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We will be back in early 2021 with all new episodes! Until then, enjoy “Crafting Jewish Identity.”

Happen listening!

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 9: Crafting Jewish Identity appeared first on The Revealer.

1) Have you ever wondered about the popularity of festivals like Burning Man or Wanderlust? Amanda Lucia, who wrote about the complicated relationships between gurus and their students for our March special issue on religion and sex abuse, has a new book that explores connections between race and religion at these popular festivals. Check out her book, White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals (University of California Press). 

2) Does December and its holidays make you think of cherished family items, handmade creations, the power of gifting, and religion? If so, you’ll want to curl up with a copy of Jodi Eichler-Levine’s fascinating book about crafting and Judaism, Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community (University of North Carolina Press).

3) If you are interested in a different perspective on American Jews, check out Ayala Fader’s fascinating book about ultra-Orthodox Jews who lead double lives. We ran an excerpt in our Summer issue and you’ll want a full copy of Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press).

4) Are you one of the many Revealer readers who appreciated Megan Goodwin’s “Abusing Religion” series that explored mainstream media portrayals of Mormons, Muslims, and Satanists and their alleged greater prevalence of sexual abuse? If so, you’ll want a copy of her book, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers University Press).

5) And speaking of sex, religion, and politics, we ran a fascinating interview with Janet Jakobsen about the American political obsession with sex and her ideas about how to create greater sexual freedom. Check out her insightful new book, The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (NYU Press).

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Want more reading recommendations? Check out our 2019 list of Winter Reading Recommendations!

Happy reading!

The post Winter Reading Recommendations appeared first on The Revealer.

The following excerpt comes from the book’s fourth chapter.

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The Pomegranate Guild functions as a Jewish haven in the typically Christian-dominated American craft world. This came up in many casual conversations during my convention fieldwork and also, frequently, during formal interviews. As Bonnie told me: “I found other Jewish women who were doing Jewish things, because the world is not Jewish. . . . There’s huge Christmas stuff, there’s huge Halloween stuff, there’s huge Easter stuff. If we don’t do Jewish things, who’s going to do them?”[1] She explained how she would “take non-Jewish designs and make them Jewish.”[2] A pattern for a fabric Christmas wreath, for example, was transformed, in her capable hands, into an autumn wreath to decorate her sukkah, the temporary dwelling Jews erect during the fall harvest festival of Sukkot.

Similarly, Cathy Perlmutter, who served as the national president of the Pomegranate Guild from 2015 to 2017, explained how her sense of alienation in local, non-Jewish craft settings drove her to seek out Jewish venues. “So, I joined the quilt guild, and of course they had their new member tea on Yom Kippur,” she said. “And I tried to talk to them about it, and they just didn’t want to talk about it. They just didn’t get it.”[3] For both of these women, and many others, the Pomegranate Guild became a safe space where Jewish traditions could be not only recognized but celebrated.

As Stacey, a New England member, told me, “I think there’s so much in the crafting world that’s not Jewish, particularly around Christmas. I mean, the Christmas crafts are just out of control. So it’s nice to have a group where you can celebrate your own traditions and celebrate your religion without feeling like you’re the only one making a dreidel while everyone else is making ornaments.”[4] I encountered similar conversations throughout the 2017 biennial convention. At one embroidery workshop, participants bemoaned the dominance of Christmas crafts and enjoyed the fact that we were making tea towels that celebrated iconic biblical heroines instead. Over dinner one evening, a woman who had lived in both the Midwest and the South told me that in the non-Pomegranate craft groups, everyone bonded over their Christmas crafts, leaving her to feel excluded. In the Pomegranate Guild, she said, everyone bonded over their tallit bags and challah covers instead, and she got to be a part of it. It became clear to me that part of the Pomegranate Guild members’ resilience came from the group’s function as an alternative crafting space where Jewish objects, stories, and rituals were at the center, not in the margin.

For women who lived in areas with few other Jews, the Guild was a particularly valuable link to other Jews. At the biennial convention, I spoke with Lindi, who hailed from Wisconsin. As an independent member, Lindi had come upon the guild in a story that echoed Gerry’s stories of early guild connections: she was accompanying her spouse on a business trip and reached out electronically to learn about fabric shops in the city they were visiting. She connected with an active guild member, and the rest was history. Lindi really enjoyed the convention atmosphere. “I love the people, the Jewish women that are here. I like the fact that it’s Jewish, it’s creative, it’s fiber, and that there’s a connection among the women that are here. Especially, coming from a smaller community, I don’t always have that connection. I have to seek it out. And I always feel that it’s as much a part of our responsibility to seek out things as other people to seek you out.”[5] Lindi had strong connections with non-Jewish quilters in her hometown, but incorporated Jewish symbolism into a great deal of her work and found meaning in connecting with other Jewish quilters.

Being proud of Jewishness in mainstream craft spaces was also important. Arlene Diane Spector, a past president of the national guild and frequent regional officer, told me the story of how a group of guild members had made it their goal to get Jewish pieces recognized at the Woodlawn Plantation Needlecraft Exhibition, in Mount Vernon, Virginia, which, at the time, often featured a large number of Christmas decorations. One of Arlene’s friends said she wanted them to make “a Judaic statement, because we’re Jewish and we should be acknowledged.” Arlene added, “Our goal was not to get ribbons, our goal was to make a Jewish statement in an area where there were not a lot of Jews.”[6] Despite this humble aside, one of her submitted pieces, an intricate black-work depiction of Naomi and Ruth, received an honorable mention one year. I viewed the piece in her home, where it is displayed on a living room wall with other framed needlework, its ribbon still affixed.

Piece by Arlene Diane Specter. (Photo: Jodi Eichler-Levine)

This delicate piece shows two women, one facing forward, the other pictured in turned profile, her long braid spreading down toward the bottom of the canvas. Ruth’s famous speech, including the phrase, “For wither thou goest, I will go, and whither thou lodgest, I will lodge; your people shall be my people,” is inscribed around the border of the image. Although this Jewish piece is most definitely not a Christmas craft, it was inspired by a Hebrew Bible passage that is common to both Christians and Jews, one that is popular in both traditions as a story of conversion; it is also important because Ruth ultimately holds a place in the genealogical tree for King David and, in the Christian tradition, Jesus. Thus, while this Jewish statement was certainly no Christmas ornament, it was also not as ethnoreligiously particularistic as, say, a challah cover or Torah mantle, objects specific to Jewish rituals and only Jewish rituals, would have been.

Hanukkah/Christmas stockings by Cherry Cassell. (Photo: Brett Krutzsch)

To be clear, Jewish crafting is not always “anti-Christmas.” Among the roughly 50 percent of Jewish Americans who marry non-Jews, including Christians, we see ever more fluid and nuanced revalorizations of both Christianity and Judaism as “cultures” that can be blended without offending the Jewish spouse; “Chrismukkah” crafts abound on Etsy and elsewhere.[7] For the women of the Pomegranate Guild, however, identification of Jewish crafts over and against Christian ones is still an important dividing line. Due to the current length of the commercial season, “for both celebrant and noncelebrant alike, there is no escaping Christmas”; furthermore, “American Jewry’s success in challenging Christmas’s vaunted status rests upon forging an identity that is at once separate from the religious and historical dimensions of Christmas, yet convergent with its underlying spirit.”[8] Even though the Jewish women of the Pomegranate Guild were internally diverse in their Jewish practice, they agreed on what they were not: they were not Christian. Thus, on one level, the Pomegranate Guild functioned as a space where members of a minority culture could congregate and fully be themselves. Not every member of the Pomegranate Guild necessarily observes Yom Kippur, but all agree that the guild would never hold the new members’ tea then.

