You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our monthly episodes.

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Jewish Bodies and Jewish Celebrities.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 49: Jewish Bodies and Jewish Celebrities appeared first on The Revealer.

You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our monthly episodes.

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Elisabeth Elliot: Evangelical Icon and Her Alarming 3^rd Marriage.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 48: Elisabeth Elliot: Evangelical Icon and Her Alarming 3rd Marriage appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

I’ve seen several trends in my 10-year teaching career: bottle flipping, fidget spinners, viral vandalism. This year teachers are reporting a new trend: “Coin Boys.” Although I haven’t (yet) seen it myself, an exasperated teacher on Reddit explains:

“The newest thing here is a flock of self-proclaimed ‘coin boys’ who carry a quarter on hand at all times and constantly flip it. They have their entire personality revolve around coins, coin flips, and chance. When we went around doing an ice breaker, 4 or 5 of the kids said some variation of ‘I live by the coin and die by the coin’ as their fact.

Just about an hour ago, when I assigned the first assignment of the school year, one of the coin boys was bold enough to say ‘heads I do it, tails I don’t.’ I told him if he flipped the coin he would be getting a call home on the first week of [high school]. He flipped it anyway and it came up heads (thank god for that at least). 

But then the other coin boy in that class flipped his coin and it came up tails. He said the coin has spoken and he’s not doing it. I say very well, enjoy your 0 and your call home — what a great way to start off the school year and your high school career.”

I find this account delightful, as a teacher, as an observer and amateur anthropologist of Generation Z, and — most of all — as a student of religion. For the past few years, I’ve taught a Comparative Religions elective course to high school students, and I’ve been intrigued by the innovative ways that Gen Z chooses to engage with religion and religious practices. The “Coin Boys” are just another example of this. These “Coin Boys” are likely unaware that they are reviving an ancient and venerable religious practice: cleromancy, a form of divination in which an outcome is determined by random means, such as the casting of dice, the drawing of cards, or the flipping of coins.

I should note that it’s difficult to confirm if the Coin Boys anecdote is true. Reddit is an online forum in which anonymous “Redditers” can post under pseudonyms. Although the various “subreddits” (forums organized by topic of interest) have moderators, posts are not fact-checked or vetted like mainstream news outlets. Indeed, internet sleuths have discovered good reasons to believe the story is an amusing fabrication by an online “troll” or prankster.

But it’s noteworthy that the post was “upvoted” more than 13,000 times by users on r/teachers; this suggests to me that very many teachers found the story plausible. As an experienced teacher myself, I absolutely found the story believable. Some 1,500 teachers commented on the thread, most thanking the original poster profusely for the heads-up, grateful that they might strategize in advance how to meet the challenge posed by the Coin Boys if or when the trend arrived at their school. And even if the original anecdote was a hoax, the Reddit post was widely re-posted on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), and so I’m quite confident the hoax has spawned copycats “IRL,” or “in real life,” as my students would say.

But even if the Coin Boys story were verifiably true, it wouldn’t be especially interesting if it was just an idiosyncratic example of a hyper-local high school subculture. But the Coin Boys (real or fictitious) are plausible to teachers like me because Gen Z has consistently demonstrated a unique interest in cleromancy — and most notably Tarot cards (a sub-genre of cleromancy called cartomancy). “Tarot Booms as Gen Z Sorts Out Spiritual Path,” reads one typical headline. A recent survey found that 51% of respondents ages 13-25 engaged in “tarot cards or fortune telling.” The Coin Boys, whether real or not, represent a well-documented magical-religious worldview among Generation Z.

(Image source: Cristian/AdobeStock Ashley Britton/SheKnows)

What, therefore, might we learn from the Coin Boys? I think the anecdote provides important insights into young people, play, education, psychology, and the persistence of religious ideas in our so-called secular age.

In cultures with a magical world view, there is no such thing as “randomness,” “chance,” or “coincidence.” As anthropologists Rosalie Wax and Murray Wax have written, “It is [only] we [moderns] who accept the possibility and logic of pure chance, while for the dweller in the magical world, no event is ‘accidental’ or ‘random’, but each has its chain of causation in which Power, or its lack, was the decisive agency.” Because everything apparently random is actually caused by the power of some (supernatural) agent, cleromancy is a mechanism by which these powers can be tested and their will discerned.

For thousands of years, the Chinese engaged in cleromancy by flipping coins or passing yarrow sticks from one hand to the other to consult the I Ching. The Ancient Hebrews made use of the Urim and Thummim, which may have been a pair of sacred dice, or else “were two flat stones, one side of which was the auspicious side and one the inauspicious, so that if they both fell with the same side upward the answer was given, while if they revealed different sides there was no answer.” The Hebrews also drew lots (1 Samuel 14:42; Jonah 1:7), as did the Romans. (We still talk of “drawing the short straw” to talk about a person to whom an unwelcome task or fate falls.) The practice of cleromancy is ubiquitous in cultures across time and geographical space.

Of course, one might argue that the “Coin Boys” are not engaging in a religious practice at all, but merely teenage play, and to confuse the two is to insult religion and place undue importance on what is, in the end, only silliness. But Johann Huizinga, the preeminent cultural historian of play, convincingly argued in Homo Ludens that there has always been the closest affinity between play and religion.

Huizinga argued that ritual and myth are rooted in what he called the “play instinct” or “ludic function.” He writes, “In all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit is playing on the border-line between jest and earnest [. . .] sacred rites, sacrifices, consecrations and mysteries, all of which serve to guarantee the well-being of the world, [are performed] in a spirit of pure play truly understood.”

Huizinga makes compelling connections between religious activities and the children’s games that take place on the playground. Both religious ritual and the games of children put a pause to “ordinary life” and transport the participants to another world. Both involve aspects of role-play or pretend. Both utilize a peculiar vocabulary unique to the context of the game or the ritual. Both mark out a sacred space, hallowed spot, or boundary within which special and arbitrary rules are strictly enforced: “Formally speaking, there is no distinction whatever between marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes of sheer play. The turf, the tennis-court, the chess-board and the pavement-hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle.”

You can sense the truth of Huizinga’s argument if you observe the earnest concentration of a group of schoolchildren playing hop-scotch: the clearly delineated squares in chalk like a magic circle; the mantra-like rhymes recited by the skipper, passed orally from one generation of school children to the next; the earnest seriousness of the inviolable rules. One can sense it in a baseball game: the painted diamond; the special vocabulary (innings, dugout, strike, shortstop); the esoteric hand gestures and signs between catcher and pitcher; superstitious rituals of pitchers and batters; the dramatic and impractical costuming and eye-black.

