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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: Jewish Comedy.

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(Jewish comedians. Image source: Jackie Hajdenberg)

The following excerpt comes from Jennifer Caplan’s book Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials. The book explores the relationship between American Jewish culture and comedy.

The excerpt is from the book’s introduction.

***

Jews and humor seem to go together like peas and carrots, like peanut butter and jelly, like Burns and Allen. Perhaps it has always been that way, though (as I will discuss in the pages to come) I don’t think so. Somewhere along the way, along their long and winding road, Jews got funny. Not just in an ontological sense, but in a way that was noticeable from the outside, and was a point of pride from the inside. So, while this relationship did not appear suddenly, when Time magazine published its now-famous 1978 article “Behavior: Analyzing Jewish Comics,” which claimed, among other things, that 80 percent of the working comedians in America were Jewish (despite Jews being then 3 percent of the general population) it both came as a shock and confirmed something people had long suspected.

In the wake of that article, “Jewish humor” became something people wanted to study, but that’s a tricky thing to do. First, what makes humor Jewish? Sigmund Freud asked this question back in 1905, and nearly a century later Rabbi Joseph Telushkin was still asking the same thing. Does a joke have to be by Jews and for Jews to qualify? This is Freud’s view. Telushkin, on the other hand, thought a qualifying joke just needs “Jewish sensibilities.” Both of these definitions are so broad, in different directions, that it begs the question as to whether the term “Jewish humor” even means anything anymore. This book is not going to answer that question. I remain unconvinced that any book can answer it with finality. What this book is going to do, however, will bear on the question: it will chart the relationship between humor created by Jews, and Judaism. My reasons for approaching the question in this way are many, but primarily I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness. It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family. In order to make sense of this, this book will also focus on change over time. I isolate four sequential generations as classified by sociologists: the Silent Generation (b. 1925–45), the Baby Boom (b. 1946–65), Generation X (b. 1966–79) and Millennials (b. 1980–95). Taking examples of humor from each generation that are about Jewish things, including rituals, texts, and Jewishness itself, I’ll track the way each generation’s relationship to these Jewish elements changes. I hope that this methodology will illuminate some of the meaning behind the phrase “Jewish humor,” while simultaneously showing why it may be impossible to define in a stable way. If something is changing significantly every twenty years or so, no wonder we would have a hard time getting a handle on it. We have to zoom out far enough to recognize those changes are happening.

These generations are, at their core, useful fictions. There is some statistical truth to the increased birth rate after World War II that gave rise to the Baby Boom moniker, but why the Baby Boom is said to end in, say, 1965 when the birthrate had been declining since 1958 is mostly arbitrary. The generational conceit of the book may seem similarly arbitrary. An account of this kind could be chronological, or separated by media type. But there is an important story happening along the generational lines. Traditionally, sociologists and historians have classified American Jews into generational categories—based on distance from immigration—that cut across those used to describe the population as a whole. The humorists I identify as being part of the Silent Generation were mostly part of what has traditionally been called the second generation within American Jewish history. I do not know if any of these humorists would have called themselves second generation, but I am nearly certain none of them would ever have identified as Silent Generation. That lack of a conscious connection to the generation into which sociologists categorized you started to change, however, with the Baby Boom generation and that change is part of the story. Some Baby Boomers may think of themselves as second or third generation Americans, but they also think of themselves as Baby Boomers, and if you ask many of them what generation they’re part of, if they have an answer it is likely the Baby Boom.

By the time you get to Generation X American Jews had lost any real sense of particularly Jewish generational difference. American Jewish members of Gen X, if asked their generation, will tell you they are Gen X. And moreover, that began to matter to American Jews. The book chronicles evidence of a changing relationship between American Jews and their conception of Jewishness, and the move from identifying with internal Jewish generation to strongly identifying with American cultural generations is an important data point. If you mistakenly call an American Jew born in 1979 a Millennial she will likely correct you and in no uncertain terms remind you she is Gen X. This book argues that what we see from the way humorists engage with Jewish things in their humor is a shift from prioritizing Jewish peoplehood to protecting Judaism. In this case, the simultaneous shift from identifying in a communal Jewish way to a cross-cultural American way is not arbitrary at all; it is the heart of the issue.

I am framing much of this priority shift in terms of whether or not the comedy of an era is treating Judaism as a Thing. “Thing,” in this context, is more than just a vague identifier. Using Bill Brown’s Thing theory, I use the word to mean something broken, abandoned, or no longer useful. In Brown’s terms the same object can be simultaneously a Thing and an object. A nonfunctional car, for example, is a Thing to the person who now needs a new car but may be a very useful object to the visual artist responsible for Carhenge. In applying this theory to Judaism I am probing whether humorists present Judaism as something vital and useful or dead and dysfunctional. The relationship of immigrant Jews to their religion has been analyzed extensively (see Hasia Diner, Nathan Glazer, Jonathan Sarna, Jack Wertheimer, for example), but my argument is that the children and grandchildren of the turn-of-the-century immigrants, the members of the Silent Generation, began a process of Thingifying Judaism that their Baby Boomer children continued. That in itself might not be a terribly interesting argument. What was the unexpected and therefore much more interesting finding is that Gen X pushed back against this Thingification and began to resacralize certain elements in their humor, while profaning others. The Thingification of Judaism seems to be extremely important in the Silent Generation, and disappears almost entirely by the twenty-first century. The full story of Millennial humor is yet to be written, as many of this generation are still building their careers, but we can nevertheless draw some conclusions as to whether they are continuing the trends begun by Gen X or changing the relationship between humor and Jewishness yet again. The generations must exist in pairs, as well, because the humor with which young people grow up, and the popular media they consume that helps shape their sense of self, is what the previous generation has been producing. So there is always a trickle-down effect from one generation to the next. What this research shows, therefore, is that as these generations became more attached to their secular generational identity they also became more interested in normalizing Jewish ritual practice and individual Jewish identities.

Because I’m focusing on humor that has some social or religious target, most of what will be included in this study could be classified as satire. Not all humor is satiric, and not all satire is humorous, though the latter is closer to being true. My definition of satire aligns with that of Ziva Ben-Porat, who says satire is “a critical representation, always comic and often caricatural.” Freud argued that meaningful jokes must have a purpose (though the underlying impetus for joking may well be latent, or subconscious), and satiric humor clearly satisfies that requirement. My operating definition of Jewish satire relies on that notion of purpose. Satire must be anchored in reality because it is the real world, or in this case real Judaism or Jews, that is being satirized. What constitutes “real,” however, is not so clear. Many of these satires are approaching a Judaism that is real only by virtue of its existing in the collective imagination, which may or may not be terribly related to the “really real” (to borrow from Laura Levitt) Judaism actually being practiced in America. All stereotypes come from some kernel of truth, but though recognizable they are also frequently to some degree false. Whether really real, or only a simulacrum of reality, the subject or target of the satire in this book is Jewish (or in many of the cases I am discussing, Judaism). I should note, however, that although Jewish humor is a popular topic, the reality of the signifier is not universally accepted. Many people, including those who would know best, have claimed that Jewish humor is some sort of optical illusion. Mel Brooks, one of the cornerstones of American humor (Jewish or otherwise) once said, “You got it wrong. It’s not really Jewish comedy—there are traces of it, but it is really New York comedy, urban comedy, street-corner comedy. It’s not Jewish comedy—that’s from Vilna, that’s Poland.” Brooks sees Jewish comedy as being something from “over there,” while “over here” the humor is not Jewish. In the same vein, American Studies scholar Allen Guttmann claims, “there really is no such thing as ‘Jewish humor’” because the Bible, “the greatest of Jewish books . . . is scarcely typified by elements of comedy.” Guttmann’s argument against the designation is, in part, that if the term refers to some form of humor which has been characteristic of Jews from the time of Moses to the day of Moshe Dayan, then clearly the term has no referent at all. There is, on the other hand, a kind of humor which is common to the great Yiddish writers of the nineteenth century and to many Jewish-American authors in the twentieth century. This kind of humor is not, however, the result of Judaism as a religion and cannot be traced to the experience of Biblical Jews.

The first part of his argument is clearly hyperbole, because if something must be consistent from Moses to Moshe Dayan in order to be considered Jewish, then there is not, of course, a religion, culture, language, practice, or belief that could properly be called Jewish. More to the point is the end of his argument, in which he claims that this thing we are calling “Jewish humor” is not “the result of Judaism as a religion.” Although Guttmann does not define what he means by either “Judaism” or “religion,” the context of his larger essay indicates it is some sort of nexus of rituals, practices, life cycle events, and texts. Defining terms is the perpetual rabbit hole down which most academic discussions eventually fall, but Guttmann’s definition of religion seems largely practical, and that works for my purposes as well. In this book I define “religion” as something that involves both beliefs and practices, and Judaism will be considered a religion using that definition. I prefer to use a definition of religion that sits somewhere between the classic functional reductionists (Durkheim, Freud) and the cultural anthropologists (Geertz, Evans-Pritchard). Religion has a role in social and cultural development, but I don’t think that is all to which we should properly reduce religion. My intention is not to limit what constitutes either religion or Judaism, but to have a stable understanding of the terms that is true to the way satirists and critics alike are using them.

Although I disagree with the way Guttmann defines Judaism for his purpose of discrediting the concept of Jewish humor, he does highlight the difficulty that arises from the arbitrariness of labels. The separation of “Jewish” and “American” in the identity marker “Jewish-American” is a tenuous thing; both must exist in close to equal measure to make the label work. Ken Koltun-Fromm asks: “In what sense is material Jewish identity in America a specifically Jewish or American expression?” and Shaul Magid asks a similar series of questions: “How much ‘America’ is in American Judaism? How much ‘Jewishness’ is in America? How much has ‘Jewishness’ changed in contemporary America? And how much has America changed?” They are both circling around the same problem, which is trying to sort out what makes American Jewish identity distinct from, say, European Jewish identity or Israeli Jewish identity. That question is significant to a book like this one, as it is American Jewish humor under the microscope here, and I argue that in humor studies it is vital not to conflate comedy from different language families, cultural settings, or national identities.