Jodi Eichler-Levine is the Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization and Associate Professor of Religion at Lehigh University. She is the author of Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community and Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Literature. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Kveller, Killing the Buddha, Religion Dispatches, and other venues. She is currently working on a book-length study on the intersections of religion and Disney.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 9 of the Revealer podcast: “Crafting Jewish Identity” featuring a fascinating interview with Jodi Eichler-Levine.

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[1] Bonnie Vorspan interview.

[2] Bonnie Vorspan interview.

[3] Cathy Perlmutter interview.

[4] “Stacey” interview.

[5] Lindi interview.

[6] Arlene Diane Spector interview.

[7] Mehta, Beyond Chrismukkah, 83, 123, 136–60; Krutzsch, “Editor’s Letter.”

[8] Plaut, Kosher Christmas, 3–4.

The post “The Christmas Crafts are Just Out of Control”: Pomegranate Guild as Jewish Space appeared first on The Revealer.

As both an anthropologist and a lawyer, Darryl Li is able to offer rare insights into — and critiques of — these questions by focusing on the lives of real people. Published after more than a decade of research in a half-dozen countries and multiple languages, Li’s new book, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020), is an account of two competing forms of universalism — Islamist jihad and American empire — in the Balkans during the years following the Cold War. Asking questions about religion, violence, and politics, The Universal Enemy is a model of the best kind of anthropology of religion — work that is ethically and theoretically rigorous, innovative, and uncompromising. Li’s study is not just a sensitive and sharp portrayal of his subjects, it is an urgently useful example of how future anthropological work ought to be undertaken. I was honored that he was able to take time over the last few months to discuss the book with me and that I can share our conversation with you here.

Kali Handelman: I’d like to start out by asking you to tell us a bit about how you came to write this book. But I thought I might ask you to focus particularly on the role of religion in this work. You are not a scholar of religious studies, per se, so I wonder what questions you had taking on a project that necessarily entails thinking about religion? What did you want to avoid? What did you especially want to accomplish?

Darryl Li: When I first embarked on this research 15 years ago, I was frustrated at debates that either treated religion — or, let’s be real, Islam — as the problem, or which tried to tell us that jihad was really a manifestation of some other problem like globalization. In other words, there was this unappealing choice between reductionism or dismissal when it came to religion. As someone who grew up neither embracing nor rebelling against religious traditions, I felt liberated from a lot of the anxieties that marked these discussions. The whole “how does religion explain violence?” question never interested me since both violence and religion are themselves incredibly broad concepts.

Looking at contemporary jihad practices and the people engaged in them (mujahids), the ones that were most interesting to me — and which have attracted the most notoriety — have been those mobilizing volunteers from many different countries, so-called foreign fighters. These included mujahids who traveled to Afghanistan to confront the Soviet Union or outfits like al-Qa‘ida that lack a specific territorial locus but instead sought to attack the United States wherever they could. These jihads are striking precisely because of how they bring together violence, piety, and transnational mobility, thus upending the widely-held assumption that the only legitimate warfare is that waged by nation-states.

KH: Right, exactly. In the book you argue that texts cannot, in and of themselves, make people violent. In religious studies, we’re pretty used to making this point — that religious ideas and texts do not make people do things —  religious texts do not, in and of themselves, produce something called religious violence. And yet, we recognize the need for serious conversations about the relationship between politics, religion, and violence. And that’s the kind of conversation about jihad that you bring your readers into. Crucially, you refuse to define “jihad,” and instead insist that the focus ought to be on how the concept of jihad is used to organize and justify political violence so that we can “ground concepts of Islam and violence in relation to one another without reductively shackling them together.”

DL: The framing I mentioned above — jihad qua transnational non-state armed campaigns — brackets out a lot of other things that get called jihad. It excludes violence by states (perhaps the most important yet understudied form of contemporary jihad), non-state groups seeking to overthrow ruling regimes or repel foreign occupiers, as well as unaffiliated individuals who “self-radicalize.” It excludes all the usages of the word “jihad” for non-violent or inner spiritual struggles. In fact, this sheer diversity is why speaking of jihadism doesn’t make sense to me, since it inevitably involves elevating some believers’ uses of the term “jihad” into a paradigm while marginalizing others, without articulating a convincing rationale.

The way I’ve just categorized my focus on certain types of jihad doesn’t correspond neatly to any particular category within Islamic law. But Islamic discourses and practices are still very important for the analysis. At the same time, mujahids live and operate in a world structured by the category of sovereignty, and their debates over doctrine are also shaped by it. I’m interested in how a doctrinal category (jihad) developed by and for believers confronts a political logic (sovereignty) that is shared by believers and non-believers alike. And this raises issues that have largely gone undertheorized in the voluminous commentary on jihad: how do we reconcile pan-Islamic commitments with doctrinal, racial, cultural, and other forms of difference in concrete settings of organized violence? The fourth chapter of the book highlights how the mujahids invoked a variety of Islamic notions of virtue, kinship, and community to process these differences and ground different forms of dispute and debate while enacting a project of armed solidarity. This gave me a way to take “religion” seriously without situating it as the cause or locus of violence.

KH: Similarly, I wonder what you think of efforts to expand, rather than minimize or eliminate, the use of “terrorism” to define acts of political violence? It’s a two-pronged project, right? First, to expose the way that “terrorism” is used to differentiate legitimate versus illegitimate violence in ways that are undeniably anti-Muslim and racist. And second, to apply the label to violence committed, for instance, by white supremacists. I understand the motivation, but I’m unconvinced that making “terrorism” apply more broadly solves the problem. Are there changes you would like to see in conversations about “terrorism”? And are there important differences between how this conversation plays out in the legal field versus in anthropology?

DL: I share your skepticism about the need or even possibility of using “terrorism” — at least in any of its recognized institutional forms — as a framework to combat white supremacy, especially when we are talking about the United States. Remember the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing? The deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil up until that point was carried out by white militia members. Yet the bipartisan governmental response was to pass a raft of laws significantly amplifying state violence against non-white populations: streamlining the death penalty, expanding the immigration detention and deportation regime, criminalizing broad swaths of charitable activity and political activism.

I think of “terrorism” as a political misnomer — it’s a refusal to name certain forms of violence as political, but the very act of non-naming is itself political and an implicit recognition that the violence in question is political as well. “Terrorism” is also a misnomer in the sense that it often marks certain groups but only in a coded way. So in the U.S. context, the need to qualify terrorism as “domestic,” “right wing,” or “white supremacist” reinforces the unstated assumption that the default terrorist is Muslim.

