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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Contemporary Christian Music’s Political and Religious Messages.”

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(Image source: Alamy Stock Images)

The following excerpt comes from God Gave Rock and Roll to You by Leah Payne. (Copyright © 2024 by Leah Payne and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.) The book explores the history of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and what that industry reveals about white evangelical culture in the United States.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction, “CCM and the Industry of American Evangelicalism.”

***

Fourteen-year-old David Shields was nervous. Really nervous. It was 2005, and his death- metal band Skull Crushers was about to play a big show in Lexington, Nebraska. The Skull Crushers may not sound like an unusual name for a death- metal band, and perhaps it is not. But what made it somewhat un­usual was that it was inspired by a passage in the Bible: Romans 16:20 — “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” Skull Crushers aimed to crush the heck out of the Devil that night. Their tools were biblically based lyrics screamed over distorted guitars. The band, booked by David’s cool, skater youth pastor, played in the youth building of a Southern Baptist Church pastored by David’s dad. “We were absolutely horrible,” David recalled years later, but the small crowd of teenaged evangelicals cheered for more.

Southern Baptist churches of the 2000s were not widely known for being death-metal taste makers, but David and his bandmates did not see their work as metal, per se. Through the power of music, they were spreading the gospel. In a performance that was part rock concert, part religious revival, the Skull Crushers aimed to entertain and to bring the audience to Christ. “Our yelling unintelligible lyrics was suddenly holy work,” he remembered, “because the lyrics were ‘Christian.’”

David and the Skull Crushers were not unique. They were among thousands of bands and artists who, in the second half of the twentieth cen­tury, performed on sanctuary stages, in youth rooms and church basements, and at music festivals, denominational meetings, colleges, coffee shops, and camps around the nation. These performers — along with record- company executives, publicists, booking agents, radio DJs, journalists, and many more — were part of the thriving industry of Contemporary Christian Music, commonly called CCM. CCM encompassed many genres and often sounded like mainstream music, but what made it distinctive is that it was created by and for, and sold almost exclusively to, white evangelicals. Consumed by millions, CCM was the soundtrack of evangelical conversions, worship, ad­olescence, marriage, child-rearing, and activism. Few church services, youth all-nighters, sporting events, holiday gatherings, or political protests were complete without CCM accompaniment.

By the time the Skull Crushers took the stage, CCM was in a precarious po­sition. Once an almost billion-dollar industry with culture-shaping power, by the early aughts the genre was in decline. This book analyzes Contemporary Christian Music as an industry born from early twentieth-century Southern white revivalist hymn- singing networks, stoked by 1960s and 1970s baby- boomer converts on the West Coast, and fueled in the late twentieth century by a vast network of evangelical media makers and marketers, booksellers, denominations, congregations, parachurch organizations, educational institutions, lobbying organizations, and advocacy groups. As Contemporary Christian Music grew, enterprising conservative white Protestants recog­nized that songs of revival were (and are) powerful, portable vehicles for ide­ology. The following pages trace how CCM produced music that served as a sonic shorthand for white evangelical orthodoxy and social action, prized for its capacity to disseminate evangelical messages about what it means to be Christian and American.

CCM songs often reflected — and drove — evangelical conversations about pressing social and political concerns like abortion, prayer in public schools, or teen abstinence. At the turn of the twenty- first century, however, Contemporary Christian Music was undermined by many of the market forces and cultural norms that built it. Even though the industry declined precipitously in the 2000s, however, the theological visions and political ambitions of CCM’s leading music makers, and the media networks that con­nect them, continue to shape evangelicalism in the United States and abroad.

Contemporary Christian Music served adults and young children, to be sure, but the industry’s core customers were suburban, middle-class, white American adolescents. CCM marketers were certainly not alone in recog­nizing the buying power of American teens, but evangelicals became con­vinced that teens were in a particularly precarious spiritual state, which meant that CCM sales had cosmic importance. For evangelical caregivers, the teen years were a must-win battlefield in the war for the future of the Christian faith, the nation, and even the world. Mass media, they reckoned, was an ef­fective weapon to be employed in that fight, and they set out to save young souls and shape the nation through music.

It is hard to overstate the power of CCM, and its ubiquity in late twentieth-century evangelical life. As the ambient sound of white evangelicalism, it felt inescapable. It certainly was for me, growing up in the 1990s as a Pentecostal pastor’s kid in a working-class town in rural Oregon. My father had no love for CCM; he thought the quality of the music was poor, and he did not play it in my childhood home. And, as a family, we did not have the means to par­ticipate in the middle-class, suburban consumption patterns of CCM — the concerts, festivals, albums, t-shirts, and other merchandise. But many young people around me were immersed in the world of youth groups and Christian music festivals, and almost everyone I knew had either heard an Amy Grant song or performed a live-action version of a Carman hit.

In college, I was introduced to revivalist hymnody by Derric Johnson, a conductor, vocal arranger, and creator of a vocal ensemble that laid the foun­dation of what would become CCM. Derric and his spouse, vocalist Debbie Johnson, expanded my understanding of sacred music beyond the boundaries of the Pentecostal praise and worship tunes of my upbringing. He taught me to appreciate and recognize West Coast pop and jazz harmonies, along with Black Gospel and Southern Gospel standards.

After I graduated, I married an aspiring CCM artist and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 2001, when CCM was at its pinnacle in terms of prosperity and cultural influence. As a new Nashvillian, I found myself doing what a lot of my peers with humanities degrees did: working at a coffee shop. Two of my fa­vorite customers were Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth, who I knew only as fellow West Coast transplants. I discovered eventually that Charlie was an award-winning singer-songwriter, jazz artist, pianist, producer, and record-label executive, who had also written a book about CCM. Charlie ended up offering me a job as his assistant, and I worked at Charlie and Andi’s legendary Art House studio for several years.

I did not understand, as a 21-year-old barista, the scope of Charlie’s influence and work. Nor did I grasp in the early 2000s that I was bearing wit­ness to a transformative moment in the music industry in general, and CCM in particular. Eventually, I went to graduate school at Vanderbilt Divinity School, became a religious historian, and thought that my short, youthful stint in CCM was over.

As I studied American religion, however, my perspective on CCM began to change. I began to regard Contemporary Christian Music performances as more than quirky evangelical entertainment. Instead, I came to see CCM concerts as sites where power is created and negotiated. At CCM performances, entertainers exerted influence over attendees by soliciting public conversions, stoking political action, and seeking donations for social causes.

In these performances, bestselling CCM stars and their audiences also performed and enforced strict evangelical ideals about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. Women who could and would be “womanly” according to straight, white, middle-class evangelical ideals were adored. Men who could and would be “manly” according to straight, white middle-class evangelical norms were admired. Those who could not — or would not — adhere to such standards were often marginalized.

For many participants and observers, the trappings of CCM — the evangel­ical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders — are silly expressions of kitsch or an embarrassing remnant of an evangelical past. Silly things, however, can be deadly serious to devoted fans — just ask anyone who has angered online fans of Beyonce or Taylor Swift. CCM had the capacity to be both.

The question that guides my work is: What can one learn about the develop­ment of evangelicalism by looking at CCM, one of the largest, most profitable forms of mass media produced in the twentieth century? CCM charts are a representative of a conversation among (predominantly, but not exclusively white) evangelicals about what kind of people they wanted to be, what sort of world they wanted to create, what kind of actions they thought would honor God.

To listen to that conversation, I analyzed the music of twentieth- century songbooks and early recordings and radio programs, tracked the top-selling CCM through the pages of Contemporary Christian Music Magazine and the Billboard Christian music charts, and listened carefully to the top twenty-five CCM albums from the late 1970s to 2023.