As further proof of the overlap between the earnestness of religion and the frivolity of play, Huizinga reminds us that in many cultures the gods themselves play games of “chance”: “In the Mahabharata the world itself is conceived as a game of dice which Siva plays with his queen… Germanic mythology also tells of a game played by the gods on a playing-board: when the world was ordained the gods assembled for dicing together, and when it is to be born again after its destruction the rejuvenated Ases will find the golden playing-boards they originally had.” In other words, play was never beneath the dignity of the gods; games of chance were one of the gods’ favorite pastimes.

But if there are historical precedents, it also seems that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between cleromancy as practiced by ancient people and the coin flipping of the Coin Boys. Ancient practitioners saw in the world a deep order and logic, and cleromancy was a way to discern that order and reconcile oneself with it. To the contrary, I suspect these Gen Z Coin Boys see a lack of order and logic in the world, and use their coin flipping to express their frustration with the randomness, and maybe even the futility, of their situation.

There is mounting evidence that Gen Z is not okay. Experts are calling it a “crisis” —  anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation are all way up. I speculate, though I cannot confirm, that the Coin Boys’ activities might actually derive from a nihilistic worldview diametrically opposed to the worldview of ancient diviners.

But why “Coin Boys” and not “Coin Girls”? I’m convinced by firsthand experience in the classroom and by emerging research cited by scholars such as Richard Reeves (author of Of Boys and Men), that boys are disengaging from school. Reeves notes that male students, on average, earn worse grades and enroll in fewer advanced courses than their female classmates. Currently, girls represent two-thirds of the top 10 percent of GPA scores, while boys make up two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent. Boys are also 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading, and science. The consequences of boys’ disengagement in high school are evident in the increasing disparities observed at the college level. As Reeves writes, “There is a bigger gender gap in higher education today than in 1972, when Title IX was passed. Back then, 57% of bachelor’s degrees went to men. Within a decade the gap had closed. In 2021, 58% of degrees went to women.”

According to Reeves, there are several reasons for high school boys’ disengagement: boys tend to lag behind girls in their intellectual and emotional development; the teaching force is overwhelmingly female; time for recess and gym has been dramatically reduced; and funding for career and technical education has been slashed. Some might object that these broad generalizations amount to a kind of crude gender essentialism, but Reeves’ research is compelling, and my own on-the-ground experiences lead me to believe that Reeves is on to something.

It could be, then, that the Coin Boys are asserting their autonomy in a school system that feels particularly stifling for young men. In my experience as a teacher, students (and especially boys) often experience school as an arbitrary set of disconnected tasks. Too often, students have too little input into what they learn and how they demonstrate their learning. If this is true, there’s something fitting, even poetic, about protesting the arbitrariness of school with something equally arbitrary.

An alternative explanation: Coin Boys (and those who engage in similar practices like Tarot readings) may have discovered that these practices are useful ways of self-psychologizing and discovering truths about oneself. If we are to follow the Delphic maxim to “Know Thyself,” it turns out that flipping a coin can be a good way to discover one’s own desires. In his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman gives the following advice:

“So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being ‘told’ what to do by the coin, that’s the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it’s ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option.”

Is this magic or psychology? Or both? It was the popularizer of Buddhism and Taoism Alan Watts, in his book Way of Zen, who argued that eastern methods of divination like the I Ching might be usefully compared to the Rorschach test in Western psychology. Both might be thought of as means of discovering and accessing the intuitive, or unconscious, regions of the self — what Watts calls the “peripheral vision” of the mind. We should not be so quick, therefore, to dismiss things like Tarot reading and the Coin Boys.

In 2004, psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote his book Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. According to Schwartz, the (un)official “dogma” of Western industrial societies goes as follows: to maximize welfare, you maximize freedom; to maximize freedom, you maximize choice. To maximize choice is, therefore, to maximize both freedom and welfare. Although this logic seems intuitively correct, Schwartz argues that it simply isn’t so. Instead, the “explosion of choices” available to people in modern affluent Western societies has made us more anxious and depressed. Instead of maximizing our happiness, it has led to analysis paralysis and decision fatigue. The explosion of choices has diminished our psychic bandwidth, leaving us drained and dissatisfied, constantly weighing the opportunity costs of choosing one thing instead of another.

Much has changed since 2004, and the breadth of our choices has only continued to expand. A prime example is modern online dating. Since Tinder launched in 2012, the dating landscape has changed dramatically. Just a few generations ago, one’s dating pool was limited to who you might meet at work, in your religious community, or at a bar. Now, a limitless potential pool of mates sits in our pocket, a swipe away. But this hasn’t improved our love lives; one survey found that 79% of Gen Z report dating app burnout. “Do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper of Nam,” reads one viral Tweet.

Schwartz’s work provides a suggestive framework to understand the appeal of modern cleromancy, whether through coin flipping or Tarot cards. Cleromancy could be an exceedingly effective way of cutting through the psychic smog of analysis paralysis. It could be understood as a kind of cathartic outsourcing of the onerous burden of decision-making in our choice-saturated world.

In any case, the “Coin Boys” phenomenon serves as an intriguing lens through which to explore the complex interplay of religion, play, and psychology in the Gen Z cohort. The ancient practice of cleromancy has been adopted and cleverly adapted by modern adolescents in response to contemporary challenges. Whether viewed as a playful rebellion against the strictures of modern life, a manifestation of nihilistic tendency, or a pragmatic tool for self-psychologizing and decision-making, the phenomenon underscores the enduring relevance, and the flexibility, of magical-religious practices in navigating the complexities of the human experience.

Corey Landon Wozniak lives with his wife and four sons in Las Vegas, NV. He teaches English and Comparative Religions at a public high school.

The post Live By The Coin, Die By The Coin: Religion, Play, and Gen Z “Coin Boys” appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image: Drake. Source: Jewish Views)

The following excerpt comes from Jonathan Branfman’s Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, & White Supremacy (NYU Press, 2024). The book explores how various Jewish celebrities present the Jewish identity onscreen and how their personas may address antisemitism or reinforce issues like misogyny.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction, “Getting Racy.”

***

Beware the comments on YouTube, for they often distill viewers’ crudest biases. For instance, misinformed comments about Jews of color lurk below many clips of the biracial Jewish rap superstar Drake—comments like “OMFG, I found the first Black Jew!” More polite but equally sharp surprise sweeps my college classes on media, race, gender, and Jewish culture whenever I mention Drake’s Black Jewish identity. Yet these same classes are just as startled to hear that the blue-eyed, sandy-haired, brawny film star Zac Efron is also Jewish: I routinely hear twin gasps that “Drake is Jewish?!” and “Zac Efron is Jewish?!” Upon reflection, students consistently trace their surprise to a perception that Drake looks too Black, Efron too white, and both too muscular and handsome to “look Jewish.” But even while voicing preconceptions about Jewish skin, hair, faces, and muscles, many students state that they do not consider Jewishness a bodily trait, but a religious identity. Indeed, for many students, it is as novel to notice their own racial perceptions about Jewish bodies as to find those perceptions shattered by Drake and Efron. And these surprised reactions only grow as we begin tracing how such stereotypes descend from at least eight centuries of religious, artistic, and racial stigmas on Jewish bodies. By examining millennial Jewish stars, many students thus newly recognize their own conflicting definitions of Jewishness, their own preset images of Jewish bodies, and the antisemitic history that shapes both.