Most importantly, the terrorism framework is about reinforcing the state’s right to choose enemies while at the same time letting it off the hook for naming the politics of those alleged enemies. Sometimes this distorts or erases political claims that may otherwise be worthy of more serious consideration, as when al-Qa’ida’s critique of U.S. imperialism was dismissed as hating “freedom” (prompting Osama bin Laden to ask rhetorically why he didn’t attack Sweden). Other times, the terrorism label conceals what the state and those groups have in common. In that regard, demanding that a state regime founded in white supremacy deploy violence against parastatal white supremacist violence strikes me as asking an arsonist to be a firefighter.

KH: You are trained as both a lawyer and an anthropologist. In the book, you offer the reader insight into what occupying that double, hybrid orientation meant for you during your fieldwork. I was particularly struck by the way that friendship — construed legally and interpersonally — is at the core of this integrated research methodology. Can you tell us how and why friendship figured into your methodology of “ethnographic lawyering”?

DL: The research for this book was informed by my experiences working as part of a clinical legal team representing Ahmed Zuhair, a Saudi national held captive at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was on a long-term hunger strike. Through visiting our client at the base, participating in federal court hearings, and many hours reviewing classified evidence in a government facility near the Pentagon, I developed some sense of how the kinds of transnational Muslim mobility that I research are understood by the national security bureaucracy. Mr. Zuhair was transferred to a rehabilitation facility in Saudi Arabia in 2009 and released several years later.

Ahmed Zuhair (Photo: Associated Press)

Working on the case also put me into a relationship of formally recognized (and elaborately structured) antagonism with the U.S. government as opposing counsel. In my anthropological research, this antagonism was important for signaling that I had different commitments from other researchers and journalists and could be trusted (which is not to say that they were always convinced!).

More broadly, I am invested in finding productive tensions between the distinct professional logics of anthropology and lawyering, recognizing that they can never fully align. I don’t think you can have an ethnographic relationship with someone you are representing as a lawyer that is both ethical and critical, or at least I don’t know how to reconcile this. Similarly, I can’t approach a private person as an ethnographic interlocutor if I’m going to be opposed to them in some kind of legal proceeding. But lawyering in relation to parties I wasn’t writing about could nevertheless ground the work — for me, ethnographic lawyering entails using everyday categories and artifacts of legal practice as conceptual and methodological scaffolding.

This gets to your question about friendship. Early in my research, one of the people who features prominently in the book, a Syrian mujahid called Abu Hamza, asked me for a “token of friendship” to assure him of my bona fides. After some time, I ended up participating in two amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs on his behalf. In those situations, Abu Hamza was not my client; my clients, formally speaking, were NGOs that were intervening in his case to weigh in on the general legal framework under which his cases were being considered and did not seek to defend him on the facts. A friend of the court isn’t necessarily neutral, but is in theory trying to advise the court at some remove from the parties. In this instance, the professional ethical model of friendship with the court provided a capacious framing that allowed me to be useful to Abu Hamza — a concern in any ethnographic encounter — in a way that used law but did not entail us entering into an attorney-client relationship.

KH: So much of my thinking about the relationship between religion and political violence was shaped by reading scholars like Edward Said and Talal Asad, progenitors of scholarship that is critically attentive to the particularities and contingencies of discourse, culture, and history. So, I was really struck by your critique of their, well, critiques. You write that, “for all their merit”, their methods have left us “few tools to make sense of the acts of sacrifice that do occasionally take place in the name of Islam between people who lack any other tie of commonality”, and that we still need a way to “move beyond this problem of alterity — either Muslims are radically Other or Muslims are basically the same as Us — to instead treat the regulation of difference itself as the object of study.” Can you tell us more about what it would look like to shift our focus from making claims about alterity to thinking instead about the regulation of difference?

DL: My argument is directed at the milieu in which I was trained: “critical” strands of U.S. and U.K.-based Middle East studies that took certain tools for exposing logics of empire and secularism from people like Said and Asad, but did not know how to squarely address the one topic that basically everyone outside the field looked to us for insight on in the years after 9/11. There is a lacuna here when it comes to jihad practices, bounded on one side by Said’s difficulty in thinking with religion and, on the other, by the obliqueness of Asad’s engagement with the political. But the book is intended less as a critique of Said and Asad than of the rest of us for not expanding the horizon far enough beyond their pathbreaking contributions.

KH: Your book is deeply engaged with the work of Carl Schmitt, a fraught but canonical figure, known both for his membership in the Nazi party, and because his work has fundamentally shaped a century of (conservative and liberal) thinking about political theology. You focus on two tethered concepts from Schmitt: the enemy and sovereignty. About the enemy, you write, “If Carl Schmitt argued that politics was about the ability to distinguish between one’s friend and enemy, then speaking in the name of the universal is about making that decision on behalf of others.” You also write that, “the Jihad fighter — especially one who travels across national boundaries — is a universal enemy.” This really clarifies a way of seeing the world in terms of competing universalisms — jihad is both the subject and object of universalisms. That is, jihads make universalist claims and universalist claims are made about jihads. Is this — these competing universalisms — what you mean when you write that “jihads can help us see the broader world differently than we may have otherwise”?

DL: Yes! That’s a helpful reformulation of the book’s argument, and the choice of title as well. I would add a third concept of Schmitt’s that the book thinks with, namely that of the partisan. Unlike most other “canonical” (i.e. racist) thinkers, Schmitt at least took the antagonistic dimension of politics seriously and also theorized war knowing full well that nation-states were not the only parties to wage it. For Schmitt, the partisan was such a figure of fascination, of potential legitimacy and even nobility, but who ultimately sought to capture state power and was defending home and hearth. In contrast, in transnational jihads, the Arabic term “ansar” (often translated as “partisan”) is used for those who travel to other lands in order to fight for Islam. Schmitt — and on this point he largely agrees with his liberal counterparts — would dismiss these partisans as unmoored and unregulated bearers of violence. But The Universal Enemy sketches the transnational social and cultural worlds that would make the ansar legible and ground their activities as potentially legitimate in the eyes of at least some of the people they sought to help in places like Bosnia. The ansar teach us that not every outsider is a stranger. The concept gives some historical depth and conceptual suppleness to think through questions like: were these mujahids in Bosnia “fellow Muslims” or “foreign Arabs”? Were U.N. peacekeepers emissaries of the International Community or instruments of Western meddling? And, as Schmitt would remind us, who gets to make that choice is the crucial question.

KH: You also point out that, despite the abundance of re-engagement with Schmitt, we (being, I guess, Western political philosophy) lack a theory of political theology that crosses state borders, as you argue that jihad does. Our political theology, centered on the authority of sovereignty, can only ever see the world in terms of the state, while jihad is based on a conception of authority rooted in solidarity that can cross national borders. Can you explain this differentiation between sovereignty and solidarity in more depth? What kind of world order does each claim as its aspiration?

DL: In the scholarly literature that I’m familiar with, it’s not difficult to find people who are analytically or normatively dissatisfied with treating the nation-state as the primary site of politics. But the alternatives presented are nevertheless often wedded to the logic of sovereignty. Most “non-state actors” that engage in warfare are fighting to become states; many of the locally rooted and authentic forms of community posited as alternatives to sovereignty are often themselves just re-imagined as sovereignties on a smaller scale. Now there is one significant alternative model, which is that of transnational diasporas as sites of political work. But even here, diasporas are usually either unarmed and essentially at the mercy of states, or they are armed but use violence to achieve statehood. I am interested in how violence can be organized without accepting sovereignty as an ultimate goal.