So for us to be able to identify Jewish satire separate from the shared American immigration experience of many cultures we have to isolate the aspects of it that could not exist without Judaism. American and Jewish identities have often battled in the lives of American Jews. Norman Leer once wrote, “America’s home-made moral system of rational pragmatism does battle with a weaker, but more ancient and durable adversary, traditional Judaism.” American Jews have spent generations trying to bring these two adversaries to a peaceful resolution. The push-pull between the Jewish and the American is, in many ways, what lies at the heart of this project, and while I am presenting things in terms of how different generations of Jews relate to Judaism, it could just as easily be read as a study of the effects of Americanization. What I will not call it, however, is a study in American Jewish assimilation, because I strongly resist the idea that what we are seeing is anything as simple as assimilation. American Jews have not become American Protestants, regardless of how many elements of American Protestantism have worked their way into Jewish life and practice. American Judaism today may not look like American Judaism 150 years ago, but it has not disappeared and I therefore refuse to see this as a story of assimilation. Resistance is not, it turns out, futile.

Jennifer Caplan is the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of numerous works on Judaism and popular culture.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 33 of the Revealer podcast: “Jewish Comedy.”

The post How Jewish Humor Has Changed Over Time appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo by Renee Fisher for Unsplash)

Eugene Exman did things before they became the thing to do. He traveled to Alabama to watch a young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. catalyze the civil rights movement. He founded a California commune with Aldous Huxley and searched for a guru in India long before The Beatles met the Maharishi. His experiments with LSD preceded Timothy Leary’s acid evangelism by several years.

For all of this, Exman might be mistaken for a trend-spotting but insignificant Zelig, an indistinct figure in the background, photobombing the spiritual elite. But he wasn’t just collecting experiences; he was recruiting authors for a religious mission: to redeem a world reeling from war and surrendering to the seductions of materialism.

The Ohio-born editor led the religious books department at Harper & Brothers, now known as HarperOne, from 1928-1965, where he published a who’s who of mid-twentieth century religion: King, Dorothy Day, Huxley, Howard Thurman, Albert Schweitzer, AA founder Bill Wilson, Zen Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki, and Jiddu Krishnamurti, among many others. His line of religious paperbacks introduced Americans to the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mircea Eliade, and Swami Prabhavanada.

Exman was “the undisputed standard-bearer for religion publishing in the United States,” writes Stephen Prothero, author of a new biography and cultural history called God the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time.

Though the topics and traditions explored in Exman’s books varied, they were bound by a common idea: the personal search for divine connection, wherever it may be found, is the most essential element of religion. By publishing the autobiographies of seekers, mystics, and would-be saints, he offered paths of holy living that circumvented congregations and creeds. In doing so, Prothero argues, Exman cleared a way for the “spiritual, but not religious” contingent, an identity now claimed by more than a quarter of American adults.

I spoke to Prothero, a professor of American religion at Boston University and author of a dozen books, about why Exman placed “stepping stones across the stream of American consciousness from Protestantism to pluralism, from dogma to experience, and from institutional religion to personal spirituality.”

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

Daniel Burke: What kinds of religious books were typically published before Exman came on the scene at Harper & Brothers in 1928?

Steven Prothero: It was mainly Protestant and denominational: a Methodist minister, writing a book of sermons that would be titled “Methodist” in some way and sold to Methodists. Exman’s idea was that clerics have interesting things to say to wider audiences. It was a broadening out to talking about faith and experience and what we would now call spirituality. That was the key shift. Over the course of his life, it keeps getting broader. He started to publish Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Catholics.

DB: What was he trying to accomplish through this broadening?

SP: His mission was to defend religion against its secular critics and to bring general audiences the best thinkers and actors on religion of the mid-twentieth century in order to save the world. He lived through World War I, the Great Depression, and then World War II. It was a tumultuous period when the belief in progress and in God were challenged by these horrific events – not least, the Holocaust. And it led many people to a search for meaning. Exman was very much a part of that, but he was convinced that meaning was to be found in God. He wanted to discover the best techniques for encountering God. He believed that if he discovered those techniques and published them, people would encounter God and stop fighting with one another.

Exman wanted to make the world more peaceful and just, and he believed you could do that by publishing books. And he’s publishing them at a time when books have huge cultural influence. They weren’t competing with the Internet, podcasts, or even television for much of his career.

DB: You describe a mystical experience Exman had as a teenager. How much of his view of religion as essentially experiential comes out of that episode?            

SP: Almost all of it. Exman, who grew up in a fundamentalist church, tried to be converted at revivals when he was a kid, but he didn’t have any kind of conversion experience. But one day, as a teenager, he was riding his horse to a Bible study when suddenly his horse rears up and Exman looks up and sees and feels God, and he never doubted God’s existence again.

There are, of course, antecedents to this idea of religion as experiential. Schleiermacher, the German theologian, writes about religion as experience. There were the First and Second Great Awakenings in the United States. Transcendentalists, who thought that religion is not about sitting in church, but about getting out in nature and finding God there.

DB: And Exman spends the rest of his life trying to recapture his teenage experience, studying ways to connect with the divine and publishing books about people who have done so?

SP: Exactly. He just wants to see God again. It’s like, if the first time you went to a Red Sox game, you caught a foul ball, and then you keep going to baseball games, hoping that will happen again. And it never does for him.

DB: It sounds like the opposite of Alan Watt’s adage about psychedelics that “if you get the message, hang up the phone.”

SP: Exactly. He never hangs up the phone. He just keeps calling. And he’s also calling his friends and asking, “What number did you use when you were able to dial into God? Can you share it with me?”

DB: You make the argument that Exman helped spread the “religion of experience,” which you suggest is the most popular religion in contemporary America. How do you define it?

SP: It’s best understood through the eyes of William James, who was a huge influence on Exman. For James, religion is not fundamentally about ritual, it’s not fundamentally about doctrine. It’s about feeling and experience, and the highest experience is the encounter with God. So it’s personal, rather than collective. Institutions just get in the way. What Exman does is spread that idea in ways that make sense to people who aren’t Harvard philosophers and psychologists. I see him as a middlebrow popularizer of the “religion of experience,” and through the books he puts out into the world, it becomes very popular. And this is not just an idea of the left. I would suspect that the religion of experience is largely the religion of most white evangelicals in the United States, maybe even the white Christian nationalist insurrectionists of January 6.

DB: I’ve been thinking about the “religion of experience,” as you call it in the book, and how common it is. For instance, experience is primary in Zen Buddhism. You see it in Hinduism and Islam as well, with darshan and the Hajj. So I wonder whether the rise of the “religion of experience” is just a reversion to the norm?

SP: That’s a good question. I do think the perceived wrong guys for people like Exman are the “doctrine of religion” people who believe that what makes you Christian is believing A, B, and C. As you say, that’s weird in world religion terms, right? But as you mentioned darshan and the Hajj, I was thinking: Do those count as “the religion of experience”? I think darshan would, but I’m not sure about the Hajj, which might be too corporate – too big and busy. Exman would say that you could find moments of contemplation in the Hajj, and that would be the religion of experience. A lot of the other parts of the Hajj would be the religion of busyness. The religion of experience has a whiff of contemplative practice, of Jewish theologian Martin Buber’s I and Thou: the encounter of the self with the mysterious divine, and cultivating the techniques that help you have that experience.

But Exman’s interest in mysticism and religious experience wasn’t escapism. He believed that to encounter God is to be compelled to act compassionately in the world. He wasn’t spending all of his time contemplating the reality of the universe.

DB: Exman had a pluralistic view of religion, but he also had areas of ignorance on religion and race, as you note. A co-editor tried to get Dorothy Day to write less about St. Therese of Lisieux and Exman encouraged Martin Luther King, Jr. to end his first book on an optimistic note about racial assimilation.

SP: Exman and the people in his religious books department at Harper & Brothers were overwhelmingly white, liberal Protestants. They were trying to be political progressives and religious pluralists. They thought there was truth in all religions, but at the same time they were not always aware of their own biases.

When it comes to race, Ibram X. Kendi, my colleague at Boston University, is helpful in making a distinction between well-meaning white liberal assimilationists and anti-racists. Exman certainly wasn’t an anti-racist. As King was writing his books, Exman was telling him, “let’s bring the races together. Let’s make it all happy.” And King was trying to bring the races together, but he was also keenly aware of white supremacy and the power of racism. He was getting death threats daily.

And so when Exman encouraged King to write a happy ending to his account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in “Stride Toward Freedom,” King did almost exactly the opposite. He ends with this beautiful, prophetic biblical blast, warning that the world might come to an end if we don’t do something about violence and racial injustice.

Daniel Burke is director of communications at Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice. Formerly CNN’s religion editor, he is writing a book about religion, revelations, and mental health.

Stephen Prothero is a Professor of Religion at Boston University specializing in American religions. Prothero has written six books. His two most recent projects are The New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–and Doesn’t and God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter.

The post Searching for God, One Bestseller at a Time appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo by Toby Cox)

“The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.”
–T.S. Elliot, The Dry Salvages, I

*** 

Driving into Gloucester, Massachusetts, I saw the Our Lady of Good Voyage Church’s two azure domes long before I arrived at its similarly hued doors. Between the domes, a statue of Mary stood with one arm outstretched, palm facing seaward, and the other cradling a fishing vessel.

Our Lady of Good Voyage was built in 1893 by Portuguese fishermen who immigrated to Gloucester, the first fishing port in the United States. The church was rebuilt after the original burned down in 1914. A wooden statue of Mary imported from Portugal stood atop the building for three decades, weathering New England storms, winds, and winters. She deteriorated under these conditions and the congregation replaced her with a fiberglass version in 1984. At night, Mary, with a halo resembling a ship’s helm, lights up to welcome those coming into port.

The church’s statues of Mary have been sending fishermen out to sea and guiding them back for nearly 100 years, absorbing a century’s worth of prayers in times of raging storms and calm waters. They have borne witness to changes in the sea herself and listened to her many voices telling of the ecology that connects lives above and below the surface.

***

The American lobster (Homarus americanus), a cold-water species, can exist in water between -1 and 30 degrees Celsius (approximately 30 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit), or within the range of freezing to lukewarm water. “But just because they can survive doesn’t mean they’re doing well,” said Dr. Tracy Pugh, a lobster biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF). “We think that right around 20 degrees Celsius is where that stressful tipping point is.”

When lobsters are consistently exposed to water warmer than 20 degrees Celsius (roughly room temperature for humans), their immune systems become less efficient, allowing disease to accumulate in their bodies. This makes them slow, weak, and less able to defend themselves.

And New England’s waters are among the fastest-warming on the planet.

*** 

Like lobster, eelgrass is a cold-water species. The plant thrives in water around five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit), approximately the temperature inside a refrigerator. Also like lobsters, eelgrass will get weaker as temperatures rise.

