Islamophobia is sustained through its connection to Whiteness in Quebec.”
Jamil explains that Bill 21, a 2019 Quebec law which prohibits people who wear religious symbols from working in the public sector or engaging with public services, “disproportionately excludes Muslim women who wear hijabs.” She discusses the law’s rootedness in key aspects of “modern” Quebecois nationalism—which since the 1960s–70s Quiet Revolution that resulted in the Catholic Church’s removal from its previous prominent role in the public sphere—has been centered around secularism, gender equality, and the French language. Muslim women who wear hijabs and niqabs are frequently represented as threats to these nationalist ideals of secularism and gender equality. As Jamil argues, the maintenance of Quebec’s nationalist “secularism” rests upon “the erasure of Muslim religiosity from public space”—an erasure which ultimately serves to legitimize acts of Islamophobic violence.
Jamil writes that victimization narratives that focus exclusively on French Quebec’s minority position in relation to English Canada also inform denials of Bill 21’s role in reinforcing Islamophobia in other parts of Canada. Such victimization narratives are incomplete and ignore the fact that both are White settler societies which hold a position of dominance in relation to racialized, non-White minorities. Refusals to see Islamophobia and White supremacy indicate an “epistemology of ignorance”: anti-racist philosopher Charles Mills’s term for the ways that an intentional failure to see Whiteness is “a necessary requirement for the structure of White supremacy to exist and to endure.” Like the Islamophobic European nationalism identified by Springs, White Quebecois nationalism is a form of ethnoreligious nationalism that conceals itself through secularist language and various “refusals to see” Islamophobia and White supremacy. Against this epistemology of ignorance, expressions of Muslim political consciousness and agency—seen in rising efforts to name and combat Islamophobia—have the potential to reshape conversations around Islamophobia, Whiteness, and ethnoreligious nationalism in Quebec.
Wooden model of a house explaining the Constitution created by activists in Ahmedabad, India. Photo courtesy of RAJEEV KHANNA/TheCitizen.in. Used with permission.
In this post, Julia Kowalski discusses protests that took place in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood of Delhi from 2019–2020 in resistance to the combined effects of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). She writes that these protests—attended mostly by middle-class, middle-aged-or-older women wearing hijab—represented acts of subversion against stereotypes about Islam and gender that the ruling Bharatya Janata Party in India has deployed to advance Islamophobic legislation. (For more information about the CAA and NRC as discriminatory against Muslims, see this post by Susan Ostermann.) Kowalski argues that Muslim women protestors innovatively mobilized representations of female kinship (including by referring to older protesters as dabaang dadis—“fearless grannies”) and home while promoting the vision of a secular, inclusive democracy and of religiously pluralistic national belonging in India.
When contextualizing stereotypes about Islam and gender in India, Kowalski notes that “[s]ince the late twentieth century, the Hindu right has targeted Muslim family laws, and their supposed ill-treatment of Muslim women, to argue for universal (read: Hindu) family and inheritance laws.” She connects these moves to longer, global histories of Islamophobic discourses that have promulgated notions of “oppressed Muslim women” in order to condemn Islam as “uncivilized” and justify Western colonial and imperial intervention in majority-Muslim contexts. In India, the Hindu right has co-opted critiques of gender inequality in order to advance these notions of “oppressed Muslim women” and “undermin[e] the status of Muslims in India more broadly.” Against these Islamophobic discourses, Kowalski’s post shows how Muslim women protesters in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood have contested right-wing Hindu nationalism, countered narratives of Muslim non-belonging in India, and subverted sexist and Islamophobic representations of Muslim women.
(Note: a different exposition of this post appears within the “Politics of the Gender, Sexuality, and Religion Nexus” module, since Kowalski’s analysis focuses on the intersections among Islamophobia, gender, colonialism, and religious nationalism.)
Sultanim, Shrine on Horizon, 2014. Image courtesy of Lisa Ross.
This post by Rachel Harris discusses the Chinese government’s escalating “counterterrorism” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China—or, more accurately, cultural cleansing driven by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s campaign to control the region and its natural resources. Harris explains that the strategic management and positioning of cultural heritage “serves as a resource for political legitimacy and soft power and is used as an asset to boost local economic development”—for instance, by driving tourism and Han Chinese settlement in the Uyghur region. Despite the listing of sites of Uyghur religious heritage on local and international protected heritage lists, Harris points to “the large-scale destruction of sacred sites, prohibitions on Uyghur language and literature, and disruption of Uyghur communities since 2017” as evidence that “the biggest threats to Uyghur heritage and culture are the policies of the Chinese government itself.”