This is why I see the jihad in Bosnia as an instance of armed solidarity involving travel to fight alongside fellow Muslims in the face of mass atrocities, even if they committed atrocities of their own in the process. Much of the literature on jihad focuses on goals like implementing Islamic law or creating an Islamic state; while many mujahids individually supported such ideas, it was not the official agenda of the jihad and indeed their leaders made public statements to that effect. Instead of having a narrow debate over the extent to which those positions were genuine or not, I want to draw attention to overlooked issues, like how the mujahids tried to balance respect for the authority of the Bosnian government while also asserting the right to act regardless of whether the government welcomed them or not, and how they coordinated with an army whose commanders were either secular Muslims or not Muslim at all.

KH: To close, I’d love to pick up your argument about practices of solidarity and ask something a bit broad. How have you been thinking about solidarity in this year which has, one could argue, been defined by the isolation of lockdown and the collectivity of uprising. What does — or can — solidarity look like right now?

DL: As you suggest, in this year we have seen two major challenges in thinking through solidarity: on the one hand, there is the glaring failure — indeed, refusal — of solidarity at the national level in terms of elite decisions to place capital over people, yet again. And, on the other hand, we have seen the flourishing forms of mutual aid and care that the insurrections against white supremacy have made more manifest. My worry, however, concerns the question of violence. When asked whether the antagonists in The Universal Enemy are engaged in regressive projects, my answer has been: sure, but if even a formation as problematic as this one has at least tried to organize violence transnationally in the face of American global hegemony, where does that leave the rest of us? To be honest, I don’t think the left — broadly construed — is talking enough about how violence can be organized and made accountable to our politics. There are recurring questions about building capacities for self-defense without devolving into vanguardism, masculinism, and performativity and about the relationship between self-defense and solidarity with others. And until this happens, I don’t see how we will be truly ready to confront what is to come.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor based in London. She is also the Manager of Program Development and London Regional Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Contributing Editor at the Revealer.

Darryl Li is an assistant professor of anthropology and an associate member of the law school at the University of Chicago. He is also an attorney licensed in New York and Illinois.

The post Rethinking Religious Violence appeared first on The Revealer.

A demonstration protesting antisemitism at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. (Photo: Thomas Peter)

I first learned about The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians a year ago when, during dinner with one of its authors (Sa’ed Atshan), I mentioned that my partner had just returned from Berlin on a vacation I did not take with her. I told Sa’ed the reason I didn’t go with her was that, despite my rational understanding of Berlin as a cosmopolitan city, rich with memorial commemorations of its Jewish heritage, and one where the Germans were more likely to be “philo” rather than “anti” Semites, I was still reluctant to set foot there.

I grew up in the 1950s boycotting German products even though my family lost no one in the Holocaust, was not religious, and my one German-Jewish grandparent, who was born in Indiana in the 1880s and whom I adored, told me often of her love for all things German. More rationally, as a staunch supporter of the Palestinian non-violent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, I was not enamored with the way Germans expressed their sense of ethical obligation to Jews by making moral and financial restitution for the Holocaust through their unwavering commitment to Israel – a commitment that inevitably required supporting its apartheid-like treatment of Palestinians.

Sa’ed, who is himself Palestinian, being ever gentle and always looking for ways to make peaceful interventions, told me I was missing out by refusing to open my eyes and see Berlin in its contemporary light. In that context he told me about the book he had recently co-authored with a Jewish friend, Katharina Galor. He had decided to respond to her invitation to conduct a sociological study of Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in Berlin because of Germany’s exemplary model of restorative justice towards Israel, no matter what its flaws. They wanted to find out how such a model was affecting Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin and how these groups were coming to terms with the relationships that existed among them in that place. I thought my partner would surely be interested in reading the book, even if I would not. I ordered an advance copy for her, and left it at that.

Fast-forward to pandemic life. When the book arrived this June, it sat in quarantine for several days. I gave it to my partner, whose work life has been so crazed she has yet to have the time to read it. But the longer it sat on her armchair next to mine, the more I thought I should take a look.

I am glad I did and encourage you to as well. You will not only see how the authors have done research that is at once scholarly and political; you will also discover two special people whose connection to each other exemplifies the goal of their work: to teach us that we must listen to others and traverse differences to do so. As we learn in the book’s postscript, Katharina is an Israeli Jew who was raised in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, and whose vivid memories of growing up with virulent antisemitism there shaped her life’s work. She left Germany after high school and did not expect to go back. But when her husband accepted a position in Germany she hesitantly returned. What she discovered in Berlin was a drastically changed society, both in its extraordinary culture and in the way the government and people have made restitution for the Holocaust and antisemitism. Yet she found herself troubled by certain aspects of the efforts at reparation: the Germans’ unquestioning allegiance to Israel, their ignorance of the Palestinians’ situation, and their disregard for how the Holocaust contributed to Palestinian suffering. Katy knew that what was transpiring in Berlin among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians would make an interesting study of a complex moral dilemma, and she embarked on an investigative journey that became a fascinating book.

When she asked Sa’ed to join her, he was reluctant at first. He was raised as a Quaker in the West Bank, and his life there was shaped by his experiences at Ramallah Friends School, where he learned about the Holocaust and the evils of antisemitism. As a result of this early training he also had to overcome his own aversion to spending time in Germany. As a student, and later as a professor at Swarthmore College, Sa’ed maintained relationships with American Jews (myself among them) and focused his personal and academic life on the pursuit of peace and justice. He ultimately agreed to contribute to this project because, like me, he was deeply moved by Katy’s vision and intrigued by her question about how this moral triangle between Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans could be better understood. Upon arriving in Germany, Sa’ed was delighted to be well received in Berlin as a queer person. But he was deeply dismayed by how he was treated as a Palestinian and how little Palestinian pleas for justice are understood there, especially since Palestinians have long seen the Holocaust as the source of their trauma, even if the Germans do not.

Although it was Sa’ed’s and Katy’s stories that moved me the most deeply, they would likely insist that this book is not about them, but about the Berliners they came to meet. In that they would be correct also. Getting to know their interlocutors and marveling at the range of voices the authors were able to represent fairly, including characters it was not easy for me to like (Islamophobic Germans, antisemitic Palestinians, and right-wing Israelis), was key to the core idea of this book — that we need to listen to each other in order to reshape the moral triangle among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians to achieve a better balance among the three groups. Hearing their voices allows the reader to view this story from all of their perspectives and in all its complexities.

Palestinian protest at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images)

The book’s title also matters: the image of a moral triangle sets up the authors’ big question. As I read, I began to puzzle over what this triangle among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in Berlin might actually look like. After all, triangles come in three main shapes. Was this triangle equilateral, isosceles, or scalene, I wondered? While what first comes to mind is the equilateral, picturing a triangle with three equal sides is not well suited to this story. It’s obvious that the German side would be longer, and probably situated at the top. The story is set in their country, they have the most power as citizens, and it all began with their sense of themselves as perpetrators of the “original sin,” the Holocaust.