As the soundtrack of white evangelical culture, Contemporary Christian Music carried, in music and merchandise, decades of musical conversations about evangelical identity and ideology. Because it was produced mostly by white evangelical men, and marketed en masse to white evangelical mothers and youth pastors for consumption by white evangelical children, it is also a large- scale, multigenerational conversation about evangelical values in the United States. Conversations about what music ought to be made, who ought to make it, and what messages it should include reveal how white evangelicals aimed to raise their children to be ideal citizens of the kingdom of God, and of the United States.

Part business, part devotional activity, part religious instruction, the trajectory of CCM also shows how the marketplace and technological innovations shaped evangelical identity and ideology. The story of CCM is the story of how white evangelicals looked to the marketplace for signs of God’s work in the world. While there were always notable dissenters, for the most part those within the industry regarded profits as a sign of God’s blessing. The top-selling artists and entertainers, then, reflected a consensus among consumers about what constituted right Christian teaching about God, the people of God, and their place in public life. Certain ideas thrived in large part because they appealed to white evangelical consumers. Other ideas faltered because they could not easily be sold.

In this way, the history of the CCM charts is a history of how consumers voiced their theological and political opinions unofficially through their buying practices. Year after year, white evangelical denominations and churches published official treatises and position papers and public statements, and all the while, the people who constituted these organizations purchased music that they came to believe represented true Christian life. CCM charts represented rank-and- ile white evangelical consensus about what sorts of people evangelicals believed could be credible messengers of the gospel. And the charts displayed what sorts of ideas about God, the world, and the people of God were bankable evangelical theologies. Sometimes these off- the- books ideas aligned with official denominational or congregational teaching; sometimes they did not. Through the market, consumers challenged — and in some cases overturned — the traditional, institutional authority of their pastors, congregations, or denominations.

Because many white evangelicals viewed CCM as a distillation of Christian orthodoxy, a purveyor of godly activism, and a form of Christian parenting, Contemporary Christian Music was (and is) a high-stakes industry. The territories of CCM were carefully guarded because the stakes are clear. For many, CCM was not primarily about entertainment or art; it was the business of salvation. The souls of all of those kids jumping up and down to the Skull Crushers in Nebraska, along with the souls of all the youth group kids in basements and church foyers around the country, were up for grabs – along with the soul of the nation itself.

Leah Payne is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Portland Seminary. She is the author of Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century and articles in the Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 44 of the Revealer podcast: “Contemporary Christian Music’s Religious and Political Messages.”

The post Music to Make People Believe: The Soundtrack of White Evangelical Culture appeared first on The Revealer.

(Scene from Jesus Christ Superstar. Image source: Austin Chronicle)

Who killed Jesus? And why? Whatever historians make of Jesus’ life and however they explain the endurance of a movement bearing his name, one thing seems clear: Jesus was killed. But that passive construction conceals a controversy that began in the first century and continues today. Two millennia after one Jewish author blamed his own people for the crucifixion of Jesus by Roman soldiers (1 Thess 2:15), the question of how best to describe the events precipitating Jesus’ death remains historically, theologically, and ethically controversial.

Two Broadway musicals-turned-Blockbuster films, Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, represent profoundly different approaches to this problem. In fact, the portraits of Jesus in these musicals reflect two conflicting explanations for Jesus’ execution, each associated with a different school of thought in twentieth-century debates over the historical Jesus. These two schools offer importantly different descriptions of Jesus’ message, his relationship with fellow Jews, and the reasons for his execution. But, as the continued popularity of these musicals illustrates, these contrasting conceptions of Jesus are not confined to the halls of the academy. Godspell and Superstar represent two distinct images of Jesus in the popular imagination.

Dramatizations of Jesus’ death are nothing new. Since antiquity, Christians have recreated scenes from the gospels, freely expanded the dialogue between Biblical characters, and otherwise acted out their sacred history. Unfortunately, these dramatizations have long contributed to Christian anti-Judaism and its racialized derivative, antisemitism. From Syriac Dialogue Poetry to Medieval Mysteries, Christian elaborations of the gospel story have long demonized the Jewish people. Dramatizations of Jesus’ death, often called Passion Plays, incited crowds of European Christians to commit acts of violence against their Jewish neighbors. Hitler himself endorsed the Oberammergau Passion Play specifically for its representation of Jews contriving Jesus’ execution.

Can the story of Jesus be told without perpetuating the same anti-Jewish sentiments that motivated millennia of violence and discrimination? Although neither Godspell nor Superstar represent a solution to this complex conundrum, the differences between their representation of the first century political situation may point us toward more responsible ways of describing Jesus’ death.

Jesus Takes the Stage

Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar are, in many ways, similar. Both musicals made their on-stage debut in 1971. Both are (mostly) sung-through, containing little dialogue that isn’t set to song. Both appeared on film in 1973. Both movies feature color-blind casting. Both were influenced by the “hippie” counter-culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. And both generated controversy for not clearly depicting Jesus’ resurrection.

Despite these similarities, however, their representations of Jesus could hardly be more different. The Jesus of Superstar is somber, easily angered, and unsure. In the song “Gethsemane,” for instance, Jesus sings,

“I have changed.
I’m not as sure, as when we started.
Then, I was inspired.
Now, I’m sad and tired.”

Jesus in Superstar is a man of sorrows, misunderstood by his closest followers and, by the end, both physically and psychologically tortured.

In contrast, the Jesus of Godspell has a smile plastered across his face for almost the entire musical. He wears literal clown makeup. Jesus is engaged in constant play, and his teachings are littered with laugh lines. For instance, Jesus’ critique of hypocrisy, “how can you take the speck of sawdust out of your brother’s eye, when all the time there’s this great plank in your own?” concludes with a slide-whistle and laughter.

However, the differences between these two portrayals of Jesus are not limited to personality traits. The musicals offer drastically different accounts of Jesus’ teachings, first-century political realities, and the motives of Jesus’ opponents. These choices in adaptation constitute to two different explanations for the execution of Jesus. And although there is plenty to criticize about the representation of Judaism in both musicals, the account of Jesus’ death in Superstar does not depend on the demonization of the Jewish people.

The Philosopher Jesus of Godspell

Godspell, written by John-Michael Tebalak and Stephen Schwartz, begins with a half-sung half-spoken number, “Tower of Babble.” The opening song (cut from the David Greene’s film adaptation) features a series of philosophers—including Socrates, Nietzsche, and Sartre—each espousing their own ideology. These philosophical soliloquies descend into chaotic babble until the Baptist’s clarion “prepare ye the way of the Lord” cuts through the noise. As such, this opening song frames Jesus as an answer to (or, perhaps, the culmination of) the history of philosophy. The Jesus of Godspell is a philosopher —a teacher of wisdom.

But what wisdom does Jesus offer? Godspell samples an array of parables and sermons from throughout the gospels. But its overarching message is clear: “Come sing about love // Come sing about love” runs the refrain of “We Beseech Thee.” The chorus responds, “Love! Love! Love! Love!” Elsewhere, Jesus paraphrases the gospels: “You have learned that they were told, ‘Love your neighbor, hate your enemy.’ But what I tell you is this… Love, love, love, love your enemies.” The stage directions, then, prescribe a “general love fest,” with the disciples jumping up and down repeating “love, love, love, love.”

(Scene from Godspell. Image source: Arts & Faith Magazine)

So too Godspell’s Jesus espouses unflagging joy. John-Michael Tebalak said that reading the gospels helped him find “what [he] wanted to portray on stage… Joy!” Early in the musical, Jesus’ clownish smile spreads to his grinning disciples and each receive some of Jesus’ face paint. In the midst of “All Good Gifts,” Jesus instructs his followers to “rejoice in hope.” Stage directions make repeated reference to the “joy” of Jesus and his followers, including the conclusion that Jesus’ disciples “leave with a joyful determination.”