Harris writes that by the 1990s, “strike hard” campaigns led by Xinjiang authorities began to repress religious practices central to Uyghur culture, such as by designating pilgrimages to shrines as “illegal religious activities.” Beginning in the 2000s, the Chinese government drew from global Islamophobic discourses and from the rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism deployed within the U.S.’s “Global War on Terror” in order to re-categorize such Uyghur religious practices as acts of “religious extremism” and “to justify its actions against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities: actions which were increasingly taking the form of cultural cleansing.” The anti-religious extremism campaign in Xinjiang has involved the demolition of thousands of mosques, shrines, and cemeteries important to Turkic Muslim Uyghurs’ religious heritage, accompanied by heavy securitization, mass incarceration, and attacks on Uyghur language in the region. Harris contextualizes these repressive acts as “a part of the national campaign to ‘Sinicize’ religion” in China and warns that the systematic destruction of a people’s cultural and religious heritage frequently functions as a precursor to genocide.
A Uyghur Rights Protest in San Francisco in April 2008. Photo by Jack Fitzsimmons.
This post by Perin Gürel challenges monolithic ideas of Islam and the “Muslim world” that dominate Western discourse on Uyghur issues, focusing on the ways that Muslim-majority countries are often expected “to respond to the oppression of Muslims across state boundaries [and particularly to condemn the oppression of Uyghurs] in a way that is not expected from Christian-majority countries.” Gürel emphasizes the heterogeneous policies within Muslim-majority countries and the existence of disunity among them in order to push for more nuanced and contextually informed understandings of how countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Türkiye respond differently to the treatment of Uyghur communities in China. She notes that although the Turkish government did issue a statement condemning the Chinese government’s violation of the human rights of Uyghur Turks and other Uyghur Muslim communities, international politics and economic relations shape governments’ decisions. She contends that those who uphold the idea of a presumably unified “Muslim world” must recognize that “the failure to condemn international human rights abuse despite cultural, linguistic, and religious ties with its victims is not unusual.”
Theme 3: Constructive Proposals for Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Peacebuilding
These posts introduce frameworks for envisioning religious pluralism and justice-oriented peacebuilding in contexts that have been impacted by violence and religious nationalism(s). Abir Bazaz discusses ideas of religious tolerance, respect, and freedom in Kashmiri history and literary culture in order to propose certain visions of Kashmiri religious pluralism as productive alternatives to Indian secularism in South Asian contexts. Bashir Bashir proposes egalitarian binationalism as a constructive ethical principle that can be applied to Israel/Palestine. Kwok Pui Lan shows how postcolonial scholarship can dismantle colonial myths that impede discussions within the field of religion and peacebuilding and offer constructive criticisms of the field. Jenna Streich, although not explicitly focused on religious nationalism, offers reflections on the ways that Catholic schools might combat religious perpetrations of violence, move away from a conversion model and towards one which honors students’ diverse religious and cultural traditions, and work towards justice-oriented peacebuilding in their communities. Her post demonstrates the on-the-ground educational work required to resist exclusionary religious nationalisms. Through cultural/literary, political/governmental, religious/social, and educational registers, these four posts offer distinct frameworks for responding to religious nationalism, addressing violence and conflict, and working towards religious pluralism and peacebuilding.
Nigeen Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo by the author.
In this post, Abir Bazaz traces the deployment of the idea of Kashmir as a “special place” over time, including in the popular movement for Kashmiri sovereignty (joined by Kashmiri Muslims and Hindus and supported by Indian nationalists) against Dogra rule in the 1920s–40s, and in the recognition of the region’s “special status” through Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The provisions of Article 370 were slowly eroded, however, as Hindu nationalists accused them of representing “nothing other than yet another shameful capitulation by the ruling Indian National Congress Party to Muslims,” and in 2019, Article 370 was revoked entirely. (For more information about Article 370 and Kashmir’s recent history, see this post by Ather Zia discussed earlier in this module.) Bazaz warns that “cancelling Kashmiri autonomy … could return Kashmir to being narrowly imagined as a site of sectarian Hindu-Muslim conflict.”
Referring to the mobilization of religion and culture in the political claims of India and Pakistan on Kashmir, Bazaz writes that “even though the Hindu and Muslim religious cultures in India and Pakistan offer us fantasies of Kashmir as either a sacred Hindu space or a lost Muslim paradise, the actual Kashmiri Hindu and Muslim religious culture affirms Kashmir as a heterodox and plural spiritual space.” He turns to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century examples of Saiva-bhakti-Sufi-tantric poetry in Kashmir to show how ideas of religious tolerance and caste equality have a long history within Kashmiri literary culture. Such visions of Kashmiri religious pluralism are already “affirmed by many Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims” and, if attended to more deeply in the present, might open up new ways of thinking about democracy, freedom, and interreligious respect in South Asia. This unique vision of religious pluralism is “[w]hat is, and remains, special about Kashmir,” and offers a justice- and peace-centered alternative vision for the future of the region in contrast to the exclusionary chauvinist nationalism of the Modi government in India.