One might then imagine this moral triangle is isosceles, with Israelis and Palestinians on sides of equal length. But the real story the authors tell here is that the triangle is scalene, and has 3 unequal sides. Israelis in Berlin have the second longest side, even though there are fewer of them than Palestinians, because of the German propensity to treat Israelis as if they were the only Jewish victims of German aggression in World War II. Of course this is problematic. After all, the Jews in Israel are not by any means always the descendants of Holocaust victims or survivors. Furthermore, Israelis are not only Jewish, but also Christian and Muslim. And Jews who live in other places never received the kind of attention from Germany that it has lavished on the state of Israel.

But there is a bigger problem in the inequality that the lopsided triangle revealed. What the authors learned in their interviews was that focusing on Israel obscured the Palestinian viewpoint for most of the Germans, even the progressive ones. The Israeli and Palestinian sides of this moral triangle are not equal because the Germans can only see themselves as perpetrators and Israelis as victims, making it difficult for them to sympathize with Palestinians and their liberation struggle. As the authors recount, many of the Palestinians “spoke about their frustration that it does not register for most Germans that their country’s genocide of Jewish Europeans played a fundamental role in causing Palestinians’ displacement from Palestine.”

The good news the book brings is that progressive Israelis are trying to change the story and are working for equal rights for Palestinians in Berlin. They are playing a crucial role in reshaping the triangle, and the authors believe Germans can begin to recognize how the Holocaust changed the world for both groups.

I found the stories the authors elicited quite moving and, as I noted, I found myself fascinated by the authors themselves, what they experienced doing this work, and the conclusions they drew from it. In chapter 11, we learn that Sa’ed planned to give a lecture in Berlin about being queer and Palestinian in East Jerusalem. But his lecture had to be moved from Berlin’s Jewish Museum because of pressure put on the institution by German officials and representatives of the Jewish community. They did not want a Palestinian to lecture in a Jewish space, no matter what the topic. Katy’s distress over Sa’ed being censored in a Jewish space resonated for me. I witnessed Sa’ed go through a similar experience in Philadelphia. Here, ironically, Sa’ed was disinvited from a Quaker space, although also as a result of Jewish communal pressure. Perhaps this is the most depressing of all: that a person who seeks peace and pursues it with passion, and who is open to conversations with anyone who will listen respectfully, should not be heard. It reminds us that we have a long way to go in our efforts toward mutual understanding.

But in the book’s conclusion, the authors give us hope. They bring a powerful message that, at least in Berlin, the work of reconfiguring this moral triangle is beginning. After all their conversations and research, the authors make the recommendation that projects of restorative justice like the one Germany has pursued in its response to the Holocaust can be a model for how things could get better. Restorative justice is not animated by guilt as motive for repair, but by acknowledging that justice is the goal. But to get there requires recognition of moral wounds.

Ultimately this book persuaded me that what is happening in Berlin in the realm of rethinking the concepts of moral responsibility is special, and I should, at the least, reconsider my aversion to going there and seeing it firsthand.

Rebecca Alpert is a Professor of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Searching for Reconciliation in Berlin appeared first on The Revealer.

Father Robert Rutledge leads a Saturday evening mass at Church of the Holy Infant on August 1, 2020 in Durham, North Carolina. (Photo: Pete Kiehart)

With every verse and refrain, Bryan Dougan’s voice becomes more urgent. “We are so weary of this coronavirus and so hungry for the physical community of Holy Family. Feed our desperate hungers with your divine mercy and grace. Bread of the world, hear our prayer.” Despite the intention in his timbre, his prayers echo hollowly in the cavernous nave; its pews sit empty. A member of Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Dougan is one of the congregants who helps create Sunday’s weekly video service, a necessity of the pandemic given the dangers of mass gatherings.

“We’re basically producing a TV show,” observes Reverend Clarke French, who says the process has been the steepest learning curve of his twenty years in the clergy. “I had to learn five new software platforms since the pandemic started.”

Associate Pastor Sarah Ball-Damberg, assisted by Pastor Clarke French, left, prepares to record a portion of the following Sunday’s service at Church of the Holy Family on July 29, 2020 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Photo: Pete Kiehart)

Although the services, which Reverend French uploads to YouTube, become available every Saturday night, he encourages his congregation to maintain their habits by watching them on Sunday mornings. The efforts are crucial, he says, to stem the post-pandemic crash in attendance that he and his colleagues at other churches fear. “We’re all expecting to come back a quarter smaller,” he sighs. “We’re all reluctant televangelists.”

***

North Carolina boasts the third-highest number of Christian congregations in the United States, according to the U.S. Religion Census. Only Texas and California, both of which dwarf North Carolina in population and geographic area, have more churches. With a deep influence on the state’s culture, urban ministries punctuate North Carolina’s cities, and chapels of every size appear on country roads, themselves often named after churches.

A sign displays a message related to the pandemic in front of Redemption Road Baptist Church on August 28, 2020 in Reidsville, North Carolina. (Photo: Pete Kiehart)

In March, two days after the state reported its first COVID-19 death, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper issued an executive stay-at-home order that banned gatherings of more than ten people — essentially outlawing in-person religious services. A May order that moved the state to ‘Phase One’ of the reopening process relaxed general restrictions by allowing retail stores to resume business at 50% capacity, but permitted religious institutions to exceed the ten-person gathering limit only if their services were held outdoors. That decision provoked a lawsuit from a coalition of religious conservatives who argued that churches were being unfairly targeted, an infringement on the First Amendment protection of the free exercise of religion.

“If a 16-year-old gives out a hamburger at McDonald’s and is qualified to give me a Happy Meal, then a pastor can certainly have the wisdom and direction to give out the Lord’s Supper in [a] safe manner,” an Asheboro priest told the Associated Press.

Reverend Ron Baity, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, saw the situation in more dire terms: “Freedoms crushed eventually become no freedoms at all.”

Other congregations took the opposite view. “Many of us serve people who are vulnerable every day,” noted the pastor of Durham’s predominantly Black Mount Vernon Baptist Church, Jerome J. Washington, at a May press conference. “They’re vulnerable socioeconomically. They’re vulnerable with regard to the justice system. They’re vulnerable with regard to healthcare.” Washington found the state’s order somewhat superfluous. “Worship has never been confined to a building,” he continued. “As a matter of fact, we did not need the governor to tell us ‘close our churches.’ Our love for our people told us to close our churches. We are shepherds . . . So it’s our responsibility to keep our sheep safe.”

Pastor Ricky Hooker leads a Wednesday evening bible study at Parrish Chapel Church on July 15, 2020 in Graham, United States. (Pete Kiehart)

A federal judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. The Governor declined to appeal the ruling, but continued to argue in a statement from a spokesperson that churches posed a unique danger, writing, “We don’t want indoor meetings to become hotspots for the virus and our health experts continue to warn that large groups sitting together inside for long periods of time are much more likely to cause the spread of COVID-19. While our office disagrees with the decision, we will not appeal, but instead urge houses of worship and their leaders to voluntarily follow public health guidance to keep their members safe.”