Who could oppose such a teacher of love and joy? And why? In the film, Jesus’ opposition appears as a giant, robotic caricature of a rabbi. After a brief back-and-forth cribbed from the gospels, Jesus begins to sing “Alas for You.”

“Alas, alas for you,
Lawyers and pharisees
Hypocrites that you be”

According to Godspell, it is sheer hypocrisy that motivates Jewish opposition to Jesus. There is no trace of substantive disagreement or wider political context. This Jewish caricature resists Jesus and his message of love simply because it is vicious.

Following this scene, there is little evidence of Jewish opposition to Jesus until Jesus’ crucifixion. Here, the actor who plays both John the Baptist and Judas hangs Jesus from a chain-link fence in cruciform. As he’s hanging, Jesus quotes an assortment of verses, concluding with a line from the trial before the Jewish High Priest: “I sat teaching in the synagogue and you didn’t come after me then” (John 18:20). Jesus’ reference to the synagogue alongside his direct address, “you didn’t come after me,” suggest that Jesus is literally crucified by his Jewish adversaries. There is no hint of Rome’s involvement.

Elsewhere, the musical contains only one reference to the occupying Roman power. This solitary allusion to the Roman occupation of Judea is Jesus’ approval of paying taxes to Caesar. Apart from this one line, however, Jesus’ ministry takes place in a socio-political vacuum. To the extent that he comments on any social realities, Godspell’s Jesus is decidedly quietist. The song “All for the Best” depicts Jesus consoling the poor and downtrodden because “when you get to heaven you’ll be blessed.” The song acknowledges that some enjoy opulent wealth, while others struggle to get by. But, after repeating the promise of heavenly reward, the number resolves, “someone’s got to be oppressed!”

Similarly, the song “God Save the People” explicitly denies any social or political dimension to God’s promised salvation.

“When wilt thou save the people?
Oh God of mercy when?
The people, Lord, the people,
Not thrones and crowns, but men!”

Jesus’ hope for individual salvation contains nothing to threaten “thrones and crowns.” Absent from Godspell is any apocalyptic proclamation of impending judgment. There is little talk of a coming kingdom. The Jesus of Godspell is decidedly apolitical. Nothing about Godspell’s Jesus would attract Rome’s ire.

But the story needs to end in crucifixion. Tebelak’s apolitical preacher of brotherly love is persecuted, therefore, by a Jewish caricature motivated by nothing more than malice. The Jewish people even replace the Roman soldiers as directly responsible for the crucifixion. As such, Godspell—and especially its film adaptation—continues a long and lamentable Christian tradition of demonizing Jews, amplifying their role in Jesus’ death, and erasing any relevant political context.

The basic contours of Godspell’s Jesus are strikingly similar to one of the two models for understanding the historical Jesus in the late 20^th century: the Sapiential (i.e. philosopher) Jesus. Bible scholars, including John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and members of the Jesus Seminar, popularized an image of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom who, like the cynic philosophers of classical antiquity, dropped out of society to form a community based on radical kindness and generosity. The apocalyptic prophecies attributed to Jesus in the gospels, these scholars concluded, did not reflect the teaching of the historical Jesus. Instead, Jesus espoused a kingdom of loving kindness. Admittedly, the Sapiential Jesus of Crossan and Borg is more socially conscious than the portrayal in Godspell but, like Tebelak’s Jesus, he preaches compassion, communalism, and charity.

Just as the Jesus of Godspell needed a vicious caricature of Judaism to oppose his message of love and joy, so too this portrait of Jesus as a philosopher sets Jewish legalism against Jesus’ politics of compassion. On this model, Jewish law becomes a misogynistic, xenophobic, and oppressive regime to provide a foil for Jesus’ proclamation of acceptance and inclusivity. This account of Jesus’ death does not entirely erase Rome, but reimagines it as an instrument of the Jewish elite to suppress Jesus’ message of love and kindness. There are important differences, but Godspell delivers something meaningfully similar to the Sapiential Jesus of scholarly imagination.

The Apocalyptic Jesus of Jesus Christ Superstar

Jesus Christ Superstar, written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, offers a very different account of the events leading up to Jesus’ death. The opening number, “Heaven on their Minds,” already establishes a distinct setting for Jesus’ life. Judas, standing apart from the other disciples, sings a warning to Jesus.

“Listen, Jesus, do you care for your race?
Don’t you see we must keep in our place?
We are occupied; have you forgotten how put down we are?

I am frightened by the crowd.
For we are getting much too loud.
And they’ll crush us if we go too far.”

This song introduces Jesus as the source of a conflict. But this conflict is not between Jesus and his fellow Jews; it is between the Jews (including Jesus) and the occupying Roman army. “We are occupied,” says Judas, and our occupiers are liable to respond to crowds with violence. What tension exists between Judas and Jesus is motivated by the former’s care for their shared people.

Norman Jewison’s film adaptation of Superstar, then, cuts away to Roman soldiers patrolling the Judean countryside. Jesus’ disciples, hidden in a cavern beneath the soldiers’ feet, sing, “When do we ride into Jerusalem?” over and over again. A subsequent number, “Simon Zealotes,” also sung by Jesus’ disciples, removes any ambiguity about their meaning.

“Christ, what more do you need to convince you
That you’ve made it, and you’re easily as strong
As the filth from Rome who rape our country,
And who’ve terrorized our people for so long.

[…]

Keep them yelling their devotion,
But add a touch of hate at Rome.
You will rise to a greater power.
We will win ourselves a home.”

These songs make clear what Jesus’ followers expect from him: Judea’s deliverance from Roman occupation.

The musical’s third song, composed especially for the film, offers our first glimpse of Jewish leadership. Two Chief Priests, Caiaphas and Annas, deliberate over how to respond to Jesus. “He doesn’t really matter,” contends Annas. But Caiaphas disagrees: “Jesus is important” and might “start […] a major war.” Caiaphas, then, explains that Jesus is not “just another scripture thumping hack from Galilea.”

“The difference is they call him King,
The difference frightens me!
What about the Romans?
When they see King Jesus crowned,
Do you think they’ll stand around,
Cheering, and applauding?
What about our people?”

Like Judas and the other disciples, Caiaphas sees Jesus and the Roman state on a collision course. Judas, the disciples, and the Jewish leadership all act out of concern for their shared people. Superstar depicts intra-Jewish conflict along multiple axes, but the threat of Rome is its occasion.

(Scene from Jesus Christ Superstar. Image source: NPR)

How does Superstar portray Jesus himself? The musical begins in the final week of Jesus’ life, so the preaching that occupies most of Godspell occurs before the beginning of Superstar’s script. The Jesus who appears on stage/screen reacts to the aftermath of his implied preaching career but says very little of substance. Nevertheless, the three songs already discussed give us a reasonable sense of Jesus’ message. Jesus, these songs report, spoke of a kingdom in a way that his admirers and opponents alike interpreted as implying the liberation of Judea.

Pressed to clarify such statements by Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, in “Pilate and Christ,” Jesus prevaricates.

PILATE
We all know that you are news,
But are you king?

King of the Jews?

JESUS
Your words, not mine.

And again in “Trial before Pilate.”

PILATE
Listen King of the Jews,
Where is your kingdom?
Look at me. Am I a Jew?

JESUS
I have no kingdom.
In this world, I’m through.
There may be a kingdom for me somewhere.
If you only knew.

PILATE
Then you are a king?

JESUS
It’s you that say I am.

Jesus’s statements are ambiguous, but he refuses to mollify the Roman governor’s concerns by disavowing a political interpretation of his message. Jesus claims to be some kind of king.

Among New Testament scholars, the main alternative to the Sapiential portrait of Jesus is the Apocalyptic Jesus. This school of thought—most famously advocated by Albert Schweitzer but championed at the end of the 20^th century by the likes of E.P. Sanders and Dale Allison—imagines Jesus as a prophet of God’s impending judgment. Jesus’ talk of a coming kingdom refers to the imminent action of God to set the world right. Jesus, then, claimed for himself and his followers some important role in that kingdom—perhaps the “thrones and crowns” disavowed by the Jesus of Godspell. Superstar presupposes something very much like Schweitzer’s image of Jesus as a prophet of the coming apocalypse.