“Photosynthetic gains will increase with temperature, but respiration losses increase at a faster rate,” said Dr. Phil Colarusso, a marine biologist at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “Think of photosynthesis as a way to deposit carbon in the bank account. Respiration is like using those funds to pay the bills.”

At 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) is where these two processes break even: Anything gained through photosynthesis is lost in respiration. When the water gets warmer than 25 degrees Celsius, eelgrass spends more energy than it gains through photosynthesis, which results in an energy deficit. “Once the account is empty, the plant dies,” Colarusso said. “There’s no overdraft protection.”

***

Early fishermen in Gloucester found opportunity, and communities grew. England’s Dorchester Company established Gloucester as a fishing port in 1623, and its success soon became record-setting. Gloucester’s abundance of cod and other species eventually attracted fishermen from Portugal and Italy, who brought their Catholic devotions with them, in the 1800s.

For Catholics, Saint Peter is the official patron saint of fishermen, but Mary also holds a place of pride. “She has a particular role in the devotions and spiritual life of Catholics in particular, and especially of Portuguese and Italian Catholics,” said Jim Achadinha, reverend of Our Lady of Good Voyage Church. “When they established Our Lady of Good Voyage, it was reflecting the sea, Mary as Mother, and the people as fishermen.”

(Memorial in Gloucester. Image source: Paul Keleher via Wikipedia)

Achadinha recalled a time when there were separate Blessings of the Fleet, one held by the Portuguese fleet and the other by the Italian. The relationship between these two sizable fleet communities was competitive, and both supported their respective Catholic churches. If a captain had a crew of 10, plus themselves, they would divide their earnings by 12, giving that twelfth portion to the church. “It was a time when these fishing families were doing very well financially,” he said.

Then the communities began to dwindle, and the Italian and Portuguese fleets combined their Blessings of the Fleet into one celebration: St. Peter’s Fiesta. It is held every year at the end of June to honor the patron saint, bless the Gloucester fishing fleet, and remember the lives that have been lost to the sea. It’s a decades-old tradition, the first one held in 1945.

“The fishing industry in Gloucester is still active, but it’s diminished compared to what it was even 20 years ago,” Achadinha said. Many of the descendants from the Portuguese fleet have relocated, and younger generations are discouraged from getting into the industry at all. “Nowadays, if a younger person decides to go into fishing, a lot of the older folks tell them not to do it,” Achadinha said. “It’s a lot of work with little money and little reward.”

Congregations, as a result, have diminished.

***

While rising temperatures aren’t ideal for lobsters, they aren’t an automatic death sentence either. “Lobsters care about temperature more when something else is going wrong,” Pugh said.

On the east coast, there are two main lobster stocks: the Southern New England (SNE) stock and the Gulf of Maine/George’s Bank (GOM/GBK) stock. SNE is located roughly south of Cape Cod and GOM/GBK roughly north of Cape Cod, which includes Gloucester.

Before 1999, the Long Island Sound, part of the SNE stock, produced a couple million pounds of lobsters every year, making lobstering a laborious but generally fruitful profession. Then, in 1999, 90% of the Sound’s lobster population vanished. “What scientists think happened was a sort of perfect storm, in a bad way, of low dissolved oxygen and extremely warm temperatures,” Pugh said.

Where the temperatures were warmer, the lobsters were unable to get enough oxygen and were essentially herded to cooler areas with sufficient oxygen supply. Scientists think this resulted in overcrowding, making the lobsters more susceptible to disease. Then in August and September of 1999, storms flipped the water column, pushing warmer surface water down to the floor toward the already stressed lobster population, resulting in mass deaths.

“They just had nowhere else to go,” Pugh said. The Long Island Sound lobster population has never recovered.

***

Climate scientists and biologists have called the Sound’s 1999 die-off a “severe mortality event,” while many lobstermen and those who once depended on the Sound’s stock call it an end to a way of life.

“People went bankrupt,” said Dr. Katherine Maltby. “Some lost their homes, while others turned to alcohol or got divorced. It wasn’t just, ‘oh, the lobster is gone now.’ It had a ripple effect through the household and then to the community.”

Maltby, a researcher at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI), examines how lobstering communities throughout New England are adjusting to changes that are driven by climate change and other ecological stressors. She recalled an interview with a lobsterman who decided to move further north in New England after the decline of the SNE lobster stock.

“He described a range of challenges—grappling with his decision to uproot the family, moving on land to an office job for a number of years, leaving fishing, adjusting to not being his own boss, traffic, and being away from the water,” Maltby said.

This person later re-entered the fishing industry, facing the challenges of not only being a “newcomer” in a different community and learning the latest regulations, but also readjusting to the physical demands of the job.

One thing Maltby is trying to glean from these interviews is what resilience looks like across lobstering communities. “‘Staying in the bounds’ is one type of resiliency—it means the community is able to cope with the shock of change,” Maltby said. “That might be because they have these strong cultural and occupational identity ties to the resource.” But over time, coping becomes an unsustainable response for many people.

Resilience can also look like adaptation—the community might be disrupted but they find ways to stay within the industry. For lobstermen, this might mean getting a part-time job to make ends meet or catching other species such as black sea bass or Jonah crab.

Another type of resilience, transformation, requires more fundamental change. This could mean a lobsterman going to a different fishery or leaving the fishing industry altogether and transitioning to a land-based job.

At one level, transformation, or transitioning to a job outside of the fishery, could mean resilience for the individual, but what does this mean for the broader lobstering community? What happens to the community if too many ‘transform’?

***

Seagrasses, such as eelgrass, are the sea’s lungs. “Think of seagrass meadows as huge filters. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and as water passes over the meadow, a lot of floating organic particles in the water column will hit the meadow and then fall to the bottom,” Colarusso said. “They’ll get integrated into the sediments, and they’ll stay there.”

Carbon and other greenhouse gasses trap heat in the atmosphere, causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise. Eelgrass’s ability to produce oxygen and sequester carbon, by storing it in its roots and surrounding sediment, makes it one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. “Everyone thinks about tropical rainforests as being incredibly carbon rich, which they are, but they recycle all the carbon,” Colarusso said. “It doesn’t get sequestered.”

Off the Massachusetts coast, some of the carbon in eelgrass roots in the top foot of sediment is more than 100 years old. Colarusso said that deeper down, the carbon might be up to 1,000 years old. Eelgrass meadows’ ability to sequester carbon provides a buffer to climate change, but when these meadows are damaged, all of this stored carbon gets released. “Unless we keep eelgrass meadows intact, they can actually become a significant source of carbon,” Colarusso said. Once damaged, these eelgrass beds can become contributors to climate change by releasing their centuries-old carbon stores into the atmosphere.

And eelgrass beds have been in decline off the Massachusetts coast for decades. Rising temperatures, water quality issues, cable pipelines, pier construction, boating accidents, and clam dredges, can all cause irreversible damage to eelgrass beds.

Kate Frew, a biologist, works to restore eelgrass beds by collecting eelgrass shoots. She collects up to 600 shoots in one day, which she weaves into burlap discs and then plants in a different location in a checkerboard pattern. “We’re like underwater gardeners,” Frew said.

She dives with a team three times a year–-in April, June, and October—to gauge the overall health of eelgrass beds and record species they see using the eelgrass beds. At least 34 different species, including lobster, are known to use eelgrass at various life stages to hide from predators and find food; many species use eelgrass as a nursery for their young. “If you don’t have any young fish, you don’t have any old fish,” Colarusso said.

The same goes for lobsters.

***

Molting and mating go hand-in-hand: Female lobsters prefer males that are bigger, and molting is how lobsters grow. A female lobster can only mate right after she’s molted.

When a lobster’s body mass outgrows its hard exoskeleton, it must molt to shed the old shell and grow a new, larger one. Lobsters will molt up to ten times in their first year and then less frequently as they age. After they reach maturity, male lobsters will molt once a year and females once every other year.

Approximately one week before a female lobster is ready to molt, she will seek a male lobster who has created and defended a shelter. Within an hour or so after molting, she and the male will mate. Afterwards, she will stay with the male for another week or more until her new shell hardens. “Right after molting, they’re super vulnerable to predators because they’re kind of squishy,” said Pugh, who specializes in lobsters’ reproductive biology.

The female lobster will store eggs until she fertilizes them with the male’s sperm, which allows her to spawn. This can take up to a year after mating but must happen before she molts again. Once she does spawn, it will take another nine to 11 months before the eggs hatch. Female lobsters can lay between 20,000 to 40,000 eggs at one time, and once they hatch, young lobsters will be small and extremely vulnerable to predators until they reach maturity, which takes around eight years.

Lobsters are thought to live for about 50 years in the wild, but these are just educated guesses based on tagging data and observations of lobsters held long-term in hatcheries. “We don’t have a good way of aging lobsters,” Pugh said. But this long lifespan is one reason they’ve evolved to have a long reproductive cycle. “Only producing one clutch every other year, in theory, shouldn’t be that big of a deal because they’re supposed to be able to do it for a few decades,” Pugh said. When lobsters find themselves in unforgiving living conditions, however, this long reproductive lifespan can become a big deal.

According to the 2020 American Lobster Benchmark Stock Assessment by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the Southern New England lobster stock remains “severely depleted with poor prospects of recovery, due to warmer temperatures” and “recruitment failure,” which means either existing lobsters cannot reproduce fast enough to replace the population that was lost or young lobsters are not surviving to adulthood. Current regulations in this region focus on promoting population growth.

Conversely, Gulf of Maine/George’s Bank lobster stock populations north of Cape Cod are at a record high: 93% of the U.S.’s lobster harvest comes from this stock, and Gloucester remains one of Massachusetts’s top ports for landing lobster. This is largely because of the federal regulations that prevent overfishing and ideal environmental conditions for lobster growth and survival.

Waters in Northern New England have not yet warmed to lobsters’ tipping point, but they may be heading in that direction. In 2022, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report that revealed a temperature increase in Massachusetts of almost 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) since the beginning of the 20th century and forecasted greater heat wave intensity for the region.

***

Beth Casoni often receives photos of debris lobstermen collect while out at sea. Balloons are especially common, but the weirdest thing she’s ever seen in a lobster trap was a satellite dish. “Who dumps a satellite dish in the ocean?” asked Casoni, executive director of Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association (MLA). She calls lobstermen “stewards of the sea,” because their livelihood depends on it. “They’re very mindful because without a healthy ecosystem, they won’t have a healthy fishery,” Casoni said.