This warning has not been universally heeded; in October, a Charlotte-area church held a week-long convocation that hosted up to 1,000 people with few precautions or requirements for participants to wear masks. So far, public health officials have identified at least 213 cases and 12 deaths from the event, and they continue to make efforts to reach nearly 300 close contacts of the infected.

***

Despite the defiance exhibited by some churches, other congregations have found creative solutions to continue their worship, as well as silver linings amidst the worst global health crisis in a century. Tiny Calvander Church, which met at an elementary school prior to the pandemic, began holding services in a parking lot on a corner of the pastor’s farm, where goats sometimes outnumber congregants.

Pastor Kelly Blackwood leads a Sunday morning service at Calvander Church’s temporary location on a corner of the pastor’s farm on July on 12, 2020 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Photo: Pete Kiehart)

Mayling Blackwood, wife of pastor Kelly Blackwood, and their daughter, Ruby, 9, take part in a Sunday morning service at Calvander Church’s temporary location on a corner of the pastor’s farm on July on 12, 2020 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Curious goats, like the one at right, often wander into the service. (Photo: Pete Kiehart)

Further into the countryside is Antioch Baptist Church, which has existed on White Cross Road since 1830. The current incarnation, a stately brick building that dates to 1974, features a colonnade and delicate stained-glass windows. Despite the hardships imposed by the virus on the church’s aging congregation, the crisis has not been without an upside. Antioch has seen a spurt of modernization — to accommodate its livestream, produced from an audiovisual suite in the choir loft, they’ve upgraded their internet and purchased a new camera. “Kinda like the Russians gettin’ Sputnik up — got the United States to get a man on the moon,” quips church member Dallas Myatt.

Parishioners gather for a Sunday morning service by Pastor David Atwater at Antioch Baptist Church on August 2, 2020 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Photo: Pete Kiehart)

In nearby Durham, congregants at Holy Infant Catholic Church sign up for services via an online registration system with a strict cap on attendance. Tape has been used to close every other pew and form arrows on the floor, creating a labyrinthine traffic flow for the faithful. A “health ministry” has been established to coordinate taking temperatures and quizzing congregants about recent symptoms. Elizabeth Fixler, a Holy Infant attendee, calls the need for church services “paramount” during this time. “Being close, being a part of worship — all the emptiness of not being with people, all that is brought together and is so deeply affirmed by going to mass and receiving the sacrament.” Communion is given by Pastor Robert Rutledge, who carefully sanitizes his hands before beginning the ceremony and, upon accidentally brushing hands with a church member, pauses to painstakingly repeat the process. As the mass comes to a close, the attendees read from a typed sheet entitled “COVID-19: A Prayer of Solidarity”:

For all who have contracted coronavirus,
we pray for care and healing

For those who are particularly vulnerable,
we pray for safety and protection.

For all who experience fear or anxiety,
we pray for peace of mind and spirit.

For affected families who are facing difficult decisions
between food on the table or public safety,
we pray for policies that recognize their plight.

For those who do not have adequate health insurance,
we pray that no family will face financial burdens alone.

Parishioners receive communion during a Saturday evening mass by Father Robert Rutledge at Church of the Holy Infant on August 1, 2020 in Durham, North Carolina. (Photo: Pete Kiehart)

Elizabeth Fixler prays during a Saturday evening Catholic Mass at Church of the Holy Infant on August 1, 2020 in Durham, North Carolina. (Photo: Pete Kiehart)

Over a hundred years ago, as the world grappled with not only a World War, but with an influenza pandemic, pastors used the technology of their times to communicate with congregants after their churches were closed. A letter from the clergy at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, printed alongside others from a diverse group of spiritual leaders in the October 13, 1918, edition of the Los Angeles Times, suggested an appropriate prayer: “I pray that God, who is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble may be with you, and keep you from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence.”

The same clergy struck a hopeful chord while referencing the city-mandated closures: “While this drastic order will impede the progress of our work, it need not interfere with the spiritual life of the church.”

Pete Kiehart is a freelance photojournalist normally based in Paris, but presently covering current events, namely the pandemic and election, in his home state of North Carolina. More of his work, including projects on topics as disparate as international sports and the European refugee crisis, can be seen at www.petekiehart.com.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Reluctant Televangelists: Worship in the Bible Belt during the Pandemic appeared first on The Revealer.

Every morning, Monday through Friday, they serve a hot meal to nearly 200 people on their quiet East Village block. A new COVID-friendly outdoor soup line has replaced the indoor meal they once served in the cozy first floor common space. The Workers meet the guests with smiles behind their masks.

But above the masks, their eyes are tired. Today, a long-time member of St. Joseph’s house, Carmen Trotta, 58, faces sentencing in federal court for conspiracy, destruction of government property, and trespass.

Fifteen minutes before the hearing is set to begin, James Murphy, 48, who moved to East First Street in January, begins to configure a mismatched array of technology so the Workers can broadcast Trotta’s sentencing. The trial will stream virtually from the court of the Southern District of Georgia. Murphy and Philip Basile, 39, try three different speakers before the sound is deemed sufficient. Even then, it’s choppy, punctuated by an undercurrent of static, and demands every ounce of concentration to hear. The voice of the prosecutor, Karl Knoche, rises above the static. Knoche describes Carmen Trotta as a criminal conspirator, noting his “pattern of behavior of trespass and disregard for the law.”

Trotta’s response exemplifies the Catholic Worker’s credo of civil disobedience: “Every one of my actions has been a reaction to an American war crime.”

Kings Bay Plowshares 7

Trotta is a member of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, a group of anti-nuclear peace activists who broke into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Southeast Georgia on April 4, 2018, to protest the Trident nuclear weapons that are kept on the base. Each Trident missile head is 30 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The seven Plowshares members spray-painted “Love One Another” and “Abolish Nukes Now” on the base’s grounds and poured blood on a medallion marking the base as a site holding Trident weapons.

Edward “Bud” Courtney—at 70, the oldest volunteer at St. Joseph House—speaks before the court to testify to the character of the man who introduced him to the house they have shared for the past 13 years.

When asked his profession, Courtney responds simply: “I wash dishes.”

The Workers gathered around the stereo chuckle in response. The warm beige walls of St. Joseph House’s kitchen usually hum with good-hearted ribbing, earnest discussion, and loud knocks on the door. But today, even the hum of the refrigerator is an intrusion in the breathless focus of listening to the static transmission. Over the next three hours, technical glitches in the stream became cues for smoke breaks on the back patio among the bicycles, milk crates of fruit, and the gray November drizzle.

Murphy and Basile closed the doors and windows to muffle the East Village’s ricocheting street noise. But throughout the sentencing, a steady stream of people in need knock on the door. Someone always answers. Calls for sandwiches or soup, socks or blankets, or the prized cup of coffee are the daily symphony of Worker life.

Although only one member of their community was facing a prison sentence, the rest of the Workers – and their lives of solidarity and protest – were on trial with Trotta. Annie Moran, 22, St. Joseph House’s youngest member, was surprised that in a court of law so much of the proceeding was focused on the application of rules and so little was focused on justice itself.