Importantly, most apocalyptic interpreters don’t believe Jesus was mounting a conventional, armed revolt against Rome. The gospels suggest, rather, non-violent resistance with the expectation (shared by other first century Jews) of divine intervention. The Jesus of Superstar reflects this same commitment to non-violence, responding “Why are you obsessed with fighting?” to his disciples’ call for a march on Jerusalem.

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Superstar is hardly innocent of anti-Jewish tropes. The original stage production dressed Annas and Caiaphas as gargoyles—a literal demonization of the Jewish leaders. In the film, they don black robes and ostentatious hats. Along similar lines, the diverse Jewish sects with their distinctive ideological positions found in the gospels are collapsed into a single amorphous but markedly Jewish opposition. As reviewers have long noted, Superstar is not a guiding light for responsible depictions of Jews or Judaism.

Where Superstar shines, however, is its depiction of the events precipitating Jesus’ death as arising out of the political realities of first-century Judea. It was, in the end, the Romans who crucified Jesus. One can acknowledge the presence of intra-Jewish conflict surrounding his death without decrying Judaism or demonizing Jewish people. Superstar even gives Judas and the Jewish leaders sympathetic motives —a concern for the safety of the Jewish people— derived from John 11:50. The Apocalyptic Jesus of Superstar is a first-century Jew engaged in controversy with fellow Jews but ultimately executed by their common oppressors, the imperial Roman state.

Jesus Exists Stage Left

The Apocalyptic Jesus of Superstar and the Sapiential Jesus of Godspell represent two different portraits of the preacher from Galilea. Neither musical is above reproach in their portrayals of ancient Jews and Judaism. But while Godspell vilifies the Jewish leaders and amplifies Jewish culpability for Jesus’ death, Superstar depicts Jesus in a way that explains his execution by the Roman state and gives sympathetic motives to his Jewish opposition. Artists as well as historians have an ethical obligation to avoid perpetuating the same anti-Jewish narratives that motivated centuries of very real violence against the Jewish people. Maybe these fifty-year-old musicals are due for a re-write?

Or maybe, even better, the time has come for a new Jesus musical that refuses to reinforce Christian antisemitism.

Ian N Mills is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at Hamilton College. Ian is a scholar of early Christianity and a co-host of the New Testament Review podcast.

The post Crucifying the Musical Christ appeared first on The Revealer.

(Scene in Oppenheimer. Image source: Popular Science)

“Ever get the feeling our kind isn’t entirely welcome here?” physicist Isidor Rabi (played by David Krumholz) asks J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer. It’s the late 1920s, and the two are traveling by train from Germany to Zurich. Though Oppenheimer jokes that “our kind” refers to physicists, they both know the people who are not “entirely welcome” in Germany are Jews.

Jewishness is a quiet but important theme in Nolan’s biopic of the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs. Many of the physicists who worked on the project—like Rabi, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid)—were Jewish.

But more than that, the film presents Europe’s prejudice against these men as a personal and national justification for the bomb’s creation. “It’s not your people they’re herding into camps,” Oppenheimer tells a military official with some passion. “It’s mine.”

Jewish exclusion and historical Jewish oppression provide a rationale for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the United States, the film suggests, is a place where Jewish people are welcome—and that welcome is evident in the way the government gives Jews the opportunity to contribute to U.S. power, prestige, and victory.

Oppenheimer is not the first film to use Jewish history and trauma to validate American patriotism and wars. But it is one of the most valorized in our current moment—a moment when many U.S. institutions and political figures reference opposition to antisemitism as justification for support of Israel’s sweeping destruction of Gaza. Within that context, it’s important to look at how Oppenheimer navigates and merges American and Jewish identities – and rationalizes horrific violence by using Jewish trauma.

Hollywood’s World War II Didn’t Always Include Jews

Today, World War II and the Nazi regime are virtually inseparable from the Holocaust and the horrific suffering of Europe’s Jews in the American popular imagination. That was not always the case.  As the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, American newspapers reported on escalating Jewish persecution, but did not present antisemitism as urgent. By 1943, four years into the war, there was strong evidence that Hitler had already killed 2 million Jews, but public polls showed half of Americans thought it was just a rumor. By 1944, people did know about the genocide, but when asked to estimate the number killed, most guessed only in the hundreds of thousands.

Even some American Jews who were aware of the Nazi policy of extermination tended to downplay Jewish victimhood and the Nazi’s specific goal to eradicate all Jews from Europe when discussing the Holocaust. Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise wrote in 1943 that, “Jews have become the victims of the Fascist terrorism because they are the unbowed protagonists of freedom, faith, democracy.” That was not a good summary of the conspiracy theories, eugenics, and prejudice that led Hitler to target Jewish people. But it was an explanation likely to get a sympathetic hearing from Americans.

You can see a similar effort to get Americans on board with antifascism in the pop culture of the period. In the famous 1943 anti-Nazi film Casablanca, the dissident resistance leader, who escapes the Nazis, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) is never identified as Jewish. For that matter, the term “Jewish” rarely appeared in Hollywood scripts of the period. Even Anne Frank’s father edited her diary to reduce its Jewishness; on its first release in 1947, references to Hanukkah in the manuscript were carefully deleted from the published text. Jewish particularity was downplayed in order to emphasize how the Nazi threat to Jews was a threat to everyone.

Rabbi Wise, Casablanca, and the publication of Anne Frank’s diary were all part of an effort to make Americans identify with Jewish people. In so doing, they also helped to create a basis for establishing Holocaust memory as part of American identity.

America Takes the Holocaust for Its Own

Memoirs and institutions further helped center the Holocaust as an important part of American memory and self-definition. Anne Frank’s diary, and the play based on it, became a huge hit in the later 50s. The trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi official, in Israel in 1961, fascinated Americans and raised public awareness of the Holocaust. Several books and films came out about the Holocaust, including Eli Wiesel’s Night (released in the U.S. in 1960), Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus (1980), Lois Lowry’s Young Adult novel Number the Stars (1989), Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006). They were all to varying degrees critical and/or commercial successes. The United States Holocaust Museum opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1993.

Many of the popular narratives about the Holocaust, like Number the Stars, Schindler’s List, and the film The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017), are gentile savior narratives. In these stories, good Christian or non-Jewish people hide Jewish friends, neighbors, or employees, and thereby protect them from the death camps. These tales are often figured as inspirational and educational; they are meant to teach people to fight for the vulnerable (especially Jews) and to stand up to tyranny (especially fascists.)

The movies also, though, tend to flatter the viewer. As you watch, you identify with Oskar Schindler, or with the Zookeeper’s wife. You become one of those rare, iconic gentiles who risked everything to fight against fascism. The identification is cemented by the fact that the people on screen speak English and are portrayed by recognizable Hollywood stars. They encourage viewers to imaginatively parachute into a distant atrocity and rescue everyone who needs rescuing.

There is an obvious parallel in these films with the U.S. role in World War II, in which American soldiers did, in fact, parachute in to defeat the Nazis. Gentile savior Holocaust films recapitulate an iconic moment of American virtue by presenting Jews as weak, generally passive victims to be rescued by powerful, compassionate non-Jews. The American government fought the good fight; Hollywood actors assure American audiences they would do the same. Onscreen, Jewish genocide has become part of a ritual of Hollywood reassertion of U.S. self-validation.

“We have one hope: antisemitism”

Oppenheimer is not a gentile savior film. But it does still use Jewish experience to buttress and vindicate American nationalism and American virtue.

