Religion Dispatches
…r for the benefit of House staffers, and spoke to a room of about 50 people. It surely is a deeply troubling development that King is cavorting with Gaffney and pontificating about the “Americanism” of American Muslims, in light of Gaffney’s agitation about fifth columns of shari’ah proponents bent on undermining the Constitution….
Read More
…roverbial Promised Land and the subsequent racist backlash has attracted a new generation of African Americans seeking answers. Why after the historic election of the nation’s first African American president has an avalanche of racist violence been unleashed? It is here that Hebrew Israelite groups like IUIC offer a ready-made answer: Deuteronomy 28, a chapter that outlines a set of curses that will befall the Israelites if they disobey the comma…
Read More
…was close to negotiating a cease-fire with Hamas. The Israeli government knew it, but assassinated its leader Ahmed Jabari anyway: Baskin told Haaretz on Thursday that senior officials in Israel knew about his contacts with Hamas and Egyptian intelligence aimed at formulating the permanent truce, but nevertheless approved the assassination. “I think that they have made a strategic mistake,” Baskin said, an error “which will cost the lives of quit…
Read More
…it misunderstands both the diversity of religious practice in contemporary American culture and the changing meaning of “practice” itself. Of course, we know that the pluralistic or even syncretistic, DIY nature of American religiosity allows for a range of practices that we could not reasonably expect researchers to either exhaustively catalogue or effectively measure. But there is significant data that invites at least an expansion of the catego…
Read More…n important route into Islam at the end of the 20th century for more white Americans. African Americans came to Islam at the beginning of the 20th century, for various reasons. African Americans are minorities within the American Sufi communities. These communities are mostly populated by white Americans and the should-be-hyphenated-Muslim immigrants and their descendants. I don’t consider Sufism about race politics. In addition, generally these c…
Read More
…rican,” one that pitted the American creed of freedom and equality against American reality. An American Dilemma was an anti-racist opus; it was cited in the Brown v. the Board of Education decision; one of Myrdal’s collaborators on the project was Ralph Bunche, who later worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. Maafa 21 quotes descriptions of the mindsets of white racists in a way that implies that they’re Myrdal’s…
Read More
…as such, but they show how Judaism is both normative and normatized in the American context. The American Jewish Committee did not have to sponsor them. Even the more recent ”The Original Kings of Comedy,” and “The Original Latin Kings of Comedy,” did not have institutional support of the type Allah Made Me Funny received. Again, I think it was necessary, but where do we go from here? How long can we have institutions propping up our cultural grow…
Read More…sh’s appearance. But he also argued that the recent landmark Pew survey of American Jews “suggests that the real problem the American Jewish community faces is the voluntary departure of Jews from Judaism. As Jonathan Tobin recently wrote in Commentary, the key takeaway from the Pew study is the degree to which American Jews are choosing not to live as Jews. The departure of Jews from Judaism via forced conversion pales before the voluntary abando…
Read More
…vid Myers and Naomi Stolzenberg write in their upcoming book, Teitelbaum’s American fantasy; an American shtetl. In the street protests and general political activism in present day Hasidism we may be witnessing yet another iteration of Hasidism’s developing Americanism. While Hasidim have always supported political candidates and voted in relatively high numbers, most of the advocacy was primarily transactional; they supported candidates they tho…
Read More
…oceeds, we realize this is no ordinary car ride, but one involving a shiny new Chrysler (the new Chrysler 200, as it turns out) driven by Eminem, a Detroit native. As the car moves deeper and deeper into the city, a hum that seems to emerge from the sounds of the city itself begins to cohere into a discernible soundtrack: first a pulsating rhythm, then a driving guitar riff, and ultimately a chorus of voices vocalizing around the instrumentation o…
Read More