With its physical demands and high risks, lobstering has never been an easy profession, but lobstermen today have more elements to navigate—the bureaucratic kind. “It’s almost like putting together a puzzle, and these guys are frustrated beyond belief,” Casoni said. These puzzle pieces include complying with federal regulations on commercial fishing, such as trap limits and adhering to seasonal closures of federal waters. In Massachusetts, the closure runs from February 1 to May 15, encompasses more than 9,000 square miles, and is mostly based on the migration patterns of the North Atlantic right whale.

(Image source Robert F. Bukaty for AP)

Lobstermen not only lose three months during the closure but also a month before and after when they’re hauling and setting their gear. They only get paid when they’re catching lobster and have to budget accordingly for the off season. However, regulations on catch limits and seasonal closures serve critical purposes, preventing overfishing, promoting species’ population growth, and protecting endangered animals, such as the right whale, from getting entangled in gear.

These federal regulations pose challenges to lobstermen trying to earn a living and feed the world’s large appetite for fresh seafood, but they are necessary to the wellbeing of the ecosystem and the long-term livelihoods of lobstermen, whose fates are entwined with that of the lobsters themselves.

***

Walking around Main Street in Gloucester, waiting for the 11:45 AM mass at Our Lady of Good Voyage to begin, I stumbled across a bookstore with a bright yellow post-it note taped to the door.

“Sometimes we run late in the morning because of who we are. Sorry for the inconvenience. ‘Time is a flat circle.’ –Nietzsche.”

That day the store didn’t open, at least not on time. But on the following trip to Gloucester, it did. The owners were friendly, and when I asked how I could get in touch with a lobsterman, they smiled, laughed, and said “good luck.” I like to think they genuinely meant it.

In her research, Maltby describes the challenges of her work with lobstermen, including interviewing them, which she says can feel “extractive” at times. “When I think about research fatigue and over-researched communities that constantly get research attention, I reflect on how I can adapt my practices,” she said.

The media hasn’t always been fair to these communities, warming the metaphorical waters and creating an atmosphere of distrust between the community and journalists. But at the end of my second conversation with Casoni, I decided to give it another try. “I would still love to get in contact with a lobsterman in the industry,” I said.

She exhaled. “I’ve asked a couple of people, and I think they shy away from it,” she replied.

A pause.

“It’s just because you’re not the first person. We get a lot of requests.”

***

At the 11:45 service, I see the inside of the church for the first time. Built by Portuguese fishermen, Our Lady of Good Voyage’s interior contains odes to the sea. The main doors open to the nave, where laity sit during mass. “The architect who designed it made it look like a hull of a ship that was upside down,” Achadinha said. I take another look and notice columns bending forward forming the frame of a boat.

Light trickles in from the stained-glass windows, illuminating scenes of the sea and devotions to Mary. These windows also preserve the history of the Portuguese community that built the church. One window depicts people in the traditional dress worn by Portuguese immigrants when they arrived. Another depicts a warship with soldiers.

“This church was built in the midst of World War I, so whoever donated that window may have chosen that image to pray for their sons going off to war, so that they have a good voyage home,” Achadinha said.

Although the statue of Mary on top of Our Lady of Good Voyage welcomes back an average of 136 lobstermen a year to Gloucester’s port, Achadinha estimates that less than ten percent of the church’s members are still actively part of the local fishing industry.

“Do people here find solace in religion from climate change?” I asked.

The answer was no, though Pope Francis has been outspoken about the climate emergency, Achadinha explained. In 2015, Pope Francis wrote an encyclical addressing the climate crisis: “We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters. Nothing in this world is indifferent to us,” the encyclical states.

“There are a few parishioners that are involved in climate [action], but overall, no,” Achadinha said. “If anyone might feel that, it would be anyone who’s still fishing, because a lot of restrictions are coming with warmer waters. I know lobsters are moving north. But sadly, it’s not on the forefront of people’s minds.”

My thoughts turn toward the statue of Mary standing on top of the church, and I wonder about all that she has witnessed: the ripples of waves developing as those crashing on the shore abate like exhales and inhales, the resilience and fragility of ecosystems and communities, and the tipping points that reveal a delicate web of interdependence in the lives of lobsters, eelgrass, and humans.

Toby Cox is a journalist and graduate student at Harvard Divinity School where she studies eco-theologies and the spiritual impacts of climate change. Her previous work can be found in National Geographic, The Diplomat, Summerhouse DC, Humans of HDS, and The Central Virginian.

The post Tipping Points appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Vox)

All hell broke loose in New York City last May after a judge threw out a congressional map drawn by the state legislature as part of the 2022 redistricting process. A court-appointed “special master” drew a map that altered districts and created a new 10^th Congressional District that covers part of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. A month before the August 23 primary, there were six viable candidates for that Congressional seat. Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou who won the coveted endorsement of the left-of-center Working Families Party (WFP) and had a ground operation of more than 1,000 volunteers, including actress Cynthia Nixon, had a slight edge over the other candidates. If elected, Niou would strengthen the small but growing effort in Congress to prevent the federal government from writing blank checks for Israel to use in any manner they desire, including its ongoing effort to take land from Palestinians.

In the weeks before the primary, the race between Niou and her main opponent, Dan Goldman, tightened. Goldman, a multi-millionaire heir to Levi-Strauss, hardline Israel supporter, and former federal prosecutor, ran a narrow campaign that focused on his experience leading the first impeachment investigation of Donald Trump for the House Intelligence Committee.

But then Niou announced that she supported BDS – i.e., “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” of Israel – and my heart sank. I knew her campaign was toast.

Informed by the international boycott and divestment movement organized by the African National Congress (ANC) in the second half of the twentieth century to help bring an end to apartheid in South Africa, BDS calls for countries, businesses, and universities to sever all ties with Israel. But, unlike the ANC, which united different factions of political life – the Communist Left, trade unions, and even some Black nationalist organizations – BDS doesn’t have the support of a single major labor union inside Israel (or out), no government body, no major global corporation; not even a significant local government has endorsed it.

Another important difference between the two is that the ANC organized its boycott in order to force South Africa to dismantle apartheid and create a democratic state for all peoples living in the country. On its website, BDS issues a vague call for “Palestinian equality.” But it does not say equality with Jewish Israelis, which is what Palestinians say they want – and surely need if they are going to achieve any measure of self-determination. The implication is that BDS supports the abolition of the state of Israel so that Palestinians can be equal to other peoples in an abstract world.

BDS and its supporters need to question whether in the nearly two decades since the movement’s founding, the BDS tactic has succeeded in ending Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians; and if it has not, what could be done to accomplish that goal. Alarmingly, the rise of an ultra-rightwing reactionary Jewish nationalism in Israel whose intention is to annex all Palestinian land suggests that BDS has not been successful and that another approach is necessary.

***

While Niou fully embraced boycotting Israel at the beginning of the short campaign cycle, she moderated her position leading up to election day, especially after taking heat from Jewish voters in liberal Park Slope and more conservative Orthodox Jewish voters in Borough Park. Ten days before the primary, in her endorsement interview with the editorial board of the New York Times, she side-stepped boycotting Israel and said she supported BDS’s right to boycott as a First Amendment issue.

Niou’s effort to extricate herself from backlash illustrates another problem with BDS. In an attempt to save her campaign, she shifted attention away from the victims of U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine to an unrelated topic – when she could have been talking about why, if elected, she would vote against U.S. funding for ongoing crimes against Palestinians.

Goldman, a Modern Orthodox Jew, says Israel is a “democratic beacon in the Middle East.” He supports two states: a secure state for Israel and a demilitarized state for Palestinians, which is more like one state with a colonial subject in tow, not so different from the status quo.

Goldman won the New York Times endorsement. And after pouring $7 million of his own money into the campaign and accepting donations from real estate developer and (ironically) major Trump donor Steve Ross, Goldman won the election with only 25 percent of the vote. He also had the support of the powerful lobbying group, American-Israeli Political Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) United Democracy Project. After the primary, AIPAC released a statement saying, “We are proud to have played a role in defeating Yuh-Line Niou – an anti-Israel candidate who endorses the BDS campaign against Israel.”

***

While touting Israel as the “beacon” of democracy, Goldman said nothing about the illegal Jewish settlements that violate international law under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Jewish settlements are so rarely discussed in mainstream media that many Americans who stand on the side of justice for Palestinians – including BDS supporters – appear not to realize there is a difference between occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza; and the state of Israel, which has a population of some twenty percent non-Jewish Arabs, mostly Palestinians, living within its borders. Israeli residents live inside the “Green Line,” meaning the border decided upon in the 1949 ceasefire agreements between the armies of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria – a year after the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land (referred to by Palestinians and their Jewish supporters as the nakba, or “catastrophe”). Since 1967, the Israeli government has been taking land from Palestinians and giving it to Jewish settlers who operate as a colonial expansion apparatus. Entire Palestinian communities have been displaced by settlements. Settlers regularly provoke Palestinian residents, destroy their homes, murder them, and deny them access to their own water and agricultural land. Some 600,000 Jewish Israeli settlers living on occupied Palestinian land restrict the daily movement of some 4.9 million Palestinians.

Although Gaza does not fall directly under Israeli jurisdiction, Israel maintains a blockade that prevents it from trading freely with other nations. Historian Rashid Khalidi calls this occupation “control from without.” Because of this blockade, approximately 47 percent of Gaza’s population is unemployed, more than 64 percent of the population is food insecure, 71 percent live in refugee camps, and, according to the United Nations Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), 1.1 million refugees receive food assistance from the Agency, up from 80,000 in 2000.

Even Mondoweiss, the independent website devoted to U.S. foreign policy and the movement for justice for Palestinians, fails to grasp the difference between occupied Palestine and the state of Israel. On June 1, 2022 Mondoweiss announced a “BDS victory” when General Mills said it would “divest from Israel.” But as Mondoweiss itself noted, the divestment was from “an illegal settlement.” A year earlier, Mondoweiss made the same erroneous claim when Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream decided to stop selling its products in the occupied West Bank: it reported that Ben & Jerry’s was responding to BDS’s call for boycotting of Israel. Since 2005, the government representing the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, has been calling for a boycott of the settlements. Ben and Jerry’s and General Mills were, in fact, responding to the Palestinian Authority and not BDS. If Ben & Jerry’s intention was to boycott Israel, they would have pulled their products from places like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and West Jerusalem, which they have not done.