This post by Bashir Bashir, co-editor of The Arab and Jewish Questions alongside Leila Farsakh, introduces a symposium on the book by describing the wider research projects that gave rise to it. (This post by Farsakh, which co-introduces the book symposium, focuses more on describing the book’s thesis and contents.) Bashir provides an overview of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, alternatives to partition, memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba, and the connections between antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe that have informed these prior projects and publications.
Based on his participation in research on the conceptual and historical links among the “question of Israel/Palestine,” the “Arab-Muslim question,” and the “Jewish question”—and among the dynamics of colonialism, Orientalism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism—Bashir proposes egalitarian binationalism as an ethical frame for challenging colonialism, promoting historical reconciliation, and dismantling Jewish Israeli supremacy in Palestine/Israel. He defines egalitarian binationalism as “a principle that recognizes and promotes the existence of two national groups with equal rights to self-determination … while insisting that this right ought to not be realized in the form of an exclusive ethnic state.” Bashir writes that some analyses of settler colonialism—though importantly drawing attention to power asymmetries between Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to the centrality of land in Palestine/Israel conflicts—are “underdetermined regarding what would be the ultimate outcome of decolonization.” As an alternative theoretical framework, Bashir argues that the principle of egalitarian binationalism “offers rich resources for a decolonizing project in Israel/Palestine that seeks to establish a polity based on the principles of justice and equality, coming to terms with historical injustices, and imagining alternative pasts, presents, and futures based on Palestinian-Israeli relationships.”
For more information about the “Jewish Question,” histories of antisemitism in Europe, and political Zionism, see Brian Klug’s post “Why is the Jewish Question Different from All Similar Questions?” Klug discusses the “Jewish Question” as a European question about the Jewish people, who (in one reading of this question) were positioned as Europe’s antithesis: Europe defined itself first as Christian (as opposed to “Jewish”) and later as a bastion of post-Enlightenment universalism (as opposed to Jewish “particularism”). Additionally, other contributions to the book symposium on The Arab and Jewish Questions contend with European colonialism, histories of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and the relationships among Europe’s “Jewish” and “Arab-Muslim” questions.
End Islamophobia, Silent Protest at Union Station, Washington DC. Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull.
In this post, Kwok Pui Lan begins by challenging three dominant myths that are rooted in European and Euro-American colonialism and that tend to impede discussions on religion and peacebuilding: Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” myth that explains wars and conflicts in terms of clashes between homogeneous, bounded, religiously based civilizations; the secularist myth which views religion as irrational, incompatible with modernity, and an obstacle to conflict resolution; and the Islamophobic myth that sees some religions (like Christianity) as inherently peaceful and other religions (especially Islam) as inherently violent—a myth that, as posts included in the previous theme have shown, has informed Islamophobic forms of religious nationalism. She shows how postcolonial criticism helps debunk these myths and also challenges the legacies of racist and colonialist dynamics that have shaped the field of religious studies.
Kwok Pui Lan then presents the ways that constructive criticism from postcolonial studies might help the emerging field of religion and peacebuilding—which “focuses on the themes of interreligious dialogue, the retrieval of religious resources for peacebuilding in various traditions, and the instrumental role that religious actors and networks play in the dynamics of both conflict and peacebuilding”—to attend to subaltern religious actors and grassroots efforts towards peace, to highlight women’s participation in peacebuilding, and to apply a lens of hybridity to the understanding of religious traditions and identities. Kwok Pui Lan’s critical analysis of religion and “secularism” draws from Talal Asad and resonates with the framing provided within Omer and Springs’s reference handbook, and her focus on practices of peacebuilding offers constructive steps towards combatting religious nationalism.
This image provides a glimpse into a Catholic high school in North Philadelphia where the author taught science. This image is of a hallway mural painted by students. Photo Courtesy of the author.
In this post, Jenna Streich reflects upon her experience of teaching at a Catholic high school in North Philadelphia, PA, and calls the disciplines and practitioners of religion, education, and peacebuilding to collaborate in efforts to build peace and justice. Streich writes that working with students impacted by gun violence, poverty, and racism in their communities pushed her to explore how Catholic schools might “draw on their theological roots to maximize their potential as religious peacebuilding institutions” and support students’ formation and empowerment as co-creators of justice and peace, particularly when such students are themselves non-Catholic or non-religious.
Streich emphasizes that in order to take on a positive peacebuilding role, Catholic schools must first acknowledge and combat the forms of violence that have been perpetrated by Catholic institutions, including abuse and cultural violence at Catholic boarding schools for Indigenous children and instances of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy more broadly. She also calls for a “bottom-up” approach to peacebuilding that—rather than pushing students to fit their experiences into existing Catholic frameworks—would ground religious peace education in students’ lived realities, values, and efforts to advance peace and justice in their communities. Ultimately, Streich argues that by shifting “the primary focus of a Catholic school away from conversion or indoctrination towards a theological imperative of care”—for example, by taking students’ experiences and struggles seriously, valuing their cultural and religious traditions, replacing punitive practices of discipline with restorative justice models, and empowering students as co-creators of peace in their classrooms and communities—Catholic schools can participate in the work of justice-oriented peacebuilding.