My students’ classroom epiphanies reflect pervasive racial contradictions around Jewishness in twenty-first-century America. On one hand, many Americans assume that all Jews look white, erasing Jews of color like Drake. Yet if Drake’s Blackness “looks un-Jewish” to many people, so does Efron’s whiteness, both men’s muscularity, and both men’s handsomeness. These contradictions emerge partly because US media circulate racial antisemitism: historically traceable stigmas that depict Jews as bodily different from and inferior to white gentiles (non-Jews). Even for Americans who do not consciously deem Jews a “race,” these stigmas fuel racial stereotypes about Jewish bodies and prompt questions about how to racially define Jews. Such questions grabbed headlines in 2019, after reports that Donald Trump might legally reclassify Jewishness from a religion to a “race or nationality.” This controversy only dramatized racial contradictions that many Jews navigate daily. For instance, I grew up Jewish in the 1990s hearing peers ask, “Are Jews a religion or a race?” without knowing why the answer seemed hazy. Jewish racial discrepancies also went unexplained at home: although my family checked “white” on school forms, we tracked monthly reports about white supremacists who committed racial violence against Jews because they deemed us “nonwhite.”

While far-right violence can target Jews of all colors, this violence especially illustrates how Euro-American Jews navigate contradictory relationships to white supremacy and white supremacists. White supremacy describes how racism systematically awards greater rights, opportunities, and safety to people labeled white, including many Jews. The Jewish comedic rapper Lil Dicky details these advantages in his 2013 rap “White Dude,” observing that “I ain’t gotta worry where the cops at,” since “they ain’t suspicious of Jews,” so “it’s a damn good day to be a white dude.” Yet even as white supremacy advantages Euro-American Jews over people of color (including Jews of color), self-declared white supremacists revile all Jews as nonwhite “race enemies.” The former KKK grand wizard David Duke captured this hostility in 2016 when tweeting, “JEWS ARE NOT WHITE!” White supremacists like Duke specifically accuse Jews of puppeteering the Black, feminist, and gay civil rights movements, plus Muslim and Latinx immigration, to eradicate white Christian Americans. This conspiracy theory, called “white genocide” or “the great replacement,” is what motivated the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally to chant “Jews will not replace us!” In 2018, this myth motivated a white gentile gunman to massacre eleven congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. Before attacking, the gunman ranted online against a Jewish American refugee-resettlement nonprofit, which he claimed was “bring[ing] invaders in that kill our people.” In response to this imagined threat, the gunman stormed Tree of Life while shouting, “All Jews must die!” This Pittsburgh attack, like the Charlottesville rally before it, illustrates that antisemitism remains central to white supremacists’ ecosystem of hate, intimately bound to anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism.

These contradictions make racial antisemitism vital to challenge but tricky to visualize in America today. If few Americans consciously label Jews a “race,” how can they racially stereotype Jewish bodies? How can this racial antisemitism impact Jews of color like Drake, who “don’t look Jewish?” Why do Euro-American Jews experience safety from racist police violence, but not from racist alt-right violence? How can Euro-American Jews acknowledge their white privilege and fight color-based racism without downplaying antisemitism, and vice versa? Unwinding these paradoxes is essential to combat antisemitism and to fully grasp how race operates in America. It is also essential for American Jews who wish to decode their own unpredictable racial statuses and to dismantle racism inside and outside Jewish communities. Until such questions about Jewishness and race receive clarity, they will keep fueling harmful miseducation, imprecise scholarship, and misinformed activism.

To clarify how America racially envisions Jews, this book spotlights the screens where many people already gaze at Jewish bodies. Like classroom dialogues on Drake and Zac Efron, this book dissects the way millennial Jewish stars market their bodies and the way audiences consume those bodies. In turn, this analysis reveals how racial antisemitism permeates twenty-first-century American racial “common sense.” Millennial Jewish stars make such helpful exemplars for this study because they tend to spotlight Jewish identity and antisemitic stigma in unusually provocative ways, as we will see.

Spotting racial antisemitism onscreen is essential because scholars, students, activists, and Jewish communities often lack tools to analyze antisemitism at all. For instance, because US culture lacks language for Jewish racial status, even students who racially perceive Zac Efron as “too white to look Jewish” struggle to analyze racial antisemitism when discussing the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Perplexed by white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us!,” students often ask, “Aren’t Jews white? Isn’t Judaism a religion?” Beyond the classroom, oversimplifying Jewish racial status this way can derail progressive social activism. For example, in 2018 the Women’s March splintered over accusations that its leaders had trivialized antisemitism because they deemed Jews white.

(Image: Zac Efron. Source: Omar Vega/Getty Images)

When progressive activists and students oversimplify Jewish experience this way, they reflect gaps in feminist, queer, and critical race scholarship. Although these fields respectively examine gender, sexuality, and race, they overlap by emphasizing how multiple oppressions intersect—for instance, how racism and sexism jointly harm Black women differently from white women or Black men. This intersectional approach, pioneered by the feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, leads all three fields to examine many facets of identity, especially race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. Jewishness and antisemitism seem natural concerns for this intersectional analysis. Nevertheless, antisemitism often goes unnamed in feminist, queer, and critical race theory: these fields often conflate Jews with white gentiles or mention Jews only as oppressive colonizers in Israel-and-Palestine. Although Jewish feminists have critiqued this silence since 1982, it remains common today. America’s feminist scholarly organization, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), illustrated this gap after the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally. When condemning that rally, NWSA detailed how “white supremacy and fascism have always been intricately connected with misogyny, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and settler-colonial logics.” This expansive list omitted how white supremacy integrates antisemitism, even though the Charlottesville marchers had chanted “Jews will not replace us!” on national television. Although later corrected, this omission exemplified how even blatant antisemitism routinely goes unnoticed in feminist, queer, and critical race scholarship.

In turn, these fields often dismiss efforts to challenge antisemitism. Such efforts often get rebuked as ploys to evade white guilt, distract from “real” injustices, or rationalize Israeli violence against Palestinians. When feminist, queer, and critical race theory do recognize antisemitism, they often narrowly deem it religious stigma, neatly detached from racial status. This perspective dismisses “white Jews” purely as privileged whites who might occasionally face religious discrimination. Likewise, when these fields (rarely) mention Jews of color, they usually discount how such Jews face antisemitism, instead solely discussing how Jews of color face racism from lighter Jews. Although media studies and Jewish studies have stronger histories of analyzing Jewish racial status, both still tend to overlook Jews of color and to oversimplify how race operates for twenty-first-century Euro-American Jews. However, by analyzing millennial Jewish stardom, this book draws Jewish, feminist, queer, critical race, and media studies toward a fuller understanding of American racial ideologies in general and racial antisemitism in particular.