The central mechanism here is fairly straightforward: the Nazis were a genocidal antisemitic regime. The U.S fought them. In reality, the U.S. wasn’t exactly fighting for Jewish people, but America was certainly on the right side.

Hitler was evil. That evil was so overwhelming that virtually anything done in the name of defeating it became good, or at least necessary.

Oppenheimer and other scientists on the Manhattan Project express concerns about whether political leaders can be trusted with a weapon as fearsome as the atomic bomb. But these worries were inevitably pushed aside by the overwhelming fear that the enemy will develop the weapon first. “Izzy, I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon,” Oppenheimer says with quiet earnestness. “But I know the Nazis can’t.” (The Germans were never anywhere near developing a bomb, though the scientists in the U.S. didn’t know that at the time—and the film doesn’t tell viewers that Oppenheimer’s fear was unwarranted.)

Oppenheimer in the film explicitly states that Jewish participation is a key advantage for the United States. German scientists, Oppenheimer believes, had a major head start on the Manhattan Project. But Hitler disdains quantum physics, which he calls “Jewish science.” He is unlikely to put in the resources needed to develop quantum theory into practical bomb. “We have one hope: antisemitism,” Oppenheimer declares dramatically.

Who Is American?

What Oppenheimer means is really that the one hope is the lack of antisemitism in the U.S. American diversity and equality are strengths measured in kilotons of TNT.

The film is proud of its diversity and equality—so proud that it overstates them. There is no example of American antisemitism in the film. However, prejudice against Jewish people was quite common at the time, and there are documented cases in which Oppenheimer experienced it personally. Even when Oppenheimer is accused of Communist sympathies and has his security clearance stripped away in the film, there is no suggestion that he is seen as untrustworthy or as alien because of his Jewish identity, though antisemitism and anti-Communism in the period were often linked.

Even more striking is the way the film—which again uses the fight against prejudice as a key theme—avoids discussing, or mentioning, other forms of racism. There is one brief conversation about Black civil rights (the scientists support it vaguely). And there is no mention at all of President Roosevelt’s Japanese internment camps, or of anti-Japanese prejudice in general, or of the possibility that racism may have made it easier to decide to drop the bomb on Japanese cities—though many of the scientists on the project have qualms about using the bomb against anyone other than the Nazis.

There are in fact no Japanese people in the movie. Rather than visualizing the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nolan shows the effects of the atom bomb by having Oppenheimer hallucinate. In several scenes, he sees colleagues and friends incinerating and melting. Virtually all of those colleagues and friends are white.

Is Cillian Murphy Jewish?

The point here is not that the United States was as bad as Nazi Germany. The U.S. was in no way as bad as Nazi Germany for Jews, nor for virtually any other marginalized group.

But that contrast, and the moral force of that contrast, can be used ideologically in a range of ways. It can be used to distract from, or to discretely downplay, prejudice and violence in the U.S. It can be used to justify military buildup and the mass killing of civilians. Or it can be used as a wedge to fight prejudice at home and abroad by linking all hate to the Nazis.

These aren’t either/or choices, as Oppenheimer demonstrates. The film shows how opposition to the Nazis can provide a moral argument for accepting one marginalized group—Jewish people—into a broad American identity, even while others (Japanese-Americans, African-Americans) are resolutely ignored.

Or to put it another way, who gets to be white in America? Not all Jews are white in every context. But in the U.S., in this movie, Cillian Murphy, an Irish actor, plays Oppenheimer. That’s a choice that is possible because Hollywood sees (white) Jewish actors, and (white) Jewish characters as part of a generalized, interchangeable group of white bodies. White people can put themselves into (white) Jewish characters and (white) Jewish perspectives. By identifying with Jewish trauma onscreen, Americans of various backgrounds can demonstrate their own virtues and open-mindedness, positioning themselves as fighters against fascism (over there) without necessarily having to pay too much attention to prejudice (including antisemitism) over here.

(Image source: Awards Daily)

Opposition to global antisemitism in Oppenheimer provides ideological support for American power and for a devastating American attack on civilians. Out in the real world, rhetorical opposition to antisemitism, and evocations of the Holocaust, have been deployed to justify the Biden administration’s support for the horrific Israeli campaign in Gaza. That campaign has killed some 28,000 people; the International Criminal Court ruled it could plausibly be considered a genocide.

The story America tells about itself and its goodness builds on its success in World War II, which means it builds in part on its treatment of Jewish people and on Jewish identity. To some extent, the process of incorporating a Jewish story into an American one has meant that (white) Jewish people in the U.S. face less open prejudice and less discrimination than they have in many other times and many other places.

Yet, as Oppenheimer shows, America’s valedictory use of Jewish identity doesn’t always result in more opportunities for actual Jewish people. Nor does it mean Americans are willing to confront prejudice, either against Jews or against anyone else. As a Jewish person watching Nolan’s massive, interminable, three-hour tribute to someone who is supposed to stand in for me, I was reminded that my country often seems to see me less as a person than as a blunt weapon with which to bat away self-reflection, self-knowledge, and remorse. I don’t feel like, “I’ve become death,” as Oppenheimer famously, melodramatically asserted. But Oppenheimer doesn’t exactly make me feel like I’ve become welcome here, either.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He writes about culture, politics, music and other subjects at his substack, Everything Is Horrible.

The post Oppenheimer, or How to Use Jews to Justify the Atom Bomb appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: CC Adobe)

The current situation in Israel and Palestine is profoundly complicated. And yet, countless people and pundits portray the solution as a simple one. As someone who has been invested in the region for decades, the one thing I know is that if someone says something is simple, whatever comes next is likely to be wrong. I am so frustrated by faulty analogies and pieties proclaimed with astonishing and unearned confidence.

We can agree (I hope) on a few basic truths: human life is sacred. Torture is unacceptable. We want the violence to end safely and as quickly as possible. That is the starting point. I suggest we take time to consider what we say next.

Part of the problem is that when it comes to being updated on world events, too many of us feel like we don’t have time to take. That’s a specific statement about the current set of global crises, and a general one about how we come to know things. We can always access the latest news, and we feel that, as engaged citizens and responsible people, we ought to do our best to stay abreast. We scroll, sometimes desperately, sometimes mindlessly. We think we know something. And we move on.

Scrolling has become the 21^st century way of knowing. Or, in reality, the illusion of knowing. There are many different ways to scroll. We scroll through social media feeds, consuming news, entertainment, and advertisements indistinguishably, and maybe thoughtlessly. It’s a verb: to scroll.

But it is also a noun and a textual medium: the scroll.

In an age of corporate media insta-expertise and social media hot-take influencers, using “the scroll” as a text encompasses an entirely different way of consuming information: a process of ending only to always, and by design, begin again.

At this time of unimaginable tragedy and widespread war, famine, and needless death, I offer as an antidote to screen-scrolling this much older model of the scroll. I offer the benefits of cyclicality and repetition as a technology for taking time. I offer, based on my experiences working with Jewish texts and sacred scrolls, slow learning as a way to counter the shallow, sometimes incorrect, and often dangerous assumptions of knowledge about the incredibly complicated conflict in the Middle East that has migrated from the online sphere to everyday life. I personally feel differently about the conflict than I did in those terrible, heartbreaking days after October 7^th. My heart is still broken. It is all still terrible, even more so. But many things have changed.

For millennia, Jewish communities have turned to a rich corpus of texts for legal guidance, ritual practice, community-building, and moral clarity. For some, the texts themselves are sacred, a direct connection to the word of God. For others, the process of studying the texts itself is sacred, a connection to Jews of the past, present, and future. Some find only pain in these patriarchal writings, feeling isolated and abandoned by a religion that is built around these historical documents. Some find solace and wisdom in the flexibility of Jewish texts, building upon them to create and excavate new communal meanings.

