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How Thanksgiving Became All Dinner, No Worship

By Bruce David Forbes

…eekend, some filled the time with recreational sports of many kinds. After American football developed in the late 1800s, high schools and colleges found Thanksgiving Day and weekend to be an ideal time for conference championship games. Later, professional football took over Thanksgiving Day with a televised Detroit Lions game, adding a Dallas Cowboy game in 1970 and now a third game in the evenings. Rowdy crowds of drunken Thanksgiving revelers…

Toni Morrison, Prophet of America’s Demons (1931-2019)

By Ed Simon

…our names in favor of the saccharine sweet myths of American greatness and American goodness and American sinlessness. Sometimes Morrison is simply categorized as an “African-American writer”—and she was that of course. But in addition to being a black writer, Morrison was an author of blackness. An author of whiteness too. Her 1992 book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, is one of the most astute literary critical readi…

Thanksgiving Reveals More About Us Than About 17th Century Events

By Ed Simon

…c story of America’s foundation. The conservative reads a tale about Anglo-American Protestant hegemony and the opening up of North American resources. But the radical, perhaps even the mystical interpreter, reads a more allegorically profound story about America as “Mother of Exiles,” a universal space that encompases all ethnicities, cultures, and religions precisely because of its universality. *** When Welcoming the Stranger Was Not Just a Rel…

Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

By Katy E. Shrout

…utside of the U.S., particularly in the Middle East and Latin America, the American soap just isn’t what it used to be. In 1970, when American women were more likely to be at home during the day, there were fifteen daytime soaps on the air, with new shows continuing to debut every year. Forty years later, only seven soaps remain, all of them aging. (The newest of these is more than twenty years old.) More alarmingly for fans, timeworn favorites ar…

Revisiting Philip Roth’s 2004 Novel that Predicted the Trump Election

By Michael Schulson

…hat huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world. Roth-the-author assumes that American fascism would only partly resemble its European sibling. Instead of demonizing its chosen Other, the Lindbergh government diagnoses Jews as imperfectly assimilated. Then it sets out to fix the problem. The program to help…

Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuse for Perpetrators—or for Provocateurs

By Haroon Moghul

…n Benghazi and knew Christopher Stevens, promptly issued an apology to the American people. We should thus consider how local forces might use anti-American sentiment strategically, and understand the difference between anti-American sentiment and the ends towards which it is put. So far, these attacks seem to be outbursts of anger, and not directed acts of political intrigue. Second, it is depressing how easily anti-Muslim sentiment can trigger v…

Electionpocalypse, Part II: The Mythical Jewish Vote

By Sarah Posner

…rly, all Israelis—view Obama as an almost villainous character. “No Jewish American,” the American-born writer Barry Rubin says in the video, “should vote for Obama on the belief that he’s a great friend of Israel.” You should think about, the narrator tells you, “whether Obama will really have Israel’s back when the chips are down.” Mark Zell, co-chair of Republicans Abroad-Israel, recently told reporter Roee Ruttenberg, “in the United States, th…

Mitt Romney and the Ghost of Anti-Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…ing Smoot’s era is now a tradition maintained by a very small slice of the American population. The Republican primaries gave that small slice a megaphone: the artificial loudness of their voice makes people overestimate their number. That said, it will be interesting to see what happens now in the general election when you may begin to hear from another voice that is anxious not so much about Mormonism per se but about any candidate that is too r…

In ‘The Evangelical Mission to Spread The Gospel to Muslims’ a Journalist Tells a Global Story About Evangelical Missionaries and the Spread of Right-Wing Ideology

By Daniel Schultz

…to prepare Latin America for exactly that moment. We could no longer send Americans, so let’s send Latin Americans. I want to send us out with some focus here on rising Christian nationalism, both in the US and in Brazil. Given that context, what do you think American readers need to know about this missionary movement? There is this well-financed wave of pastors and missionaries with a very right-wing neo-evangelical perspective, who have starte…

Kindred Hatemongers: Why American Islamophobes and Muslim Protesters Need Each Other

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…to more firmly reject the protestors. In the meantime, while the Muslim world burned over a hateful video, its producer, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was safely in hiding somewhere in Southern California. While many leaders on the political right were quick to blame Libya and Egypt for not protecting American interests, few bothered to criticize the hatemonger, Nakoula, who had created the mess in the first place. But without him the anti-American an…