Oversimplifying Jewish racial status prevents many scholars (both Jewish and gentile) from recognizing that such antisemitism remains a threat. The same oversights also discourage some Euro-American Jews from addressing their white privilege. Time magazine exemplified this problem with a 2014 op-ed, “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege,” by Jewish Princeton student Tal Fortgang. Fortgang asserts that because his grandparents reached America as penniless Holocaust survivors, neither they nor he benefit from any white privilege. Fortgang’s narrative overlooks how white skin helped Ashkenazi Holocaust refugees to obtain legal entry, citizenship, or employment in America, and how America rebuffs darker refugees today. Fortgang also overlooks how Euro-American Jews receive better acceptance within American Jewish communities than Jews of color. For instance, he has probably never been mistaken for “the help” at Jewish events, as the Black Jewish comedian Tiffany Haddish has: Haddish relates that “I’ve been to like over five hundred bar mitzvahs, and I’m getting tired of people telling me to go to the kitchen. No motherfucker, I’m supposed to be here!”

It is tempting but inadequate to dismiss Fortgang’s defensiveness as willful ignorance. When refusing to notice white privilege, Fortgang actually mirrors the NWSA statement that disregarded neo-Nazi antisemitism at Charlottesville: both gaps result from trying to ignore Jews of color and to label Euro-American Jews as stably racially privileged or oppressed. Further, both miss how Jews can encounter racial antisemitism simultaneously with white privilege or color-based oppression.

For instance, both Fortgang’s and the NWSA’s statements overlook how twenty-first-century Euro-American Jews experience a gap between legal and social race. On legal documents, these Jews are stably white. Yet in social interactions, they experience racial instability that legal scholar David Schraub calls conditional whiteness. I specify that such Jews are conditionally white with unpredictable conditions. Even people who deem these Jews white often assume they can spot Jews by noses or hair, assumptions rooted in racial antisemitism. Ultra-Orthodox Jews with distinct clothing may seem “less white” than secular Jews. Sephardi, Mizrahi, and/or Latinx Jews, no matter how fair-skinned, may find their white status more precarious than that of Ashkenazi North American–born Jews. And even secular Ashkenazi, non-Latinx, Euro-American Jews who get initially read as white cannot predict if this advantageous white status will falter once a name or nose reveals their Jewishness. Likewise, conditionally white Jews cannot foretell what consequence may follow losing whiteness, from mockery to murder.

Feminist, queer, and critical race studies often worry that acknowledging antisemitism and conditional whiteness may aid Jewish communities to deny their white privilege as Fortgang does, to employ evasions like “I’m not white, I’m Jewish.” However, erasing racial antisemitism actually promotes this evasion. Unlike Fortgang, many conditionally white Jews do wish to challenge white privilege. But when hearing anyone deny their Jewish stigma and danger, such Jews can jointly experience a rightful urge to acknowledge antisemitism and a wrongful urge to avoid white guilt. Together, these reactions encourage some condition- ally white Jews (like Fortgang) to reject antiracist insights altogether. Instead, accurately naming how antisemitism intersects with white privilege and color-based racism sets the stage for Jews and gentiles of all colors to ally in dismantling white supremacy.

To support this precision, this book helps readers to articulate how US media depict Jewish racial status onscreen. Although Jewish racial contradictions can seem abstract, they are really as familiar to many Americans as their favorite sitcom or star.

Jonathan Branfman is the Eli Reinhard Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Stanford University.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 49 of the Revealer podcast: “Jewish Bodies and Jewish Celebrities.”

The post From Drake to Zac Efron: “Looking Jewish,” or Not appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures)

When Dune: Part Two came out this spring I felt called to the theater like a sandworm drawn by a thumper (IYKYK). As a science fiction fan, I wanted to see the latest blockbuster adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 novel. I cannot think of another science fiction franchise that so clearly draws on Arabic terminology, Islamic theology, and stereotypically “Middle Eastern” culture. The decades since Herbert published the first book in the Dune series include U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and concerns over reliance on spice—oh wait, I mean oil—continue to drive U.S. domestic and foreign policy. The issues Herbert raised in Dune such as religion, politics (especially the dangers of charismatic leaders), and colonialism—as well as ecology and climate change, issues largely ignored by the recent films—continue to hold great importance today.

As a scholar of Islam who also teaches college courses on science fiction, race, and cultural appropriation, I had concerns about the depiction of Muslims in Dune: Part One (2021). Instead of alleviating those concerns, watching Dune: Part Two brought them into sharper focus, especially since these two films have combined for over $1 billion in revenue worldwide. Countless people are consuming Dune, and I have significant concerns about what exactly they are consuming in terms of messages about the Fremen who serve as stand-ins for Arabs and Muslims.

In Dune’s version of humanity’s far future, the desert world of Arrakis is the source of spice, the most valuable substance in the galaxy because space navigators use it to transport ships from one system to another. The galaxy is controlled by an emperor who pits different noble Houses against each other. Arrakis’s indigenous people, the Fremen, have been persecuted for generations by House Harkonnen who occupied the planet with an imperial mandate to mine spice. Envious of House Atreides’ growing power, the emperor commands them to take over spice mining on Arrakis while conspiring with House Harkonnen to slaughter House Atreides in a sneak attack. The ruler of House Atreides, Duke Leto Atreides, wants a more equitable arrangement with the Fremen as part of his plan to harness “desert power.” His teenage son, Paul, arrives having strange dreams and instinctively knows how to wear a stilsuit (Fremen technology that captures the body’s moisture, allowing the wearer to drink it later to survive the desert). His mother Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, a powerful monastic order of women who have worked for millennia to manipulate the breeding lines of the royal houses so as to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, a male Bene Gesserit with extraordinary powers.

In the opening scene of Dune: Part One, the audience sees Paul studying up on Arrakis. He learns that the Fremen “are fierce and unreliable.” Yet when Paul arrives it is clear that the Fremen see something special in him. Crowds of people dressed in what I can only describe as Hollywood’s Orientalist imagination of Arabs, clamor that Paul is the “Lisan al-Gaib.” Jessica tells Paul that “Lisan al-Gaib” is a Fremen phrase meaning “Voice of the Outer World” (the actual Arabic phrase translates more exactly to “voice of the unseen”), and says that “these people have waited centuries for the ‘Lisan al-Gaib.’ They see you, they see the signs.” Paul is unconvinced, responding: “They see what they’ve been told to see.” This is a reference to the Bene Gesserit preparing the way for the Kwisatz Haderach. Their missionaries planted myths and prophecies over the millennia so that when the Kwisatz Haderach comes along, everyone recognizes him as such. It’s one way in which Herbert depicts religion in the books as a dangerous tool to manipulate the masses.