Listening, pausing, reflecting, repeating: these are structural ways to deepen our relationship to texts, to knowledge, to ideas. And they are built directly into the Jewish calendar, starting with the Saturday synagogue service. Each week, Jews gather in sacred space to pray together, chanting and singing the liturgy and listening to the cantillation of the weekly Torah portion. This happens on a yearly cycle, in which a chapter of the scroll, comprised of the five books of Moses, is sequentially chanted aloud each week. The ba’al koreh, or designated reader (or readers), stands in front of the scroll that is placed on a special table amid the congregation and, publicly and clearly, recites a portion of the Torah to a community that, if they were there for that section the prior year, has heard it all before.

(Torah scroll. Image source: National Geographic)

It’s a deeply sensual process: before the reading begins, someone carries the Torah, covered in fine dressings, through the congregation where people touch it, symbolically bringing the text’s teachings into their lives. Then there is another sensory experience: the sound and sight of the scroll being opened and rolled as the reading progresses, starting with the bulk on one side until, by the end of the Jewish year, it has shifted entirely to the other. Only, at that point, to be “refreshed” as it is manually rolled to the start to begin again.

The Torah is one kind of scroll, read weekly; there are 5 other scroll texts, or “megillot” we read once a year at set times of the Jewish calendar. We read them again the following year. And the year after that. The words don’t change, though our relationship to them does as over time as we – and the world around us – change. These are communal reading practices, designed not only to build relationships to texts but to build relationships with each other.

The Jewish tradition contains additional models of slow learning that are useful today, including the practice of Daf Yomi, the daily page of Talmud study done by Jews around the globe in continual synchronized cycles every 7.5 (!) years. The Talmud is a written collection of Jewish law and tradition dating from the fifth century CE that serves as the foundation of Jewish practices and ethics for daily and communal living. It’s a process that may seem simply unfathomable in our content-obsessed culture.

Founded in the early 20^th century as a way to connect diasporic people in a project of communal learning, Daf Yomi has extended across denominational and observance divides. There are multiple ways of “doing the Daf,” from group shiurim (traditional Jewish learning classes) to chevruta (learning partnerships) to podcasts to blogs to just opening the book (or screen – there’s an app for that!) and reading. If you regularly ride the Brooklyn subway, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the sight of someone hunched over a page of Talmud studying the day’s daf. People do it at different times of the day and via multiple media, but all participants are literally on the same page across the world for 7.5 years. At the end of the cycle, various communities throw a big party. And the next day, if they choose to keep going, they start back again on page 1. For another 7.5 years. It never ends. It’s not supposed to.

(Pages of Talmud. Image source: Jewish Learning Today)

Daf Yomi has a lesson for all of us. No matter how many times you read something, no matter how often you review the same set of words, and no matter how close to mastery you have achieved in a set of ideas, there is still more to learn. There is always more to learn. It’s a deeply humbling approach to knowledge and expertise. In contrast to the Google-on-demand environment, where new information updates every second, these ancient texts serve as the beginning rather than the end of how we know. Even still, the Daf is amongst the shallower types of textual encounters within the Jewish tradition; a page a day doesn’t allow the space to truly cultivate the deep, slow approach to ideas that characterizes intensive Jewish learning found in yeshivot, or seminaries devoted to full-time Jewish textual studies. But that’s not the point of the Daf. Instead of textual mastery, the process cultivates a habit of mind and practice: learning is daily, dynamic, and goes the distance. And, again: it’s repeated, over and over and over. There is always something new to learn.

Our access today to on-demand information, accurate or otherwise, has changed not just what but how we read, and how we come to know things, and how we make ethical, emotional, and practical decisions about what it is we believe we know. As someone who teaches ethics, I worry about the ramifications of this approach to making judgments about complicated issues. Our responses ought to emerge from thoughtful consideration and, if not personal expertise, then assessments based on trusted interlocutors, leaders, and thinkers. But the world and its crises move so fast, it seems challenging to develop any kind of depth of knowledge. It’s not just tempting to opt for the screen scroll, and it’s not that we’ve almost forgotten there are other ways to know; it’s that we think they are worse. What’s the point of repetition and depth when, in the blink of an eye, everything has changed? But most of the urgent things about which we need to know: war, famine, structural oppression, violence, poverty, and disease are a long time in the making. And that’s exactly the point of the cyclical scroll: we return to stable texts, repeating words precisely as a way to reflect on all that has, in the intervening time, changed. We learn new things from that which is the same.

I want to pause on the term “taking time.” It’s one of those phrases that has become so common that we don’t consider the language itself, which implies a process, an action, even a transaction: something is actively taken. We take time to: make sense; do work; rest; and we take time for: a project; a process; ourselves. It is both a demand and a gift. And it can – and perhaps uniquely at this moment ought to be – a scared duty. In the era of content consumption and scrolling through headlines and hot-takes, when it comes to how we know, we have stopped taking time.

Social media is one way to know things, and has its advantages alongside myriad and ever-increasing problems. One of these problems is that, for so many people, it is the only imaginable way to know about the world, especially in times of crisis. And I get it: there is so much out there, and things move so quickly, and most of us just want to be responsible citizens on the right side of history. Social media can be the quickest way to access information on the ground, sometimes showing us images and events we wouldn’t otherwise see. It can bypass gatekeepers, challenge censorship, and give access to non-traditional voices and makers. If we want to stay on top of emergent situations and be able to form opinions and exchange ideas, we start scrolling. It makes sense and it can be a double-edged sword: gatekeepers ideally serve to verify and vet information, place events in context, and offer depth and expertise. But of course, sometimes they fail. How do we balance direct access to, say, the voices of the minoritized, oppressed, and persecuted with a growing (and necessary!) distrust of what we see online?

I suggest, we pause. We use the model of cyclical learning to reframe our relationship to on-demand information. We look at our screens and we sit with what we see. We take time to reflect, using social media as the beginning rather than the end of the learning process. Instead of scrolling on our screens, we reimagine our screens as scrolls, with texts that serve as the basis of investigation, learning, and understanding. Instead of virtually forwarding and sharing at the click of a button, we discuss – in real-time, and real space – what we’ve read and what we imagine we know. We return, revisit, repeat. It works. I know that in those heartrending days after October 7^th, everything I read was filtered through grief, horror, and fear. I still grieve; I’m still horrified; I am still afraid. But with time, with intervening events, I can know things differently. The moral clarity of David Myers’ plea for empathy has compounded over time; the gaping hole left by Mehdi Hasan’s show’s cancellation, following Hasan’s criticisms of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, grows ever-wider.

Instead of scrolling past Palestinian writer Heba Abu Nada’s final Facebook post from 8 October, we can revisit her words: “Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets, quiet apart from the sound of the bombs, terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer, black apart from the light of the martyrs. Good night, Gaza.” And we can sit with the 2018 words of murdered peace activist Vivian Silver, who asked the Israeli government to “Show the required courage that will bring changes of policy that will bring us quiet and security,” even as she insisted “terror does not make anything better for anyone.” Let these words be our texts. Let us study them, learn from them, and live with them. Let them form our scrolls rather than scroll past them forever.

Alongside the fast, let us embrace the slow. The infinite scroll of the screen with its disappearing feed may be our current default, but we can turn to another infinite scroll as we remind ourselves that there are words that do come back. We can – and should – see knowledge as a process. We can – and should – reach for expertise that is not just wide but deep. We can embrace slow learning and repetition and communality and the taking of time, turning to texts that refresh by saying the same thing again and in so doing, allow us to learn something new.  We can – and we should – insist on the sacred within the scroll.

Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and History at Drexel University. Her most recent book is Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), and her book Mask is forthcoming in May 2024 with Bloomsbury Academic. She has written for The Washington Post, The Conversation, Real Life, Aeon, Tablet, Lilith, Kveller, and other places available on sharronapearl.com.

