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What’s the Matter With Jewish Studies? Sexism, Harassment, and Neoliberalism For Starters

By Gilah Kletenik and Rafael Rachel Neis

…Rather than studying how people live Jewish lives, the emphasis is on the numbers of bodies that “count” as Jewish. More disturbing still are the legacies of scientific racism evident in the language of “intermarriage,” “in-marriage,” and “out-marriage.” We suspect that such constructs may unintentionally amplify intra-Jewish prejudice and discrimination towards non-Ashkenazi and non-white Jews. This shapes an academic field in which people of ce…

What Passover Taught Me About Being Black

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…the urban centers of America, favelas of Brazil, shanties of Jamaica, and reservations of the American West. For years, I would anticipate the arrival of spring and Passover season. Meticulously cleaning my house of leaven as I awaited this celebration of freedom. Now when I watched The Ten Commandments I was once again rooting for Moses (albeit a white one) and the Hebrews as they dueled with Ramses and the Egyptians. But then something unexpect…

When the ‘Biblical View’ for Evangelicals Was That Life Begins at Birth

By Jonathan Dudley

…the founders of the evangelical Right to neutralize previous, Bible-based reservations about Catholic pro-life activism. By 1980, Jerry Falwell was off to the races. “The Bible clearly states that life begins at conception,” he declared in his book Listen America! Abortion “is murder according to the Word of God.” Falwell’s major reference for this claim was Psalm 139:13, where the author writes that God “knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Mo…

Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

By Sarah Posner

…inence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.” Based on the “explanatory memorandum” document identifying a number of American Muslim organizations as allies in its author’s aspirations, prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation trial publicly labeled over 200 American Muslim organizations “unindicted co-conspirators,” a highly controversial move derided at the time by legal experts as…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…rganized religion (religio = binding) in their lives. Protestantism spawns free thought and free radicals (some of them toxic) the way a prism breaks light into uncountable and unclassifiable hues. So while it is definitely not fair to count the great unchurched free radicals of the 19th and 20th centuries as official Protestants, there is no doubt at all that, unofficially, that is just what many were: not just the towering Lincoln but also such…

The Fire This Time

By Anthea Butler

…holarship done this summer. Meanwhile, I try to hold it together to write a 800-word piece without crying and wanting to tear my hair out about the pain of my people. I’m not writing prophetic words to you anymore. You fix this shit. I’m done carrying the cross of America, its false promises of democracy and inclusion, the documents that excluded me and called my ancestors three-fifths of a person. You figure it out. I’m about comforting Black peo…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…

Something So Broken: What’s Frightening About Beasts of the Southern Wild

By Michael Pasquier

…cinates me about Louisiana. There’s just some sort of internal or external freedom that exists there that I don’t feel anywhere else in America… There’s some kind of enlightenment that exists in Louisiana. There’s a fearlessness in the culture down there that has everything to do with how close to death it is. If we take Zeitlin at his word—that Louisiana is some kind of grim pleasure garden of freedom and frivolity that perspires enlightenment, v…

Are School Districts Getting the Message on Government-Sponsored Prayer?

By Lauri Lebo

…rt of the program. In the Chattanooga suburb of Hamilton County, the Times Free Press reports: After receiving a letter of complaint from the Freedom from Religion Foundation this week on behalf of students from Soddy-Daisy High School, Scales sent an e-mail to all local principals on Tuesday, saying the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled prayer before football games and graduation ceremonies to be unconstitutional and that the practices should be stopp…