(Image source: Warner Brothers)

Paul and Jessica survive the Harkonnen sneak attack and flee to the desert. They seek refuge amongst the Fremen, and are accepted by the Fremen leader Stilgar, who believes that this boy is indeed the “mahdi” (Arabic for “the guided one,” a term drawn from Islamic theology referencing a prophesied messianic leader). Paul then meets Chani, who is literally the girl of his dreams, and defeats Fremen warrior Jamis in an honor duel, killing Jamis even though he himself had never previously killed before. This scene is key to Paul’s transformation from sheltered child to messianic warrior. The scene also conveys the Fremen sense of justice, that violence is a way of solving problems.

***

The Dune-iverse has many tendrils. After the initial novel’s success, Herbert published five more books to carry the story forward. Brian Herbert (son of Frank) and Kevin J. Anderson co-authored sequels and prequels. David Lynch directed the first film adaptation in 1984, the SyFy Channel produced a TV mini-series in 2000, and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) took the franchise to its most popular and profitable heights since its inception almost sixty years ago. Thus far only the SyFy Channel’s 2003 Children of Dune carries the story beyond the first novel, although reports indicate that Villeneuve is set to direct a third film that would cover the material in Herbert’s second novel, Dune Messiah. A prequel series, Dune: Prophecy, is due to stream on HBO Max this fall.

I first thought the adaptations would become less Orientalist over time, but have found the opposite is true. Orientalism, a term popularized in 1978 by Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, describes the West’s construction of the “East” as anti-modern, irrational, static, and effeminate (amongst other things). This is in contrast to the “West” as modern, hyper-rational, dynamic, and masculine. I watched David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation with a friend who observed, “I’m really not getting any kind of ‘Arab vibe’ from these Fremen.” Well, yes, they weren’t very Arab at all! The 2000 SyFy channel’s adaptation is more Orientalist than David Lynch’s version, but less so than the Villeneuve films. What accounts for this inverted arc?

My theory is that in the 1950s and through 1965 when Herbert was researching and writing Dune, Muslims were largely absent from the consciousness of mainstream America. This meant that he could use Islam and Muslim communities as a reference for the epic mythology he was crafting because it wouldn’t be familiar to his audience. The distance — the weirdness, the exoticness — is a key factor in what made Dune appealing.

Dune: Part Two is where the action really gets going, with both sandworms and Orientalism hitting home. Paul learns the ways of the desert, including not only how to walk without attracting the mammoth sandworms but also eventually how to ride one. He takes the name “Muad’Dib,” inspired by the Arrakis desert mouse. We are told the term means “teacher of the desert,” but of course this is another Arabic term that can be translated straightforwardly as “teacher.” The Fremen leader Stilgar encourages Paul to embrace his messianic destiny even though Paul himself does not want to. “The Mahdi is too humble to say he is Mahdi,” Stilgar tells a group of brown-faced turbaned men with large bushy beards, all of them smiling widely and nodding their heads in response, the perfect Orientalist image of the irrational “Arab” fanatic. Stilgar gapes at everything Paul does then gasps “as it is written,” or “Lisan al-Gaib” or “the Mahdi.” The audience laughs, because decades of this Islamophobic and Orientalist trope within Euro-American literature and cinema tell us to laugh (and because the audience’s other option is to be fearful of the Fremen/Arabs). This became a popular meme that circulated after the film’s release, in which people make fun of Stilgar for believing in Paul. Listening to the audience in the theater laughing at Stilgar was the moment when my concerns about Dune: Part Two really came into focus.

Paul reluctantly embraces his destiny and leads the Fremen to victory over their oppressors. The Fremen leave Arrakis to take their jihad/holy war to the rest of the known galaxy under Muad’Dib’s rule. In the book we see a combination of terms: jihad, holy war, and crusade. The Villeneuve films use “holy war” and drop any reference to jihad or crusade, in part because the writers felt that, in the time that has passed since the book came out, Arab communities have become much less exotic to an American audience. This shift is also a half-hearted attempt at sidestepping the link between the Fremen and Muslims.

Herbert’s use of Arabic terminology is a key part of the Dune series, providing an exotic layer that keeps most of the audience believing this story is set in a different world. When I watched the SyFy channel’s Dune mini-series from 2000 with a friend with a similar passion for science fiction and fantasy, I pointed out every time we heard something in Dune that was in Arabic. He was shocked, having thought that Herbert created this language, just as Tolkien did with Elvish. The comparison between Tolkien and Herbert is productive since Elvish is based on Latin, Finnish, and Celtic languages, and the Fremen Chakobsa is based on Arabic but also Serbo-Croat, Turkish, and Navajo. Fans today might expect conlags (“constructed languages”) as part and parcel of high-level world building, but that was not the expectation in 1965 (nor in 1914, when Tolkien wrote the first piece of Middle-Earth related fiction). There is an additional challenge when novels are adapted for the screen, with studios hiring linguists to take what has so far only existed in written form and convert these words into something that actors can speak.

A recurring question for me has been why I find Herbert’s appropriation of Arabic problematic, while Tolkien’s use of Latin less so. The core answer is in the debate over cultural appropriation, when a person from Culture A takes something—language, practice, clothing—from Culture B, and then uses it in ways that are different from the original setting. An example would be white people at Coachella wearing both Indian and Native American clothing.

In the 2000 SyFy channel’s adaptation, the aftermath of Paul’s duel with Jamis cemented for me that the Fremen are meant to be depicted as mindless quasi-Muslim zealots. At Jamis’s funeral, Chani and other Fremen stand together and chant “bi-la kaifa” each time someone offers up a memory of their fallen comrade. In Arabic, this term literally means “without how” or “there is no ‘how’,” and is drawn from early theological disputes between the Mu’tazili and ‘Ashari schools of Islam on how to understand passages of the Qur’an. If the text says that God has a hand, or sits on a throne, is that literal or metaphorical? While the rationalist Mu’tazili argue for a combination of literal and metaphorical understandings, the ‘Ashari’s would respond, “there is no how,” meaning that the question was unnecessary. Is this how Herbert uses the term? No. Instead, the Fremen use this phrase to mean “Amen [literally: ‘nothing further need be explained’].” Muslims (even the majority of whom do not speak Arabic) utter “Amin” in the exact way that Christians and Jews say “Amen” at the conclusion of prayers, so what accounts for this unnecessary adaptation? Why not simply use the term “amen”? Because Herbert wants the Fremen to appear different than white Christians. With their blank faces and use of Arabic, Herbert depicts the Fremen as uncivilized religious savages.