The post From Scrolling to The Scroll: A Model for Learning about Crises that Demand Our Attention appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Axios)

“We’ve been here before,” Margarita says as she holds a sign with bold, red and green letters exclaiming, Basta ya genocido! Variously translated as “enough is enough” or “stop already,” basta ya is a Spanish exclamation of exasperation. And Margarita is exasperated. “What I mean is [that] we’ve done this before,” she explains, “when they [the Israeli military] evicted families in Sheikh Jarrah in 2021, when Israel invaded Gaza in 2014, after Hurricane María, when they [the U.S. Navy] bombed Vieques, during the Second Intifada, I was out here, protesting. Enough is enough!”

Wearing a loose, floral, floor-length dress, brown jacket, and burgundy head covering, Margarita joined thousands of other Puerto Ricans in November 2023 demonstrating in Brooklyn and Manhattan on behalf of Palestinians, demanding a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. At the march, Puerto Rican flags flew next to Palestinian ones alongside signs reading Puerto Rico con Palestina or “Puerto Ricans for Palestine.” Other protestors paired keffiyehs, headdresses that have become associated with Palestinians, with black-and-white banners representing Puerto Rican resistance to U.S. colonialism.

As a Puerto Rican convert to Islam, Margarita feels compelled to take to the streets. But even before she became Muslim, Margarita possessed a sense of solidarity with people in Gaza and the West Bank. “We share a history of oppression, of being under empire’s foot, of being a people without a nation,” she says, “so I’ll continue to show up until Palestine and Puerto Rico are free.”

Puerto Rican demonstrations for justice in Palestine, and Palestinian solidarity with Puerto Ricans, is nothing new. Forged in their common colonial condition, Puerto Ricans and Palestinians have long spoken up — and out — for each other’s fight against imperialism and for independence.

But for Puerto Rican Muslims in the archipelago and diaspora, that solidarity takes on additional, resonant meaning. For some, their faith imbues their solidarity with divine purpose. For others, it is solidarity that leads them to faith in the first place.

La brega  

Talking during a work-break at a posh Italian restaurant in Santurce — a colorful, artistic neighborhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico — Ibrahim says he grew up influenced by global anti-colonial literature. His parents, both academics, provided him with a wide array of books through which he perceived himself, and the world around him.

The former ballet dancer, BMX biker, skateboarder, and punk rocker, says the first influential book he remembers reading was Manifiesto comunista by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Developing a sense of solidarity with various resistance and leftist movements – from the Zapatistas to Hugo Chavez and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) – Ibrahim wanted to understand the motivations of “freedom fighters.” And so, his parents gave him a Qur’an as a gift in 2011, telling him it was “beautiful literature” he should get to know.

Inside, he found much more. “As soon as I began reading it, it changed my life,” he says. “I stopped drinking, stopped smoking, stopped eating pork. Then, I decided I better find a mosque. What started as a sentiment, or a sense of solidarity, led to the shahadah [recitation of faith].”

Ibrahim is one of thousands of Puerto Rican converts to Islam. Though official numbers do not exist, there were an estimated 3,500-5,000 Muslims in Puerto Rico before outmigration lowered numbers in the wake of Hurricane María in 2017. There are an estimated 11,000-15,400 Muslims who identify as Puerto Rican across the U.S.

With a conspicuous tattoo of Leila Khaled, a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and icon of the Palestinian liberation movement on the inside of his forearm, Ibrahim says he draws on global solidarities to inspire resilience in the midst of his everyday grind.

For Ibrahim, these struggles, or what Puerto Ricans call la brega, include the daily hustle to provide for his family amidst an ongoing economic crisis, exacerbated by natural disasters and the continual failures and broken promises of the local and federal government. He would love to study and become “a proper Puerto Rican sheikh [religious leader],” he says. But he knows he needs to work instead. “In this economy, I can’t just study,” he says.

Both to get by and push back against what he sees as injustices leveled at Puerto Rican people, he often draws on examples from fellow Muslims in other parts of the world. Looking to Palestinian resistance in particular, Ibrahim says it provides inspiration for popular political movements in Puerto Rico.

That’s because converts like Ibrahim feel Palestine and Puerto Rico are both subjected to foreign domination and experience analogous forms of oppression and exploitation.

(March in solidarity with Palestinians in Philadelphia. Image source: Worker’s World)

Palestine has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, with the Israeli government implementing policies resulting in the displacement of Palestinians, the confiscation of their land, and the suppression of their basic human rights — like unlawful search and seizure, and now, as South Africa argued before the United Nations’ top court in January 2024, open acts of genocide.

While respecting the distinct differences between their situation and Palestine’s, many Puerto Ricans see parallels to their lives in what some call, “the oldest colony in the world.”

After 405 years of Spanish colonial control, Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898, following the Spanish-American War. Since then, the U.S. government has imposed its power over the island through various means, including military intervention and economic policies that scholars and activists say disadvantage Puerto Rican people. Although Puerto Rico has some self-determination when it comes to internal affairs through its own executive, judicial, and legislative branches, U.S. federal law supersedes Puerto Rico’s and the U.S. government controls its trade, commerce, and foreign relations. This is also true of states, but without voting representatives in Congress or the ability to vote in presidential elections, Puerto Rico’s sovereignty is hamstrung.

Though distinct, many Puerto Ricans — Muslim and non-Muslim alike — feel imperial powers impose cultural, economic, and political punishments on colonized peoples in both Palestine and Puerto Rico. This process of suppression, they say, results in struggles not only in their native lands but their marginalization in the media and popular opinion.

Occupied Vieques, Occupied Palestine

Puerto Ricans and Palestinians – Muslim, Christian, and otherwise – have resisted these colonial conditions for decades.

In both places, there are grassroots movements to assert residents’ rights and large-scale political actions to challenge those in power. In Palestine, this takes various forms, including nonviolent protests, civil disobedience, armed resistance, and international solidarity campaigns. Similarly, Puerto Ricans utilize protests, strikes, and armed opposition to the U.S. government, receiving support from progressive movements around the world, including Palestinians.

Sara Awartani, assistant professor of American culture at the University of Michigan, highlights how, in Puerto Rican Chicago, “Puerto Ricans sharpened their political identities in conversation with the struggle for Palestinian liberation.” Awartani wrote how “individuals imprisoned for alleged participation in the Puerto Rican armed clandestine organization Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN; Armed Forces of National Liberation),” and other similar groups, “framed Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle” within an enlarged and “reimagined geography of liberation.” They drew on, and declared solidarity with, Palestinians’ struggle for independence. These struggles cemented Palestine “in the Puerto Rican political imaginary.” It was through the Palestinian struggle that many of these Puerto Rican activists “learned to think and operate within a ‘Third World’ revolutionary political condition,” she says.

For the FALN in the 1970s and early 80s, this was more than a rhetorical flourish. It was an action. On October 26, 1974, five large bombs exploded near Wall Street, in Rockefeller Center, and on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The explosions caused considerable property damage, but no injuries, in what The New York Times described as a “terrorist” attack. The FALN later claimed responsibility, as well as additional explosions in Puerto Rico. Their armed struggle was not, they said, about killing civilians, but attacking symbols of American empire (e.g., capitalist institutions, military bases).

Throughout the following year, the FALN executed a series of bombings, beginning on January 24, 1975, with an explosion at Fraunces Tavern in the New York City financial district, which killed four people and injured approximately 63. The violence climaxed on October 27, with nine nearly simultaneous explosions in New York City, Washington, and Chicago. In waging their own struggle, they also felt their actions were taken in direct solidarity with the Palestinian people and their cause.