What is true justice? is the question the Catholic Worker poses to whomever they encounter, in courts of law and on street corners alike. And, as the results of the 2020 election reveal, the question of what a truly just society looks like is a hotly debated question among Catholics themselves.

The Catholic Vote
For most Catholics, as for most Americans, the question of political action begins with the question: for whom do you vote?

The “Catholic vote” is a phrase ragged from overuse in recent news cycles. In the past two months, Attorney General William Barr, a Catholic, received an award from Catholic leaders for his “advancing the teachings of the Catholic Church” through “exemplary, selfless and steadfast” public service even as he reinitiated federal executions, in opposition to Catholic teaching. One week before Election Day, Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice. In each instance, pundits speculated on how Catholics would respond at the polls. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s and President-elect Joe Biden’s campaigns persistently wooed Catholic voters.

The “Catholic vote” comprises 22% of the electorate and is the largest single-denomination voting bloc in the country. It has consistently backed the presidential winner from 1972 until 2020, according to the Associated Press.

The 2020 election was an exception, with 50% of Catholics backing Trump and 49% voting for Biden, according to AP Votecast. The hairline margins indicate a sharp fault line in the American Catholic Church.

Those disparities grow stronger along racial and ethnic lines. 57% of white Catholics voted for Trump, while only 31% of Latino Catholics did. Trump lost his grip on the white Catholic vote by 7 percentage points — he captured it by 64% in 2016. But that’s even less than the number of Latino Catholics who voted for Biden this year — 67% of them.

After overwhelmingly supporting John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Catholic president, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, the Catholic contingent has swung between Democrat and Republican candidates. But it usually backs the winning candidate. “This is unusual, as most other religious groups vote for the same party over and over,” said Mark M. Gray of Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate via email.

Of the Catholic vote, William Cavanaugh, professor of political theology at DePaul University said, “There isn’t such a thing anymore.”

Catholic voters have ceased to be a unified bloc. Cavanaugh attributes this split to the fact that neither major political party fully represents Catholic social teachings. He pointed out that the Democratic party supports women’s access to abortion, which is a grave sin according to Catholic Social Teaching. But on the other hand, he said, the Republican party’s policies violate the Biblical mandate to care for the poor. “Republicans aren’t in favor of cutting military budgets,” Cavanaugh said in a phone call, “just cutting budgets that feed poor people.”

In the wake of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the debate over legalized abortion has defined many Catholics’ voting practices. But what muddies the waters, Cavanaugh said, “is the unclear relationship between voting and moral evil.” Namely, does voting for a pro-abortion politician contribute to the occurrence of abortions? Voting guides at parishes painstakingly parse the distinctions between material and formal cooperation with evil — that is, accidental and unintentional participation in an evil act versus the direct, intentional willing of an act. These moral discussions proceed from the premise that politicians are a more proximate cause of abortions than other systemic factors such as poverty, racism, or sexism.

“It would help,” Cavanaugh continued, “if Catholics could think of ourselves as homeless politically, and think more broadly than party politics, than electoral politics.”

For Catholics caught in partisan divisions, Cavanaugh held up Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, as a guide: “She has a challenge for both of the parties.”

A History of Challenge
Dorothy Day challenged the electoral system itself. Unlike Catholics who visited the polls last month, Day refused to vote.

Born November 8, 1897, Dorothy Day came into adulthood in New York’s Greenwich Village after dropping out of the University of Illinois in 1916. In New York City, Day kept company with a literary set, including playwright Eugene O’Neill. 

Dorothy Day

In Greenwich Village, Day became preoccupied with the issues that would comprise the mission of the Catholic Worker movement — activist journalism, advocating for the poor, and non-violent civil disobedience. In 1932, five years after becoming Catholic, Day met theologian and activist Peter Maurin. Together, they published the first edition of the Catholic Worker newspaper on May 1, 1933.

Despite being jailed in 1917 for demonstrating for the 19th Amendment, Day never exercised her right to vote. She saw no virtue in voting for the lesser of two evils. Rather, her democratic action took the form of civil disobedience.

Day was repeatedly arrested protesting New York City’s nuclear air raid drills after the Second World War. At first, the protests seemed to be nothing more than the symbolic resistance of a handful of Christian anarchists to what Day called “psychological warfare.” But, slowly, symbolic resistance led to tangible change. Day, along with her colleague Ammon Hennacy and other fellow war resisters, demonstrated consistently. Their numbers grew until they filled City Square Park with 2,000 protestors in April 1961. After that, the city abandoned mandatory drills.

Day remained a pivotal Catholic figure long after her death in 1980. In his address to U.S. Congress in 2015, Pope Francis elevated Day’s passionate activism as a model of Catholic civic engagement inspired by the Gospel. The Catholic Worker movement continues Day’s work through houses of hospitality for the disadvantaged and the sustained protest of injustice. The Catholic Worker’s aims and means, published each year in the May edition of their eponymous newspaper, quote Day’s co-founder Peter Maurin, whose goal was to build a society “where it is easier for people to be good.”

The Catholic Worker challenges political bodies to embrace nonviolence and solidarity with the poor. Actions of civil disobedience are some of the more spectacular routines of Workers’ day-to-day lives. Many of the Workers have a story of their first arrest, a sit-in, or protesting outside the White House. Unlike Trotta, however, few have been charged in federal court.

***

In his sentencing statement, Trotta said, “All of my arrests were deliberate, non-violent responses to the prompting of my conscience, which I hold to be a divine gift.” Whereas traditional Catholic election guides urge the faithful to vote with their consciences, Catholic Workers object with their consciences. Their conscientious objection challenges not just a policymaker or a law — it questions the entire system.

After an interminable three hours on November 12, 2020, Judge Lisa Wood handed down a decision, sentencing Trotta to 14 months in federal prison.

The members of St. Joseph House peeled away from the stereo, unwinding in both mourning and relief. Jim Reagan, 69, who has lived with Trotta for the last 18 years, stepped out onto the patio for a quiet moment with his cigarette. When he came back inside, Annie Moran put a hand on his shoulder in comfort.

Being Challenged
As a decentralized movement, the Catholic Worker invites interpretations of its goals that are as diverse as the people who live within its walls. Unintentional homogeneity, however, can also limit their vision. Of the seven live-in volunteers at St. Joseph House, the majority are male and predominantly white. The community they serve is largely Black.

Although individual Workers and some communities have dedicated themselves to racial justice, Annie Moran pointed out that the Worker has been a predominantly white movement since its inception. The movement’s aims and means focus more on the arms race than systemic racism.

Moran, whose shaved head gives her an uncanny resemblance to Joan of Arc, spent a summer at Maryhouse three years ago and returned to live at St. Joseph’s after graduating from college this spring. She accepts the age gap between her and the majority of her community members with equanimity. “Here,” Moran says with a laugh, “the kids are like anyone under fifty.”

Moran and James Murphy — a fellow “kid” by Moran’s terms — expressed the tension that exists in the Worker between hospitality and resistance. “It’s a good tension,” Murphy said. But the work of protest and political resistance, he pointed out, always begins with hospitality. As Bud Courtney put it, resistance is fueled by care for each other — by washing dishes, by welcoming neighbors, by offering food and clothing to the community.