Charles W. Mills argues that we can take Tolkien’s racial hierarchy (with the Elves on top, Men in the middle, and Orcs at the bottom) and map that onto a racial hierarchy in our own world, with the elves as the ultimate white race, and the orcs as a stand in for all Black and Brown peoples. We can debate whether or not to call Tolkien’s depiction racist, but for my purposes, the contrast here is that Tolkien mines cultures (specifically pre-Christian pagan Western Europe) that he considers his own to create Elvish languages, while Herbert takes languages from cultures that are definitively not his own. Therein lies the difference.

One point I will concede is that Dune: Part Two depicts the Fremen debating whether an outsider like Paul should be allowed to lead them. The Northern Fremen do not see themselves as fanatic believers in prophecy, while the Southerners – embodied in Stilgar – embrace the prophecy of Lisan al-Gaib. “We believe in Fremen” declares a Northerner. The others respond with bi-la kaifa.

Does a leader—especially a messianic one—need to be an insider? Can someone like Paul ever truly learn to become Fremen? Can we as the audience in 2024 see Paul as anything other than a white savior who has come to lead the superstitious indigenous people to their freedom? In the SyFy channel’s 2000 adaptation of Dune, Paul comments to Jessica that the Fremen “have a simple religion.” She responds: “Nothing about religion is simple.” As with religion, so too with cultural appropriation, especially in the Dune-iverse.

Dune is not alone amongst science fiction franchises engaging in cultural appropriation. George Lucas used elements from Buddhism, Daoism, and Sufism to create the Force and the Jedi. It’s not the fact that Herbert borrows so much material from Arabic and Islamic sources, but it’s the way in which he goes about the borrowing that I find problematic. Perhaps I can understand Herbert’s work as a product of his time, but I don’t see how to excuse Villeneuve for perpetuating these stereotypes sixty years later.

Why does all this matter? A common theme with American science fiction is depicting alien races and new planets as objects that “we” (the implied Euro-American subjects of the story) need to conquer or at least civilize (see most of Star Trek). This narrative has consequences in our real world, not just with European colonization over the centuries, but also here in what eventually became the United States with the genocide and near erasure of indigenous peoples. Paul’s reluctant manipulation of the Fremen fits perfectly with this narrative. To wield “desert power,” one must first take control of the desert people.

Books, TV, film, music: these are all powerful forms of cultural production that serve either to perpetuate or challenge dominant narratives we use to structure our society, develop public policy, and in general, make sense of the world. Fidelity to the source is a constant question with adaptations. Dune could be done without playing Stilgar’s devotion (and by extension, Fremen culture) for laughs, raising the question: why not depict it differently? That Villeneuve made the choices he did—and is being rewarded with huge commercial success—reveals Hollywood has a long way to go to undo its Orientalist legacy.

Patrick J. D’Silva is Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Denver. He is co-author (with Carl Ernst) of Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan (Suluk Press, 2024), and his next book focuses on the intersection of religion and science fiction. His website is www.patrickjdsilva.com.

The post Layers of Dune: A Sandworm-Sized Case Study of Cultural Appropriation in Contemporary Science Fiction appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

When House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University in April he castigated pro-Palestine student protestors and university administrators alike for their role in creating what he called an unsafe and antisemitic campus environment. His speech was drowned out by heckling from protestors who emphatically asserted their First Amendment right to demonstrate. The students countered that they are not antisemites demonstrating against Jews, but rather that they are protesting the catastrophic effects both Israeli state violence and Zionism, a political movement, have on Palestinians. Furthermore, they argued that the protests were intended to maintain local and global focus on the Israeli atrocities in Gaza, contending that the attention should be on Gaza and not their methods of protest.

What happened on college campuses across the United States this spring—a massive wave of nonviolent student encampments protesting the war in Gaza and universities’ investments in companies that profit from that war—is a reminder of the power people have to organize for social change. And like the most successful social movements in history, the student encampments built a broad-based coalition of support, which included Palestinian and Arab students; Black, Brown, white, and multiracial students; and students of all nationalities and immigration statuses who are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, other religions – and, especially, Jewish.

I have been following the participation of young American Jews in the Palestine solidarity movement, on campuses and off, for the last decade as I conducted research for my book Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine. In the book, I argue that young Jewish American Palestine solidarity activists view their activism and commitment to ending Israeli state violence as a Jewish value. For them, active participation in this social justice movement is a reflection of Jewish ethics, motivated by their Jewish identities and the values they learned through Jewish education. The activists intentionally and strategically infuse their work with Jewish teachings and customs in ways that strengthen and reinforce their Jewish identities, making Palestine solidarity activism not only a reflection of their individualized values but an expression of a collective Jewish ethos.

This is exactly what occurred on college campuses in the spring across the United States. Young American Jews showed up as Jews to say they reject the Israeli state violence being conducted in their names as both Jews and Americans. And they played an essential role in the Palestine solidarity encampments.

(Image source: Lindsey Wasson/AP Photo)

The visible presence of Jews at these protests was crucial, in part because the most common way the pro-Israel establishment discredits and smears Palestine solidarity activists is by calling them antisemitic. Accusations of antisemitism constitute a widespread and effective tool in silencing those who support justice in Palestine. When Jewish activists show up visibly as Jews, they deflect such smears and render it clear that the pro-Palestine encampments are not inherently based on antisemitism but rather are rooted in the principles of justice, equality, and human rights for Palestinians. These values do not threaten Jewish safety or wellbeing, but they are a direct threat to the existing order in Israel, which guarantees rights and protections to Jews that it denies to Palestinians. For example, as Israeli citizens, Jews have the right to vote and access to national health care, social security, and education. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who have no citizenship status, have none of these rights and are unable to vote for the government that controls their lives. Furthermore, Palestinians are subject to severe violence from both Israeli settlers and the Israeli military. Palestinian political prisoners, including minors, are often held under administrative detention without charge or trial, and Israel routinely demolishes Palestinian homes, targeted due to a lack of building permits or security concerns, leading to massive Palestinian displacement and the loss of livelihoods. Students and the broader movement for justice in Palestine are concerned with these and other Israeli violations and are generally not motivated by antisemitism.

Of course, there are individuals who engage in dangerous and antisemitic rhetoric within these encampments and beyond. But to paint the movement as a whole as antisemitic because of a few individuals is both disingenuous and factually inaccurate, and that devalues the very real forms of antisemitism that physically threaten Jews and our communities, which we must take seriously. The threats of white supremacy and increasing white nationalism in the United States have already proven deadly for Jewish communities, as was made evidenced by the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Poway Chabad in California, to name just two such attacks. When nonviolent activism in support of Palestinian rights is deemed antisemitic merely because it challenges Jewish supremacy in Israel, it makes it harder to combat the violent antisemitism of white nationalists in the United States who endanger the lives of Jewish and other marginalized communities.