Streich’s reflections on religious peacebuilding offer a vision of religious pluralism, encounters across difference, and the co-creation of a culture of justice and peace as it might be lived out in the daily interactions among students, teachers, and their surrounding communities. Although rooted in the specific experience of teaching at a Catholic school, Streich’s post also points more broadly to the ways that religious institutions might draw from the resources of their traditions to challenge religious perpetrations of violence, work towards justice and healing, and collaborate with peacebuilding efforts rooted in other religious traditions. In this way, her argument offers a counterexample to the right-wing religious nationalisms critiqued by other posts in this module, which draw on violent and reactionary practices in pursuit of their ends.
Discussion Questions
The contributions featured within this educational module have provided means of theorizing and responding to religious nationalism; understanding histories of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and European colonialism; and turning constructively to religious resources for justice and peacebuilding. The questions below highlight some areas of ongoing scholarly debate; invite critical reflection on discourses of “secularism” and “terrorism”/“extremism”; and encourage the further exploration of pathways towards conflict transformation in interreligious contexts.
Religion, Nationalism, and Secularism
Scholars such as Philip Gorski present religious nationalism as a distinctive variant of modern nationalism, but Atalia Omer and Jason A. Springs (in their co-authored reference handbook on religious nationalism) intentionally trouble the lines of distinction between “religious” and secular (or “non-religious”) forms of nationalism. To what extent is it useful to theorize religious nationalism as a distinct form of nationalism? How ought analyses of religion inform the examination of forms of nationalism that are not typically categorized as “religious”?
Insidious Nationalisms
Scholars such as Uzma Jamil and Jason Springs have emphasized the concealed operation of ethnoreligious nationalisms in presumably “secular” contexts. How does religious nationalism appear in contexts such as the United States, Canada, or Europe that are typically imagined as “secular” or as safeguarding “religious freedom”? How do Orientalist and other colonialist discourses lead to “religious nationalism” being imagined in association with particular religions, geographies, or ethnic groups rather than others? Specifically, how do the posts included in this module help trouble the idea that certain religions are “peaceful” (Buddhism) or particularly compatible with “secularism” (Christianity) whereas others are inherently violent (Islam)?
Islamophobia and the Discourse of Terrorism
What makes the threat of “Islamic terrorism” and “religious extremism” such a compelling mobilizing force in European and American religious nationalisms, and how do these discourses of “terrorism” transform when adopted in other contexts (such as China)? How do discourses of “terrorism” differ from or reinforce Islamophobic discourses from other sources or contexts? How is the violence enacted by a state—particularly against an ethnoreligious minority group—constructed differently from forms of violence (actual, anticipated, or imagined through narratives of victimization) enacted by other actors?
Religious Peacebuilding
How might the constructive proposals for interreligious peacebuilding offered by Bazaz, Bashir, Kwok, or Streich apply (or not apply) to various contexts impacted by religious, cultural, ethnic, and political conflict? How do these proposals differ from the secularist myth (critiqued within Kwok Pui Lan’s post) that imagines religion as irrational, a hindrance to conflict transformation, and properly transcended by “secularism”?
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso Books, 2016.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. New Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
de Silva Wijeyeratne, Roshan. Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014.
Gorski, Philip S. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Edited by Christophe Jaffrelot. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Omer, Atalia and Jason A. Springs. Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.
The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding. Edited by Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Wenger, Tisa. Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
White, Jenny. Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Updated Edition. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2014.
Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Victoria Basug Slabinski is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, with a graduate certificate in American studies. Her work draws Christian theology into conversation with decolonial thought and explores constructive Filipino American theologies, focusing especially on questions of memory, ancestrality, narrative, and aesthetics. Her research interests include decolonial and postcolonial thought, Christian liberation theologies and eschatology, gender and sexuality studies, and constructive readings of literature and the arts.
Prithvi Iyer is a Program Manager at Tech Policy Press. He completed a master's in Global Affairs from the University of Notre Dame, where he also served as Assistant Director of the Peacetech and Polarization Lab. Prior to his graduate studies, he worked as a research assistant for the Observer Research Foundation, wherein he published research exploring the mental health implications of political conflict, the role of behavioral science in shaping foreign policy outcomes, and discourse on countering violent extremism. He also holds a BA Hons in Psychology from Ashoka University.
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.
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This post by Bashir Bashir, co-editor of The Arab and Jewish Questions alongside Leila Farsakh, introduces a symposium on the book by describing the wider research projects that gave rise to it. (
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. 