(Illustration by Mohamad Elaasar for Middle East Eye)

In 2015, the European Union, which does not support BDS, responded to the Palestinian Authority’s demand by issuing guidelines for the labelling of products from Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories so that consumers can make informed decisions about whether to buy products made by settlers. If activists in the U.S. want to organize boycotts against Israel’s illegal occupation, they could follow the EU’s lead. For example, in December 2022, the New York Stock Exchange signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, which could fast-track U.S. investment in companies tied to the illegal settlements. Imagine a divestment campaign targeting institutional investments, including municipal pension funds, universities, and the like – designed not only to undermine Israel’s settler regime but educate Americans about Israel’s heinous treatment of Palestinians living under occupation.

BDS says little about the settlements because to do so would affirm the existence of Israel and BDS regards Israel as an illegitimate state. This might be a logical position, especially after 2018 when Jewish supremacy in Israel was given legal sanction in the Jewish-Nation State Law making the right of self-determination in Israel exclusive to the Jewish people. While perhaps logical, it does nothing to address the ever-evolving crisis. Nir Evron who teaches English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University says Israeli Jews (who recently returned Benjamin Netanyahu to power as head of a new far-right coalition) have never been more united in their support for Jewish domination, adding that nearly half of Jewish Israelis “support the transfer or forced expulsion of Arabs from the country.” The new Israeli government plans to carry out one of the largest expulsions of Palestinians since it occupied the West Bank in 1967 if residents of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank refuse to voluntarily leave their homes.

BDS claims to represent all Palestinians in the region. But Ghassan Fawzi – a Palestinian activist who grew up in Umm el Fahm in Israel about 20 kilometers from the West Bank city of Jenin – says that BDS “denies the voices and the aspirations of Palestinian people living in Palestine who above all want to end the Israeli occupation and build a Palestinian state where they can live in peace and security and with international recognition.” Fawzi now lives in New York City and works in Arabic and Hebrew acquisitions at Columbia University Library. He learned Hebrew in the 1980s while incarcerated in an Israeli prison for seven years as punishment for his political activism – working in coalition with progressive Israeli Jews to advance democracy in Israel. BDS claims to be the “supreme leader of Palestinians,” said Fawzi, but in denying a difference between Israel and occupied Palestine they ironically share with the Israel’s rightwing government a refusal to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority.

“BDS is righteously anti-imperialist in its rhetoric,” says Susie Linfield who writes about left-Zionism in Israel, “but I challenge anyone to show how it has improved the life of even one Palestinian.” BDS is divorced from the day-to-day problems that Palestinians living in the region confront; including job security, protecting their homes from demolition, access to health care and to old age benefits, and outside the West Bank city of Ramallah – where Omar Barghouti, the architect of BDS, lives – the ability for Birzeit University to operate freely as part of an international intellectual community. BDS ignores the civil institutions created by Palestinians in the West Bank and inside Israel that seek to address these crucial issues.

Full disclosure: I knew Omar Barghouti and his brother Nasser in the early 1990s when we were all graduate students at Columbia University. The First Intifada, the popular uprising in the West Bank and Gaza that erupted spontaneously in 1987 after 20 years of Israeli military occupation, had not yet been squashed by Israel. To contain the uprising, Israel launched a war on Palestinian education, closing schools from kindergarten through university. I was the token Jewish member of Arab Students at Columbia. As university students, we identified with our counterparts in Palestine. We sought to compel Columbia to do the same by condemning the closure of Birzeit University, located not far from where Omar and Nasser were born and raised. We drafted a proposal and gathered signatures from a handful of professors, most notably Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian American public intellectual and literary scholar. After months of doing this work, Nasser and I went to the University Senate meeting (Omar – not one to get involved in the nitty-gritty of political work – did not participate). Nasser and I were young and idealistic and more than a little naive when we arrived at the meeting and took our seats in the balcony. We were completely unprepared to see our sponsor introduce our bill – that we had worked on so diligently – stay on the Senate floor for less than two minutes before it was summarily tabled. Without discussion. Criticizing Israel was beyond the pale on college campuses in those days. We were pariahs. I was called a “self-hating Jew.”

If BDS helps Palestinians and Palestinian Americans living in the United States feel as though they have not been entirely abandoned, it does nothing for the more than 1.5 million refugees and their descendants living in 58 UNWRA camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. and the occupied territories. Samia Hadi was born in the Am’ari refugee camp outside Ramallah. Am’ari was created in 1949 after the U.N. Partition of Palestine. Although her family left for Queens in 1970 when she was seven-years-old, Hadi was shaped by her experiences at Am’ari: open sewers instead of sanitation, schools that did not hold classes, no healthcare – and Israeli soldiers who entered any home they wanted on any pretext. There were “no laws to protect us,” she said. She now lives in Brooklyn with her first-generation Palestinian American husband and two grown children. She is convinced that nothing will change, that there will “never be laws to protect Palestinian rights.” She said that my efforts to encourage U.S. supporters of BDS to stop virtue-signaling and instead force our government to end its unqualified support for Israel – by writing this article — was wasting my time. After more than 40 years of U.S. politicians and journalists framing the Israel-Palestinian conflict as one between equals — and where if either party is a victim, it’s the Israelis – it is no wonder Hadi is so nihilistic.

My conversation with Hadi about Palestinian rights made me think of what political philosopher Hannah Arendt, herself a stateless refugee for some 18 years after fleeing Nazi Germany, wrote about stateless people demanding “the right to have rights.” In an elegant essay in a book by the same name, historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn parses this now famous phrase, calling it Arendt’s theory of “the preconditions in inclusionary citizenship.” Arendt, writes Moyn, regarded projects like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights published in 1948 – the same year the U.N. recognized the Jewish state of Israel, which created yet another refugee crisis – as little more than a “set of pleasant normative assertions.” Making a list of “elaborate entitlements” for people without “citizenship,” he argues, was “like offering a detailed inventory of the courses to a lengthy meal in the presence of the starving.” Without a state, Palestinians will never have any of the rights BDS supporters living in the U.S. take for granted.

Omar Barghouti started BDS in 2005, two years after Edward Said died from leukemia. Had he consulted with Said about his plan to initiate a boycott of Israel, Said likely would have advised against it. Said  understood that American Jews wanted Palestinians to acknowledge what he called a “moral complexity” in “the politics of dispossession.” The tragedy for Palestinians, he used to say, was that they were “victims of victims.” American Jews want their suffering, especially during the Holocaust, to be recognized. Said would have said that boycotting Jews is a bad idea. Yet at the same time, he never retreated from decrying the Zionist project and what it means for Palestinians.

***

Recent efforts by rightwing politicians to punish companies that boycott Israel is a disproportionate response to the modest number of individuals who embrace BDS. According to a recent Pew Research Study, only five percent of all U.S. adults support BDS. Two percent say they strongly support it, while 84 percent have either never heard of it or have no opinion about it. BDS enjoys its strongest support, a whopping eight percent, from Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) count among BDS’s strongest supporters beyond college campuses. But in 2021, DSA’s National Political Committee de-chartered its BDS Working Group, transferring the work to the organization’s International Committee. This came after months of infighting about whether to expel Representative Jamaal Bowman for not supporting BDS (in the end they did not), voting to approve $1 billion additional funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and joining a J Street-sponsored trip to Israel and the West Bank. (J Street is a liberal Zionist organization that supports dismantling all Jewish settlements in the West Bank and creating two states).

In 2020 Bowman, an African American former middle-school principal, shocked the Democratic political establishment when he successfully primaried 16-term incumbent Eliot Engel, chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, an ally of AIPAC and a good friend to Israel (sometimes taking positions to the right of Netanyahu). Bowman won with the backing of the Hudson Valley DSA. Until the end of 2022, Bowman’s district included Riverdale in the Bronx, home to a sizeable Orthodox Jewish community. After court-ordered redistricting shifted the 16^th District to mostly Westchester County — including a mixture of working-class majority Black and Hispanic cities like Yonkers (where Bowman lives) and wealthier and more educated mostly-white cities like Scarsdale – Bowman handily won the Democratic primary against two barely credible candidates.

The Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a pro-Israel organization, which supported six other congressional candidates in New York City, would like nothing better than to defeat Bowman in a primary election. In 2021 Bowman was one of the original cosponsors with Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) of H.R. 2590, which, if passed, would assure that U.S. taxpayer money not be used to detain Palestinian children, destroy Palestinian homes, or persist in annexing West Bank land. During Israel’s most recent military assault on Gaza, in May 2021, Bowman joined Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to try and block the sale of $735 million in bombs to Israel. He was also a co-sponsor of the so-called Abraham Accords, the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the U.A.E., Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco written during the last year of the Trump Administration in order to politically isolate the Palestinian Authority. But after returning from Israel/Palestine, Bowman withdrew his co-sponsorship of the Israel Relations Normalization Act, saying that he originally supported the legislation because he believed it was “a path to a two-state solution.” But he said that his “experience on the ground” in the West Bank and “further conversations with constituents led [him] to see this is not the right step to fulfill these goals.”

***

Niou’s campaign should be a cautionary tale for all who seek to support the aspirations of Palestinians within and outside Israel. It seems that Niou realized the folly of her well-meaning ways after the primary when her campaign posted an Israel Policy Position Paper on its website outlining her support of the McCollum Amendment, opposition to additional settlements, and the reinstatement of the Iran Nuclear Deal. There was no mention of BDS.

BDS will never achieve what most Palestinians say they want. Instead of boycotting Israel, U.S. activists could boycott settlement products. At the same time, they could educate Americans about the role the settlements play in Israel’s plan to annex all of Palestine. Rather than supporting BDS, advocates should re-direct their attention to forcing the U.S. to stop providing military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological cover for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. So long as the U.S. continues on the same trajectory, Israel will not abandon its brutal policies.

Adele Oltman is a historian, teacher, journalist, and activist. Author of Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow, she is working on an international history of public health and social medicine. 

The post What Does BDS Really Mean? appeared first on The Revealer.

(Sister Laura Manso Pereira in Porto Velho, Brazil, 2022. By Gabriel Bicho.)

A hazy pink dawn rises on a statue of Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida, “Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception who Appeared.” Her onyx face is almost visible in the sunrise, but not quite. The starkly painted white of her eyes pierces the shadows.