At numerous universities around the country, Jewish student activists engaged in Jewish rituals in the encampments – holding Passover seders, Shabbat dinners, and prayer services – inviting Jewish and non-Jewish faculty and students to participate in and witness Jewish culture. Joining in Jewish ritual as a form of Palestine solidarity activism is a profound way these activists differentiate and liberate their Jewishness from Zionism. At one encampment Passover seder, students included olives on the traditional seder plate to symbolize Palestinian freedom and chanted “next year in free Jerusalem” at the end of the ritual. Jewish students adapted the holiday’s traditional rituals for the current moment, emphasizing that if the Passover holiday is a commemoration of emancipation, that it should extend to the freedom of Palestinians as well. By participating in a Passover seder within the context of the Palestine solidarity movement, the Jewish activists framed their participation in the protests as rooted in Judaism. And by bringing Jewish rituals to the encampments, they made it clear that their public resistance to the war in Gaza was an explicit expression of their Jewish identities and values.

Many young American Jews, including students on university campuses, feel alienated from Zionism, Israel, and the mainstream Jewish organizations that maintain a close relationship with both. In fact, many Jewish students on campuses today actively oppose Zionism and identify proudly as anti-Zionist Jews. Rather than participate in mainstream Jewish organizations, they have found new places to engage with Jewish life and have created Jewish communal spaces that foster dissenting views on Israel and Zionism and that embrace Palestine solidarity activism as one way to express one’s Jewishness and commitment to liberal and progressive Jewish values.

Engaging in Jewish rituals at the encampments forms solidarities among anti-Zionist Jewish students who don’t feel welcome in mainstream Jewish spaces, in particular at Hillel, the organization for Jewish life on campuses that has widely and publicly condemned the encampments. They engaged in Jewish rites and showed up as Jews in order to form new Jewish communities where their values can be on full display and where they can say “not in our name” to the genocide in Gaza.

(Image source: Maen Hammad)

For some Jewish students, showing up as Jews included being part of formal groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a distinctly Jewish organization that organizes in solidarity with Palestinians on campus and beyond. Other Jewish students participated in the protests not through affiliation with any groups but made sure to be there alongside them, thereby forming a Jewish bloc of protestors that was able to respond to detractors challenging the broader protest movement. Regardless of how they came to participate, at campus protests the Jewish student activists highlighted the significant Jewish emphasis on the idea of “never again,” a post-Holocaust phrase invoked to suggest that Jews will never allow another Jewish genocide. But rather than taking the particular view, which would indicate “never again for Jews,” the student activists emphasized the universalist approach to say “never again for anyone,” including Palestinians.

Many of the activists I interviewed for my book indicated that their participation in Palestine solidarity activism is essential to transforming their relationships to Judaism. They often mobilize based on the premise that upholding their Jewish identity and their conception of Jewish values obligates them to organize in solidarity with Palestinians. Their activism stems from the ethical imperative of justice that many were taught in the Jewish educational and communal environments in which they were raised.

This new generation’s engagement in Palestine solidarity activism is based on a love for and commitment to the Jewish people, a safe and secure Jewish future, and the consistent application of the Jewish values of freedom, liberation, equality, and justice that they were taught by Jewish institutions. Today’s young Jewish activists believe that Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians are not only morally repugnant but also a harm to Jewish life, identity, and culture in both Israel and around the world. For them, the unwavering support of Israel by mainstream Jewish institutions conflicts with the Jewish values upon which they were raised—those of freedom, equality, liberation, and liberal democracy—which compels them to resist Israel’s policies of occupation and apartheid toward Palestinians.

Perhaps most significantly to the campus protest movement, Jewish students are participating in Palestine solidarity activism in ways that can transform their local communities materially and symbolically. On a material level, Jewish students participate in boycott and divestment campaigns that are rooted in localized, winnable efforts to pressure their universities to divest from companies that profit from Israeli occupation, including many companies in Israel and weapons manufacturers across the globe that don’t align with the mission and values of the university. Inspired by a similar international movement to end apartheid in South Africa, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns create opportunities for U.S. based activists, including American Jews, to target something local, familiar, and achievable rather than something far away that seems impossible to win. Put simply, while ending the war in Gaza seems like an unlikely possibility to achieve from U.S. campuses, students are able to pressure their universities to divest from companies that profit from war and to end official partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Many of the Jewish activists I interviewed perceive BDS campaigns as a viable and powerful nonviolent tool for resisting and combating Israeli state violence from the United States. Unlike other forms of activism that might require them to travel halfway across the world to the Middle East, BDS campaigns enable activists to work toward change from their homes and campuses where they have more power to influence their institutions.

Symbolically, the presence of Jewish activists in the student encampments challenges the narrative that Palestinians and Jews are enemies in perpetual conflict with one another while simultaneously showing the world that Jews are willing to put their bodies on the line in solidarity with Palestinians to end Israeli injustices. The participation of Jewish activists challenges power, seeks to disrupt the status quo, and rejects the perception that Jews and Palestinians are on opposite sides of a protracted conflict. Put simply, most Jewish activists who engage with the Palestine solidarity movement are concerned with the material gains of improving everyday life for Palestinians as well as the symbolic notion that Jews and Palestinians can resist Israeli state violence collectively, in alliance with one another.

To dismiss campus protests as antisemitic and to ignore the large symbolic presence of Jewish student activists is to miss the point of this movement. It intentionally detracts from the mass atrocities the Israeli military is committing to instead condemn the methods of protest rather than the atrocities themselves.

These protests are about keeping an eye on the genocide unfolding in Gaza and the complicity of universities in the violence against Palestinians. Jewish students are an important element in the broad-based coalition protesting the war. Critics of the protests would rather smear the entire movement as antisemitic, focusing on the means of protest, so as to ignore the actual genocide. But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the protestors aren’t the ones creating the tensions. They are merely bringing the tensions to the surface.

Oren Kroll-Zeldin is the assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco where he is also assistant professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. He is the author of Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine and co-editor of This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity.

The post The Symbolic Significance of Jewish Students in the Pro-Palestine Campus Protests appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

This August, after 21 years, Angela Zito is stepping down as co-director of the Center for Religion and Media at NYU, the place that has served as The Revealer’s home since its genesis in 2003. Angela co-founded the Center for Religion and Media with Faye Ginsburg, originally one of ten “centers of excellence” across the country first funded by Pew Charitable Trusts and then with an endowment at NYU. The Center for Religion and Media has a proud history; numerous scholars, journalists, and activists have benefited from its presence and offerings. And one of the Center’s most visionary and long-lasting projects is The Revealer, a publication that, if not for Angela Zito’s determination, would not still exist today.