Their hospitality and resistance are both fueled by prayer. Morning soup lines begin with benedictions. Important memorials—like Day’s 123^rd birthday on November 8—are marked with Mass. Each Sunday, St. Joseph House hosts compline—the nightly ritual from the ancient prayer cycle of monastic communities. “People wouldn’t expect such a traditional thing to happen here. We’re always held up as protestors and going to jail,” said James Murphy. But there is plenty of piety at the Catholic Worker—just for God, not the state. “This sounds like I’m so freaking pious,” said Jim Reagan, shaking his head, “but if there is a God, then it’s gotta be the most important thing in your life. How anything else could possibly be more important doesn’t make sense to me.”

Each week since the spring of 2017, the Catholic Workers have been holding a vigil in Tompkins Square Park to protest the U.S.-backed Saudi attacks on Yemen. They have intentionally chosen to call it a vigil, to center the place of prayer in their protest. One Saturday, a woman walking by shook her head at the placards they held. “Stop killing Yemenis?” she scoffed, “How about stop killing Black people?”

Her question articulated the tension Murphy felt between protesting injustice on a macro level and grassroots action—hospitality—on a local level. “You walk to that Yemen vigil and there are tons of homeless people in Tompkins Square Park,” said Murphy.

Reagan acknowledged the reality of this tension, but pointed out the seamless connection he saw between international injustice and domestic oppression. “If there’s so much government money being spent on war, there’s no money for housing,” he said.

Symbolic actions, like protesting the largest humanitarian crisis in the world according to UNICEF, or graffitiing a nuclear base, might seem useless to those in immediate need. But Day’s persistent resistance to nuclear air raid drills eventually led to their abolishment.

At the Yemen vigil the Saturday after his sentencing, Carmen Trotta held two large banners. One called “for a nuclear-weapon-free world,” the other declared, “Stop US Saudi war crimes in Yemen.” A pedestrian paused to consider the signs. He asked Trotta what would change under Biden. “Not much,” Trotta responded. “The underlying logic of American imperialism won’t change.” The man paused to consider the answer and then thanked Trotta before continuing past.

“We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world,” wrote Day in the June 1946 edition of the Catholic Worker. Resistance may not reap tangible fruit right away. But in the face of rampant injustice —housing shortages, compulsory drafts, and acts of war — Day found the Gospel provided a roadmap for resistance. “There is nothing we can do but love.”

Power of Community
With the election of John F. Kennedy, American Catholics began assimilating more easily into the halls of political power, according to Professor William Cavanaugh. But, in order to gain acceptance, Kennedy had to assure the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment that his Catholicism would not influence his governance. “To enter the mainstream, Catholics had to give up what makes the Gospel distinctive,” Cavanaugh concluded.

“Catholics have grown to care more about power than faithfulness to the Gospel,” said Cavanaugh. Trump’s campaign rhetoric repeatedly appealed to Catholic’s desire for cultural power. “Our nation is strong because of Catholics,” the president insisted.

But Dorothy Day called—and continues to call—her fellow Catholics to resist the empty strength of Americans’ political leaders and instead to create community. A Catholic wondering what political action based on the Gospel looks like—that eschews systems of power—might pay a visit to St. Joseph House.

In soup-splattered shirts reading “Disarm” or “Capitalism Breeds Poverty,” fueled by the continual divestment of their own power and resisting their own privilege, the volunteers are united by a commitment to dedicate their money — what little they have of it — to the causes listed in their newspapers and signs, and to use their lives to serve their neighbors.

“Where else can you be around reality like this?” asked James Murphy, his voice tinged with exhaustion and awe. “This place is alive.”

Renée Darline Roden is a graduate student in journalism and religion at Columbia University.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Catholic Politics Beyond the Catholic Vote appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers

As of today, more than 280,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. 280,000.

280,000.
280,000.
280,000.

When will we speak of the trauma? When will we acknowledge the loss? When will we help the thousands of grieving families? When will we make reparations for a White House that told people not to worry or to wear masks? When will release our anger and scream at elected officials who did nothing or silenced scientists? When will we reckon with the disproportionate toll this has taken on people of color? When will we adequately support the medical professionals who tried to prevent these deaths from happening month after agonizing month? When we will mourn this national nightmare?

280,000 Americans dead.
280,000 people with friends and families and stories and dreams.
280,000 lives lost.
The number will increase soon after we publish this letter.

As we reflect on these deaths, I imagine many of us feel a mix of sorrow, exhaustion, and maybe even some hope. Hope that 2021 will be a better year with far fewer deaths. Hope that we will have a vaccine that will be distributed fairly. Hope that our new President and Vice President will make good on their commitments for racial equality. Hope that we will confront this painful period honestly and with a national commitment for justice. Hope that there will be accountability for the staggering government negligence. 280,000 dead. 280,000 people gone. 280,000 lives that are no longer with us.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

With these reflections in mind, this issue of the Revealer considers themes of confronting social inequalities, restoring justice, and practicing religion during the pandemic. The December issue opens with Renée Roden’s “Catholic Politics Beyond the Catholic Vote,” where she explores The Catholic Worker, an organization dedicated to advocating for impoverished Americans and to protesting government violence. Next, in the photo essay, “Reluctant Televangelists: Bible Belt Worship During the Pandemic” Pete Kiehart illuminates how churches in North Carolina have transformed because of COVID-19 to meet their congregants’ religious needs. In “Searching for Reconciliation in Berlin,” Rebecca Alpert reviews the book The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians and considers what it can teach us about possibilities for restorative justice. And in “Rethinking Religious Violence” Kali Handelman interviews Darryl Li about his new book The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity and why we need to re-consider longstanding cultural assumptions about religious, especially Islamic, violence.

Our December issue also features some more upbeat pieces. In “‘The Christmas Crafts are Just Out of Control’: Pomegranate Guild as Jewish Space” Jodi Eichler-Levine offers an excerpt from her book Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis, where she describes how Jewish women throughout the country, especially in areas with small numbers of Jews, have used crafting as a way to create community against the backdrop of the cultural obsession with Christmas. And in our “Winter Reading Recommendations,” our editorial staff suggests books written by recent Revealer writers that we think you will enjoy.

The December issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Crafting Jewish Identity.” Jodi Eichler-Levine joins us to discuss why focusing on crafting can illuminate much about American Judaism, how it can transform stereotypes of Jewish women, and how it sheds insight on contemporary Jewish participation in social justice movements. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As we close out this year and hope for a better 2021, let us not forget or ignore the horrors of 2020, which include not only the vast number of COVID-19 deaths, but also unrelenting state violence against Black Americans, mass unemployment, and a disturbing number of hate crimes throughout the country. We cannot move forward or reconcile as a nation until we deal with the disturbing facts of this year. We must share our anger and our sadness. We must support those who lost loved ones. We must hold government officials accountable. 280,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19. A disproportionate number of the dead are people of color. 280,000 lives are gone. 280,000.

280,000.

280,000.

The number will increase soon after we publish this letter.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Confronting the COVID-19 Death Toll appeared first on The Revealer.