The story of the appearance is that a statuette of Mary was found floating offshore when a group of fishermen had prayed for a catch in a dry season. They suddenly found their nets full of fish, and the dark-skinned statue alongside them. She is now known as the patrona of all Brazil, and of the Earth’s rivers and seas.

The painted statuette of Our Lady of Aparecida is about 3 feet tall and wears a dress embroidered with golden thread. A Black Madonna, standing in prayer upon clouds and angels.

On a nearby lot, a groundskeeper reaches up to a tree branch, pulling down a pod that she cracks open and nibbles from her fingers: “tamarindo.” Soon it will be hot; an unceasing, still heat through the end of the day.

(Earth offering. Photo by Pilar Timpane)

On this compound that belongs to the Catholic Archdiocese of Porto Velho, Brazil, a mass is beginning. Led by guitar, drums, singing, and local Amazonian instruments, women dressed in a mixture of indigenous feather headpieces and street clothes are entering with an offering of elements: sifted sienna-brown earth in a woven wicker pan, a candle whose flame bounces in the morning light, a rainbow flag that beats air into wind, and a bowl filled with water. The natural elements are presented in the mass before the liturgy is read or Communion is shared. The women carry the soil and other elements to the congregants to touch in reverence. Following the crowd, I pick up some of the dirt and it runs over my hand like a baptism of earth.

On the floor, the congregation is laying an altar of sacred objects. Each has a connection to the Amazonian locals – especially indigenous people and workers – and the abundant local flora and fauna: banana leaves, flower stems, corn, candles, an orange tree branch, a machete for the farmer, a metal sickle for the worker, and religious images of Jesus and Mary. Throughout the mass, the services are performed in this distinct Amazonian style, with songs from indigenous leaders in their native dialects, in synergy with the Catholic liturgy.

In the midst of the congregation is a confident, small-framed Brazilian woman. Dressed in the unassuming plainclothes of a t-shirt and shorts, it is not obvious that this woman is a nun. Sister Laura Vicuña Pereira Manso is wearing the feather arrangements of the local indigenous artisans in her hair. Her smile is bright and infectious, and her cheerful voice and passion animate the congregation.

In the hot days of July 2022, Sister Pereira Manso is leading a consultation to collect feedback and increase dialogue as a part of the Catholic church’s “Synod on Synodality.” Listening sessions such as this took place globally, and the church-wide Synod process will lead to a meeting of Bishops and possible reforms under Pope Francis.

Sister Pereira Manso is spunky and light on her feet, and floats around the archdiocese grounds like a butterfly to flowers; each person and group who has arrived to take part in the sessions greets her. She knows them all by name. She has invited me to document her work around the Synod, in the context of a longform documentary I am directing about women in the global Catholic church.

(Synodal gathering in Porto Velho, Brazil, 2022. By Pilar Timpane)

Here on the outskirts of the Amazon region of Rondônia, Brazil, Sister Pereira Manso and her colleagues from the archdiocese have brought together a diverse group of regional leaders. The local Archbishop Roque Paloschi is also present. He supports Sister Pereira Manso and has worked with her to promote this event. Attendees include representatives such as the first female chief of the indigenous Purubora people, river workers, members of the LGBT community, women’s groups, Catholic missionaries, and farmworkers. These groups with distinct goals share a common, resounding commitment to have their community interests heard and supported through a mass movement for land protection. And they want the Catholic church to support them through public denunciation of the environmental degradation and cultural genocide that is happening, and to publicly support their needs.

Sister Pereira Manso has a nearly 25-year history of working closely with indigenous peoples, made clear in this diverse community’s trust of her and participation in this event. For many years, Sister Pereira Manso has denounced Bolsonaro-era policies that promoted development and an open-door policy to agrobusiness. These policies resulted in large-scale logging and threatened major deforestation and loss of indigenous peoples’ homelands. As the Amazonian ecosystem is destroyed, so are their homes and well-being. Without clear demarcation, the borders of their sacred lands continue to be pushed back and edged up on little by little, slowly displacing people and causing violent conflict. Illegal forest arsons on indigenous territories that inhabitants believe were set by loggers have scattered communities. In 2019, these fires were noted by National Geographic to have been so large they were visible from space.

(Burning fire in Rondonia. Source: Victor Moriyama for the New York Times)

By advocating for those whose lives have been endangered by these land-grabbing and life-threatening practices, Sister Pereira Manso has herself been in danger. She often goes directly to the sites where companies set intentional fires to intimidate villagers to move. Along with others, they record video of the fires to show at press conferences, and to share among social media groups.

As a nun, Sister Pereira Manso also works closely with the Brazilian Catholic church in close unity with Bishops and her fellow ministers in the region. She says that fewer and fewer priests are available for worship services in their region, and at times a priest will only be available every 6 months to a year. So, the work of nuns and lay women ministers (those who have not taken religious vows) often keep communities going through tasks as varied as baptisms and marriage ceremonies. At the same time, women are active in public health, education, and protecting the land for future generations.

For Sister Pereira Manso, legitimizing the work and place of women in the church is crucial to the health and life of Catholicism, as well as the safety and preservation of the planet.

Recently, Sister Pereira Manso’s work caught the Vatican’s attention. She was invited to speak at the Pan-Amazon Synod in 2019 about the issues facing the Amazonian region and women’s leadership in the area. The event brought Amazonian leaders from many countries to address Pope Francis and call global attention to the environmental, social, and spiritual needs of their communities. After years of his vocal support for indigenous groups around the world, the Pan-Amazon Synod was one of Pope Francis’ major events to catalyze listening and support for these regions that face human rights violations, cultural erasure, and environmental devastation.

As an auditor at the Pan-Amazon Synod, Sister Pereira Manso brought her message about the importance of environmental protection and of including greater roles for women in leadership positions in the church.

“Women are the guardian of life itself. It is the woman who does all these processes of defense of life, of territories, and of rights. We have this great mission of defending life itself; Pope Francis himself calls us all to work for an integral ecology,” she said. “I think that the Amazon is a region that is strategic for the world and essential for the world. And women have been carrying out these processes of defending life, land, and rights.”

Given the central place women play in the Amazonian church and in the defense of the environment, Sister Pereira Manso always makes it a point to express the clear connection between women’s leadership and ecological protection. For her, the promotion of women to places of decision-making in the Catholic church is one way to give women a more equal standing in society. If Catholic women were elevated to places of decision – that of deacon, for example – it could have an impact on the ecological safety of these communities since women are among the most ardent defenders of the land, and they make up a sizeable portion of the agricultural and cultural producers. Sister Pereira Manso’s position is backed by groups like the United Nations, who agree that women need to be front and center when addressing climate and environmental challenges.

(Photo courtesy of Sister Laura Pereira Manso)

Women requesting greater leadership roles and ordination in the Catholic church is not new, but recent reforms and promotions of women within the Vatican have made it seem that a door could open to changes. Leaders such as Sister Pereira Manso are showing that many women already do much of the church’s work today. And indeed, Sister Pereira Manso has been called to present on this very topic at the Vatican several times; she, herself, was promoted to a high leadership position in a newly created decision-making body in the South American church.

But, so far, the Vatican has given no indication that it will give women elevated leadership roles or ordination.

“We still have a lot of difficulty in full leadership. Androcentrism, patriarchy and clericalism are still very strongly present in our churches,” says Sister Pereira Manso on why women’s leadership is being held back.

Sister Pereira Manso works with many women organizers and leaders because they are essential to the health of their communit­­ies and the protection of their environment. One such organizer is Chief Hozana of the Purubora people who also attended the Pan-Amazonian Synod in 2019 in Rome. For twenty years, she has been the leader of her community and is the first female chief, she says, in Rondônia. She told me that bringing this message to the Vatican left a mark on her, and that she wishes the church could make a hundred religious leaders just like Sister Pereira Manso.

“It was a very important meeting for us,” Hozana says of the Amazonian Synod. “For indigenous women to have a voice. To cry out. Other heads of states have not privileged our voice. In that space, Pope Francis asked for the indigenous leaders to be brought together with the other heads of state.”

***

Back at Sister Pereira Manso’s religious community compound in Porto Velho, she and her Franciscan sisters have a small chapel where they gather for daily prayer and a garden where they grow organic vegetables. The walls are adorned with casique, indigenous headdresses, forest objects like a hummingbird’s nest, and religious symbols like Our Lady of Aparecida. Sister Pereira Manso takes it for granted that these symbols of spiritual power are at home with one another, a mélange of indigenous and Catholic objects. For her, it’s essential to guard the spiritual traditions of the Amazon, incorporate them into Catholicism, and not allow Western European ideas of Christianity to dominate.

“I think that the church is an ally of great potential for the people, for the leaders in this community who are a part of this work,” says Sister Pereira Manso. “The church that I was born in, that I have learned from my mother, is this church that is with their people, that is in the midst of the people, who walk together with the people,” she says. “It’s this presence of the church that is next to them without doing many things. Just being a presence.”

Sister Pereira Manso was raised in a Catholic family in Porto Velho, and her family’s roots are to the Kariri Brazilian tribal group. She says she remembers sleeping in hammocks every night growing up, and playing by the wide brown Madeira River, their local tributary of the Amazon. The river and surrounding Amazonian territories of Rondônia are home to at least 21 indigenous communities and are some of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.

Because of her outspoken advocacy, Sister Pereira Manso has exposed herself to dangerous threats from groups who see her work as a burden to land expansion and illegal deforestation.

“When people begin to make themselves the protagonist of their own stories and assume their own struggles, they begin to make structural changes,” she says. “That bothers the powerful very much. So, we know if the powerful are angry, they begin to persecute us.”

Although she is confident anywhere, even debating Cardinals in the halls of the Vatican, Sister Pereira Manso is clearly the most comfortable and vibrant when she is at home in Brazil and among the original peoples of this land. Much of her work in the Amazon over more than two decades is among the Karipuna people. The Karipuna are, she says, an extremely endangered indigenous group in Rondônia whose numbers have dwindled so far down that they are on the brink of demise. Because of deforestation, land-grabbing, and threats on their lives, the Karipuna leaders have had to bring their case before state and national governments, trying to expose the agrobusiness companies and Bolsonaro-era policies that have opened the door to a slow genocide of tribal groups like theirs around the Amazon.

The Karipuna’s story is, unfortunately, not unique. There are many tribal groups who are losing population and land to these developments. In the summer of 2022, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project noted a 140% increase in violence between state forces and armed groups in Rondônia — many of which are illegal logging or mining enterprises.