In 2003, when many in the media were responding to the United States’ invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following the September 11 attacks, the Center for Religion and Media launched The Revealer to offer correctives to how mainstream media talked about religion, to “reveal” more incisive and researched perspectives about religion around the world. Angela hired journalist Jeff Sharlet to helm the publication as its first editor. Over the next five years, Sharlet invited numerous scholars and journalists to contribute to The Revealer and to offer readers more nuanced perspectives about religion than they might find elsewhere.

After Jeff’s departure from NYU, The Revealer could have ended. But Angela believed in its importance and ensured it would continue. She hired writer Ann Neumann to serve as The Revealer’s next editor. Neumann brought her own talent for reportage and literary nonfiction to the publication and expanded the types of stories The Revealer publishes. Ann shared the following about working with Angela on The Revealer:

“My personal curriculum vitae for Angela includes all of the discipline-defining events of her scholarly life, but also a separate category called, say, Above and Beyond, or Who Does That? In this category I list the ridiculously high number of times Angela taught me something—a lesson, a truth, a trick, a way of seeing—I hold like a talisman in my ‘surviving this world’ pocket. There’s the time she told me that one can experience a particular liberation after the loss of a parent. My father had died, I suspected she was heartless, then, in weeks, I understood that she was right as the sun. Or the time she said to me—after I had been a shit person, undecided, unreliable, scared and stuck—that ‘we should all get to do what we want.’ It is of great note that she was my boss at the time. Then there’s the time she graciously promoted me into a job I didn’t think I could do, but under her direction ultimately figured out. And then also the way those ‘figuring out’ skills became a career, a satisfaction, a future, a dream. Angela’s intellectual contributions at the Center for Religion and Media have helped change how these two juggernauts of American life are studied and discussed. Her uncommon ability, throughout her career, is centering community—a way of being in the world that has changed so many lives, including my own.”

After Ann stepped down as editor, Angela hired Kali Handelman who served as The Revealer’s editor for the next six years. With Angela’s support, Kali transformed The Revealer into its current form as a monthly online magazine. About working with Angela, Kali writes:

“Angela taught me that it was possible to lead through collaboration. From Angela I learned how to use energy and resources (by which I really mean capital — social and financial — salaries, honoraria, real estate, all of it) to support work one believes in. I learned how to do this explicitly — by hosting events and publishing work — but also more quietly, by connecting people with one another and with resources. At the Center for Religion and Media, and especially The Revealer, Angela created a place where so many people had the chance to figure out what we want to do and have been provided with the resources and support to do it. Our accomplishments are, in no small part, a credit to Angela. She created something durable and flexible, ahead of the curve, but somehow also at the same time responsive to what people ask and push for. I’m confident it will go into the future just as sharp and strong and bold as it started, and that it will carry forward Angela’s singular balance of brave critique and open-minded generosity.”

When Kali left her position as editor, Angela could have decided the time had come for the magazine to fold. But instead, and to my great delight, she insisted on its importance. She knew the world needed astute writing about religion and a place where academics and smart journalists could share their expertise. She believed in The Revealer’s value, and when I took over as editor in the last months of 2019 my only goal was not to ruin the publication. Angela encouraged my ideas and supported my decisions to try new things like themed special issues and to launch a podcast to complement the magazine.

In my first year as editor, as the Covid-19 pandemic spiraled during the Trump presidency and my sense of dread for the world worsened, Angela provided me with the inspiration for how I would ultimately edit and shape The Revealer to this day. She shared one of her favorite quotes from writer Raymond Williams: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” I had seen that quote at the bottom of Angela’s emails, but one day we talked about it and since then it has informed how I see my role at The Revealer and the responsibilities that come with it. In these years of right-wing hate, growing Christian nationalism, climate change, and the push for fascism, we could easily publish articles month after month that leave readers with despair. But a sense of doom can paralyze people and give them the impression that other political options aren’t possible, which would let the fascists and bigots win. So, from Angela’s cue, The Revealer has aimed to inform people while also showing pathways to better possibilities and avenues for hope. I take it as one of my key responsibilities that we must illuminate the current workings of the world alongside better alternatives. If you’ve read an article in The Revealer in the past few years or listened to our podcast and had a sense of hope, you have Angela Zito to thank.

With these thoughts about Angela’s influence on The Revealer’s legacy in mind, I am pleased to share our Summer 2024 issue with you. The issue opens with Oren Kroll-Zeldin’s “The Symbolic Significance of Jewish Students in the Pro-Palestine Campus Protests,” where he shares reasons why so many Jewish students participated in the spring protests against the war in Gaza and why their visibility as Jews matters. Then, in “Layers of Dune,” Patrick D’Silva explores this year’s blockbuster film Dune 2 and considers how it and the larger Dune franchise deploy anti-Muslim tropes and engage in cultural appropriation. Next, while thinking about mass media, in “From Drake to Zac Efron: ‘Looking Jewish,’ or Not,” an excerpt from Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, & White Supremacy, Jonathan Branfman reflects on people’s surprise when they learn a celebrity they didn’t expect is Jewish and what that reveals about Jewish identity, race, and antisemitism today. And, as we start to think about the back-to-school season, in “Live by the Coin, Die by the Coin: Religion and Gen Z Coin Boys,” Corey Wozniak reflects on a trend among Gen Z where they make life decisions based on a coin toss or a tarot card reading and what that says about young people in the face of climate catastrophe, how they view the future, and unexpected religious rituals among today’s teenagers.

The Summer issue also includes two new episodes of the Revealer podcast. In the first, “Elisabeth Elliot: Evangelical Icon and Her Alarming Third Marriage,” Liz Charlotte Grant joins us to discuss evangelical leader Elisabeth Elliot’s teachings about the supposed ideal Christian marriage, the disturbing details of her own marital life, and people’s reactions to our viral article about Elliot that we published in February. In the second episode, “Jewish Bodies and Jewish Celebrities,” Jonathan Branfman joins us to discuss bodily and racial stereotypes of Jews, how some Jewish celebrities navigate these stereotypes, and what lessons representations of Jews in the media reveal about antisemitism and racism today. You can listen to both episodes on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As summer comes to a close and we look ahead to a fall that will inevitably include more protests and political turmoil, I return once more to Angela Zito’s wisdom and the insistence that we locate and spread hope. Her inspiration to provide alternatives to despair will continue to inform our work. And here at The Revealer, one sign of positive things to come is that Elayne Oliphant, associate professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at NYU, will step in as the new co-director of the Center for Religion and Media alongside Faye Ginsburg. That means we have a bright future. And it will be a future shaped by the astute foresight, incisive wisdom, and indelible legacy of Angela Zito.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Celebrating Angela Zito, the Person Who Made The Revealer’s Legacy Possible appeared first on The Revealer.