Sister Manso Pereira knows that her connection to the church and her work as a leader offers some protection to her friends, the Karipuna people.

“The Karipuna once said to me, ‘We sleep well when you are here, because you’re with us.’ I said, ‘Why? If they come for you to kill you, they’re going to kill me, too.’ And they said, ‘We know if you went missing, the church would come looking for you. They would know you were gone.’”

Sister Manso Pereira’s eyes mist with tears when she says this, but also a wry smile spreads across her lips; as if out of one side of her mouth come these dangerous anecdotes and out of the other complete peace with the possible consequences of this advocacy.

On one night with the Karipuna, she tells me, they were sure that an assailant was close by in the forest. Out of fear, they moved quietly and without lanterns, walking for miles in the dark. She believes that Our Lady of Aparecida protected them.

“By forest, by river, I always believe that she is with me. That she protects me. Because of that, I am not afraid. [That night in the forest] I didn’t sleep because every leaf that made a sound could be someone coming with a gun to kill us. But I thought, yes, Our Lady of Aparecida, she is our mother, and she has protected us well.”

Pilar Timpane is a documentary filmmaker based in Durham and New York City. Sister Laura Vicuña Pereira Manso’s work and the changing role of women in the global Catholic Church are the subject of her feature length film in progress.

The post In the Amazon, Religious Women Lead the Way appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: BBC/Getty Images)

House cats may spend most of their days asleep, but when they’re awake, they’re likely to spend at least some time fighting one another. Competition in the natural world for food and territory may be a far cry from a comfortable life of puffy sofas and regular feedings, but animals still feel a need to battle it out. But no matter the species, even if they bite hard enough to draw blood, animals usually seem to forgive one another.

Anyone who’s watched a nature documentary knows there are exceptions. Sometimes animals fight to the death. More typically, fights end quickly, and the herd goes back to grazing or hunting. Sometimes animals become enemies for life. But they mostly return to being compatible.

This may not be what we think about in the larger scope of conversations about forgiveness. But our hominid ancestors lived in tribes, and we are still animals. Moving quickly past conflict made our survival as a species possible because we learned how to stop fighting before we killed one another. In any competition for survival, a pack is more likely to survive than a solitary animal. It could be argued that forgiveness is hard-wired into our DNA.

Yet the reason we evolved as a species from swimming to crawling to walking is because we were willing to override our genetic code. We learned to forgive to protect the pack, but we also learned when a pack member could not be forgiven. In those same nature documentaries, you might recall the solitary animal, cast out on its own, wandering the wilderness. That is the unforgiven animal. And revenge or retribution might be as deeply embedded in our genes as forgiveness.

But what do we really mean when we talk about forgiveness? The understanding most of us have is that forgiveness is essentially a kind of moral gift, granted to someone who has wronged us. There’s also a common notion that we somehow “forgive and forget,” moving past harm and leaving it behind, which is often far from our lived reality. Forgiveness is often portrayed as something that will help a person turn their life around. Seemingly every religious tradition describes forgiveness as a virtue. Muslims refer to Allah as “Ghafir,” or all-forgiving. In the Dharmic religions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, seeking forgiveness is an important step toward both mental clarity and cultivating compassion. Judaism’s focus on forgiveness is so paramount that many regard Yom Kippur, literally “Day of Atonement,” as the holiest day of the year.

Christianity, however, is what shaped much of Western thinking about forgiveness, and nearly every classic work of literature, film, theater, and music made by Christian or lapsed Christian artists has involved some portrayal of forgiveness. In America in particular, our collective imagination is shaped by the idea that forgiveness is a virtue, and failing to forgive is a vice, sin, and failure.

Up until the 20th century, when psychology evolved into its contemporary form, how people understood forgiveness was rooted in philosophy and religion. And both of those continue to influence how we talk about forgiveness today. In essence, our understanding of forgiveness often lands in the middle of a Venn diagram of philosophy, psychology, and religion. Plato and Aristotle, the founders of Western philosophy, saw controlling anger as important to leading a virtuous life, and understood forgiveness as a route toward freeing a person from anger. But as Christianity evolved and conquered, forgiveness itself became a virtue, and failing to forgive became a vice.

(Scene from Promising Young Woman)

On the opposite hand of forgiveness is revenge. And depictions of revenge can be a highly enjoyable way for us to live out the fantasy that we might get our own retribution instead of being forgiving. In the 2022 film The Banshees of Inisherin, a conflict between old friends escalates to absurdist levels of violence as the two men trade acts of revenge. At the end of the film, Pádraic, whose house has been burned down by his former friend Colm, says “some things there’s no moving on from, and I think that’s a good thing.” In 2020’s Promising Young Woman, a former medical student whose friend was raped by a classmate systematically takes revenge on everyone from the school who colluded to cover it up. In 2002’s Oldboy, a man freed from prison after many years for reasons he doesn’t understand sets out on several acts of revenge. And even 1980’s classic comedy 9 to 5 is about a group of women who get revenge on their misogynistic boss.

These movies are enjoyable because they are a kind of wish fulfillment. Instead of being forgiving, the characters get what most of us really want deep down inside when we have been wronged, which is to hurt the person who did it. Sublimating that instinct for revenge is one of the great battles of our lives. The difference between us and our house pets is that we keep thinking about being wronged long past the event itself, sometimes for years or decades.

Revenge fantasies are an escape from the reality that forgiving is sometimes just more pragmatic. But the fact is that while forgiving one another may be part of what keeps our world from tumbling into violence, it is not always as easy as we are taught. And it is not always possible.

While many portrayals of forgiveness focus on reconciliation, with the offender being welcomed back into a relationship, modern philosophers like Jean Hampton have argued that reconciliation can be “morally unwise.” If the offending party isn’t asking to be forgiven, offering forgiveness can put the victim in a more vulnerable position. This is closely related to cycles of abuse in domestic and institutional relationships. If a victim is always forgiving, the offending person is essentially given permission to keep harming. A tendency to rush to forgiveness can also indicate a lack of self-respect, because the individual who does this may struggle to understand that sometimes forgiveness isn’t actually owed.

Some philosophers also argue that forgiveness cannot work unless it comes with conditions. Charles Griswold writes that it is the wrongdoer who is responsible for fulfilling the conditions for forgiveness. In Griswold’s argument they must acknowledge they’ve done wrong, repudiate what they’ve done, express regret, commit to change, show they understand the damage they’ve done, and explain why behaved poorly in the first place.

But even if reconciliation isn’t always possible, philosophically, “reconciliation is the goal to which forgiveness points.” The animal kingdom example works again here. The pack is stronger when reconciled. It will survive. The same can be argued for nations struggling to move past painful episodes in their histories. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which shed light on the atrocities of apartheid, worked to demonstrate that unless those atrocities were made public, reconciliation would never really be possible, and the nation would never be unified.

For many religious people, divine forgiveness can be difficult to grasp and explain. Who can really know the mind of God? If forgiveness is in God’s hands, as Jesus says on the cross, how does one know when or if God has forgiven? The truth is that one can’t and doesn’t know. We can only assume that some combination of atonement, right behavior, amends, and apology will get us close enough for God to grant us forgiveness. In Catholicism, the priest, acting “in persona Christi,” does the forgiving on God’s behalf in the sacrament of reconciliation, more commonly known as confession. But forgiveness in confession always comes with penance of some sort, or else, the church teaches, it doesn’t work.

There is also a performative kind of forgiveness, where a person asks for forgiveness but is essentially unchanged when granted it. If forgiveness means moving past and letting go of resentment toward someone who’s wronged you, as many philosophers and psychologists agree, that assumes that the person being forgiven is actively working to avoid making the same mistake again. This, of course, is far from reality in many cases.

But who is forgiveness really for? In philosophy and religion, art and literature, forgiveness is often depicted as liberating for the person who has done wrong. But modern psychologists have begun to focus instead on the idea that forgiving is about liberating the person offering the forgiveness from resentment, anger, or a desire for revenge. If holding on to grief or pain can lead to resentment, which can be psychologically damaging, forgiving someone could theoretically be an end to that resentment. In this framing, the person doing the forgiving is who benefits the most.

The psychologist Fred Luskin, who formerly ran Stanford University’s Forgiveness Project, says that learning to grant forgiveness is a way of understanding that being told “no” is a universal experience. According to Luskin, “the essence of forgiveness is being resilient when things don’t go the way you want.” Learning to accept that things are not always as we hoped is a key to moving past resentment and into forgiveness.

But Luskin contends that you cannot forgive someone without grieving. When someone does us wrong, we must recognize that our relationship is forever changed, and we have to grieve that change. Instead of letting go of the experience, Luskin says allowing ourselves to grieve helps us transform our emotional response to it, which can help us to become more resilient and more forgiving. He also maintains that not hiding the process you’re experiencing is crucial. Research has shown that people who experience trauma and don’t share that experience have worse outcomes than those who do. This may be why sexual abuse victims find it so difficult to arrive at forgiveness, since shame and secrecy are inherent to many cases of sexual abuse.

The former pope Benedict XVI died while I was working on this essay, and the knowledge that he had failed to act to end sex abuse by priests in Germany while he was an archbishop overshadowed every word of praise I saw lavished on him in obituaries and on social media. Children were raped while he stood by and did nothing. Why were people so forgiving of a person who’d colluded to allow that to happen?

Because the sexual abuse atrocities were so shameful, they had stayed a secret until Benedict retired from the papacy and were not made public until the same year he died. Among the eulogies praising his theological mind and his love of music and art, the voices of abuse victims were hardly heard at all. It’s likely they had not forgiven him.

If psychologists argue that learning to forgive benefits the person who has been wronged because it allows them to move past resentment and into freedom from mental burdens, the problem is that memories of a traumatic event can last for the rest of a person’s life. Sex abuse victims have talked extensively about this, as have war veterans, and many other people whose bodies and minds have been violated.

When it comes to people who are not able to forgive, some psychologists argue that this may actually be a way of protecting themselves from further harm. Jeanne Safer, author of Forgiving and Not Forgiving, argues that “enshrining universal forgiveness as a panacea, a requirement or the only moral choice, is rigid, simplistic and even pernicious.” Yet, according to Safer, we have come to expect forgiveness to be granted so universally that we demonize anyone unwilling to grant it. The problem here is that we equate forgiveness with a kind of moral purity that few people can live up to. In her reading, there are actually many cases when not forgiving someone is the most appropriate action to take.

Safer describes three types of people who withhold forgiveness. For the first type, “moral unforgivers,” refusing to forgive means telling the truth, asserting fundamental rights, and opposing injustice. “Psychologically detached unforgivers” accept the painful reality that they cannot experience any positive internal connection with a betrayer, which forgiving would require. And “Reformed forgivers” have faced conflicts between feelings, religious principles or ethics, and have come to reject the conventional attitudes they once accepted. But none of these three types of people is vindictive or against forgiveness in principle. They share the capacity to forgive, but have come to a decision that forgiveness, rather than freeing them from patterns of negative thinking, can further damage them psychologically.

In Safer’s telling, the decision not to forgive can sometimes be liberating for the children of abusive parents. This does not mean those people necessarily cut off all communication or refuse to acknowledge a parent, but that they are “outraged but not obsessed” by the harm done to them. When people insist on universal forgiveness, it can blind them to the fact that reconciliation without forgiveness is also a viable possibility.

The pandemic has also revealed fault lines in our understanding of forgiveness. In the most recent season of the podcast Serial, the poet Rachel McKibbens tells the story of how her father and brother both died from Covid just a few weeks apart. Her father, who had been physically abusive to her and her brother throughout their childhood, still displayed qualities that caused both Rachel and her brother Peter to stay in touch with him as adults. Their father took them in when their mother put them in foster care. He supported Rachel’s interest in acting and theater and drove her to rehearsals all over the Los Angeles area. He loved movies and watched them with his kids, and was scrupulous about making sure they were well fed. But he drank, and when he drank, he got violent. Rachel and her brother, like many children of abusive and alcoholic parents, became a team and paired up together against their father’s rage.

When Rachel grew up, she moved across the country. But her brother moved back in with his father, and tried and failed to get him to stop drinking. When Covid arrived, both father and son refused to get vaccinated. They began to tunnel down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories about vaccines and the government, fueled by texts from a cousin. Her father refused to go to the hospital when he got Covid, and he died at home. Shortly after, Peter’s health rapidly declined as well.

As Peter’s own Covid case got worse and he became feverish and short of breath, he called his sister. Rachel told him, “If you don’t go to the E.R. right now, I will not forgive you when you die.” Peter went to the E.R., where he was put on oxygen, but he refused medication because he believed a conspiracy theory that doctors receive money if they give medication to Covid patients. He told his sister he was released because he was getting better, but this was a lie. He had discharged himself against medical advice, went home, and died. He was 44 years old.

Three years into the pandemic, there are millions of stories like this. Rachel says she herself feels like she needs forgiveness for not pushing her father and brother harder to get vaccinated. But at some point, when a person refuses to get help, even to get something as simple as a vaccine, they move past being forgivable and into a messier, greyer area.

During the AIDS epidemic, millions of people were abandoned by their parents and families because they were considered untouchable. But it was the enraged, unrelenting pressure from gay men, at that time the most at risk of contracting the disease, which pushed the American government and pharmaceutical companies into funding medical research to make lifesaving drugs affordable and accessible. Some of those same men who survived AIDS never forgave or reconciled with the families that rejected them.

(Dallas Texas Digest headline from April 1990)

Today, untold numbers of queer and trans kids are also rejected by their families of origin, and they, too, struggle to feel forgiving. But if they cannot bring themselves to forgive the parents who rejected them, does that make them bad people? I know far too many people who fit these descriptions, who cannot forgive their parents and have had to self-create families that would be more understanding and supportive. In no cases would I describe them as “bad.” They are, in fact, some of the most empathetic and compassionate people I’ve ever known.

Perhaps, for some people, forgiveness can be freeing. But in cases where it would do further damage, enable abuse, or cause someone to engage in self harm, forgiveness can do the opposite. It can put us into a moral cage of “goodness” where we become trapped by the idea that failing to forgive means we are fundamentally bad people. And this is particularly true among Christians in America. Decades of the rise of fundamentalist thinking about Christianity have led people to believe that Jesus always preached forgiveness, that he demanded it, and that failing to give it makes you a bad Christian and even an apostate.

But American Christian ideas of forgiveness are also shaped by our country’s history of believing in predestination, manifest destiny, slavery, colonialism, misogyny, homophobia, and many other social ills that have become deeply intertwined with Christianity. The idea that forgiveness must be universal is cross denominational, too, impacting every American Christian from Catholics to Protestants, from overwhelmingly white Mormons to Black Christians who belong to churches founded by slaves.

Just as our nation both insists it believes in the separation of church and state and demands lawmakers to take an oath of office with one hand on a holy book, we fetishize forgiveness, but we also have the highest incarceration rate in the world. The death penalty is legal in 27 states. Families trying to cross the border into the United States, often fleeing abuse and violence, are put into cages or detention centers where they lack adequate food, medicine, and water. And a woman seeking an abortion because of an unplanned pregnancy will be unable to get one in thirteen states as of this writing, and likely many more in the future. We are not a forgiving nation.

But it needs to be clear that as the author of this column, I am not against forgiveness. Forgiveness can indeed be liberating. It can mend relationships, heal emotional wounds, and make us feel better about ourselves. But expecting universal forgiveness can also give abusers permission to keep abusing. It can cause self-harm. It can lead to suicidal ideation and addiction. It can also drive people away from religion when religion makes them feel like failures for being unable to forgive. Forgiveness is something that should improve our lives and our society, but America today is a stellar example of why this is very much not the case. We need to see that forgiveness has limits, and that for our own good, we sometimes need to heed them.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post Fetishizing Forgiveness appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

A few weeks ago, I saw the remarkable Broadway play Leopoldstadt, a show about multiple generations of one Viennese Jewish family. The first act opens in 1889 as children are decorating a Christmas tree. This is an assimilated Jewish family (“We worship culture,” one character proclaims), and the patriarch even converted to Catholicism to integrate more fully into Austrian society. But the family has not renounced Judaism either. They may have a Christmas tree, but they also host a beautiful Passover seder in the spring. They are cosmopolitan, well-educated, and affluent. They love Vienna and several in the family are convinced Austria celebrates the contributions Jews have made to art, music, literature, science, and psychology (they mention Freud more than once).

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

One family member, a mathematician, is more skeptical. As the play unfolds with no intermission to add to the show’s intensity (act two is in 1900, act 3 in 1924, act 4 in 1938, and act 5 in 1955), the audience witnesses the entire family learn that assimilation offered no protection from the Jew-hatred that festered just beneath the surface until it overflowed in the most horrific ways imaginable. Even before the Nazis rise to power, the audience watches the family patriarch discover that, despite converting, many Austrians would never see him as anything other than a Jew.

As the play inches closer to 1938, I worried that some in the audience might think this family should have seen what was coming, as if they could have known what we sitting in the theater know, a phenomenon literature scholar Michael André Bernstein describes as “backshadowing.” But Leopoldstadt shows how difficult it was for Jews to flee – the extraordinary expense, the unwillingness of other countries, including the United States, to accept Jewish refugees, and the horrible choices some faced to leave their families and to go to another country that they hoped would not also be invaded by the Nazis. The show makes clear that most European Jews had no viable options, and for those who did, things rarely went well because most of continental Christian Europe was either complicit or passive bystanders in the Nazi’s Final Solution.

Leopoldstadt is a play that has stayed with me, lingering in my thoughts longer than most. One reason I can’t seem to shake the play is because events of the present day remind me of the show. I do not simply mean the rise in antisemitism, nor am I suggesting that I see another Holocaust on our horizon. But I do see a similar type of hate and scapegoating among powerful, elected officials. While I used to roll my eyes at Marjorie Taylor Green’s comments or Ron DeSantis’s diatribes, I find myself deeply concerned by their willingness to target vulnerable populations, like transgender Americans, and their legions of supporters who, like Nazis and January 6 insurrectionists, seem poised for violence. Just recently, DeSantis demanded that public colleges and universities in Florida hand over transgender students’ medical files to his office. And across the country, from Mississippi to Utah, state legislatures are passing laws making it illegal for transgender adolescents to access medical services to support their transition. The legislative dehumanization and targeting of transgender Americans is well underway, as are physical attacks against transgender women and, increasingly, drag queens. As these legislative and bodily assaults escalate, the number of bystanders who have not protested them continues to come into clearer, and frightening, focus.

With these thoughts in mind, I turn to this issue of the Revealer and the pressing matters it addresses. Several articles in our March issue consider what it means to identify one’s enemies, how political action can make a difference, and why we should consider when, or if, forgiveness against those who have wronged us is appropriate. The issue opens with the newest installment in Kaya Oake’s “Not So Sorry” column with the article “Fetishizing Forgiveness,” where she reflects on how the pressures to forgive people, institutions, and officials can allow injustice and abuse to continue. Next, in “In the Amazon, Religious Women Lead the Way,” Pilar Timpane profiles a Catholic nun who faces death threats for her activism to protect Brazil’s indigenous communities and their land. Then, in “What Does BDS Really Mean?,” Adele Oltman, an advocate for Palestinians, suggests that BDS, the movement to “boycott, divest, and sanction” Israel, does not actually do anything to improve Palestinians’ lives. And in “Tipping Points,” Toby Cox offers a reflection on how the climate crisis is making the “religious ecology” – the interconnected lives of humanity, animals, and vegetation – abundantly, and painfully, clear.

The issue also moves away from issues of bystanders and political action, and takes a look at two new books that we believe will be of interest to Revealer readers. In “Searching for God, One Bestseller at a Time,” Daniel Burke interviews religion professor Stephen Prothero about his new book God the Bestseller, which tells the story of a religion editor who was responsible for many of the 20^th century’s most popular books about religion. And, in an excerpt from the new book Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials, Jennifer Caplan explores how Jewish humor has changed over time.

Our March issue also features a conversation with Jennifer Caplan for the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Jewish Comedy.” We discuss how Jews developed a reputation as a funny people, if antisemitism has contributed to Jewish humor, and how Jewish humor is changing as the image of American Jews diversifies. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As I reflect on the many concerns our March issue raises, I return to my thoughts about Leopoldstadt. Today, we face what might feel like an avalanche of attacks on people’s dignity, fueled by an overwhelming number of people who seem fine with the rise of fascism and with taking away people’s democratic rights. But we are not in a fascist country – yet. Given the rapid speed of our media, we do have awareness of what is happening. We know who and what we should be protesting if we want to protect democracy, trans people and other targets of hate, and the teaching of history itself. Let us act with that knowledge and with the urgency our current situation demands. And may we not be passive bystanders.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

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