More than three decades later, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition marched with Puerto Ricans in the 2001 annual Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City with a sign reading, “U.S. Bombs: Tested in Vieques, Dropped on Palestine.” They were referring to the small island of Vieques, which lies near Culebra, six miles east of the Puerto Rican mainland. In 1941, the U.S. forcibly displaced some 10,000 people, relocating them to the center of the island. For the next six decades, the military used Vieques to test three-to-five million pounds of artillery and explosives per year. The island was poisoned with the remnants of depleted uranium, lead, napalm, and other deadly chemicals. Puerto Ricans on the archipelago and in the diaspora protested, but their cries went largely unheard until 1999, when the killing of 35-year-old David Sanes by a 500lb U.S. Naval bomb sparked worldwide marches and acts of civil disobedience. With signs like the Palestine Right to Return Coalition’s, protestors linked the anti-imperial struggle in Vieques with those in Palestine.

Although Awartani admits Palestine and Puerto Rico are not in the same situation, she says theirs is “a shared colonial condition.” Based on her own comparisons, Awartani says the way activists and everyday Palestinians and Puerto Ricans frame the situation calls attention to a “bigger global structure.” She explains, “the way the U.S. Intervenes in the Caribbean or the Middle East, the everyday experience of surveillance and policing, that’s what is being named by this comparison, [and] the activists are illuminating the ways power works in different places.”

Thousands of seeds, born from the ruins

“Thousands of seed, born from the ruins” was part of the message the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, a direct-action political organization, wanted to send through a new street mural they painted in Puerto Rico in November 2023.

In response to the invasion of Gaza, more than 50 volunteers painted adjacent walls and doorways with Palestinian and Puerto Rican colors and symbols in one of San Juan’s oldest neighborhoods, Río Piedras.

Home to Universidad de Puerto Rico Río Piedras (UPRRP), the country’s largest institute of higher education, the district has often been the site of intense activism. Motivated by a sense of political and moral responsibility toward Palestine, the mural at the intersection of Robles Street and Ferrocarril Street in Río Piedras, was a concrete form of resistance, organizers said.

Alongside a bunch of olives held in two cupped hands, a full-grown olive tree, and a woman in keffiyeh — all Palestinian cultural and political symbols — the mural read De las ruinas nacerán miles de semillas…y será libre Puerto Rico y Palestina, or “thousands of seeds will be born from the ruins and Puerto Rico and Palestine will be free.” Organizers said the phrase, “describes the political context of people besieged by colonialism.”

The ruins, they said, are not only the homes, hospitals, businesses, and schools razed in Gaza, but the ruins of Río Piedras itself, an impoverished neighborhood they insist has been systemically abandoned by authorities.

And they have a point. Puerto Ricans’ marginalized place in American political, social, and cultural orders has been brought into sharp relief over the last several years. Crippling debt, numerous natural disasters, a crumbling infrastructure and economy, as well as inadequate responses by local political leaders and the U.S. federal government to these combined crises have left many Puerto Ricans living in poverty. With a median household annual income of $21,000 (USD) and a poverty rate of around 40 percent, Puerto Rico is twice as impoverished as the U.S.’s poorest state (Mississippi).

Meanwhile, incentivized by favorable tax laws, U.S. investors continue to buy up tracts of land and properties on the island — in places like Río Piedras — developing them for tourism and investment purposes. This has displaced scores of Puerto Ricans, led to a decline in affordable housing and services, decreased job availability, as well as the gentrification of certain areas, with a resultant rise in outmigration as Puerto Ricans seek financial security and representation in places like Connecticut, Florida, New York, and New Jersey.

Marisol, a San Juan resident, said gentrification has become the primary problem she and her neighbors now face. “We are in a vulnerable state,” she says. “We are being displaced from our homes, and can no longer afford to live in places we grew up in. Our land, natural resources, and communities are at stake.”

This has led to palpable and collective rage, on display during public demonstrations that led to the ousting of Governor Richard Rosselló in 2019 (la revolución más corta) – or at the 2017 university protests, when students were joined by a range of activists protesting controversial budget cuts and a lack of democratic representation and accountability.

One of those activists was Adrián Robles. A staunch independentista who advocates for Puerto Rico’s right to be an independent nation, Adrián was an active and politically engaged street artist in San Juan at the time. Known on the Río Piedras campus for his striking political murals, Adrián says he was the only Muslim he knew who took part in the protests. When people asked him about his faith, he pointed to a mural on the wall of one of the campus’s parking lots, depicting female freedom fighters — one Palestinian and one Chechen — along with flowers, skulls, and a gunsight trained on Carlos M. García, a prominent member of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) committee, established by the U.S. government in 2016 to restructure Puerto Rico’s debt.

Adrián says the art, which has since been painted over, symbolized his complex feelings of frustration and his hope for peace and change. But as a Muslim, he says it also illustrated the connected struggles of the Puerto Rican independence movement to anti-colonial resistance throughout the Global South. Through what he calls his, “public art interventions” on walls and hallways across the campus, Adrián puts the intersectionality of his politico-religious sentiments and solidarities into material, graffitied form.

Another of his murals features a Palestinian woman holding a flag in one hand and making a peace sign with the other. Her eyes are shaded with a stylized keffiyeh wrapped around her face; Adrián painted her as a figure of solidarity with the protesting students. At the same time, Adrián says he wants to express the mutual support of independentistas like himself with the Palestinian cause. Scribbled in red graffiti across the upper left corner of the mural are the words, Puerto Rico con Palestina. Puerto Rico con la Infitada, or “Puerto Rico for Palestine, Puerto Rico for the Palestinian uprisings.” Adrián says he feels both murals, depicting strong Muslim women in places far away, resonate with Puerto Ricans who are fighting against the injustice of their own situation. Despite geographic distance and geo-political disparities, he says, “we can draw strength from each other and perhaps be inspired that through our struggle, we might make a better tomorrow.”

(Photo by Ken Chitwood)

Lixabel, another local Muslim convert in San Juan whose family has been involved in the Puerto Rican independence movement for generations, says the only difference between Palestine and Puerto Rico is, “there is no need to bomb a place where people are already dying because of lack of education or the use of drugs.” The only option for such people, Lixabel says, is to sell their land to foreigners and leave Puerto Rico for good. “What’s left behind are crumbling buildings that look like a warzone,” she says.

But like Adrián, Lixabel clings to hope. “Our emotional resonance with the Palestinian struggle creates opportunities to bring awareness, hope, and momentum towards justice,” she believes.

And so, she, Marisol, Adrián, and Margarita say they plan to continue carrying flags, painting murals, and taking to San Juan’s and New York’s streets to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and justice for displaced and despondent Puerto Ricans. As they do so, they say they are bolstered by decades of shared action and solidarity. Despite ongoing frustrations and feelings of hopelessness in the face of liquidation and destruction, they believe life continues to emerge in both places.

“Seeing Palestinians maintain their faith and their smiles through all of their hardship has only solidified my faith,” Lixabel says. “Every time you speak up about something, that is the first step toward a better world.” These, she says, are the true seeds of change born from the resistance and tenacity of people who share each other’s struggles and survive.

Ken Chitwood is a religion scholar and journalist based in Germany. His book AmeRícan Muslims: The Everyday Cosmopolitanism of Puerto Rican Converts to Islam, is under contract with University of Texas Press.

The post From Puerto Rico to Palestine, with Solidarity appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

The first time I visited Israel, at age 19, I toured the country from the Golan Heights in the north to Masada near the Jordan border. One evening I was on a coach bus with a group of American Jews coming back to Jerusalem from an excursion near the Dead Sea. Our driver, an Orthodox man who wore a black velvet yarmulke, decided to take a shorter route and drove us through part of the West Bank. As I was drifting to sleep, I heard what sounded like an explosion. Someone threw a large rock, about the size of my head, through the bus’s windshield. The glass shattered, but the driver did not stop in case more people were prepared to attack the bus. Everyone onboard was fine physically, though clearly startled. The trip’s leaders, all people living in Israel, apologized for what happened and complained that the incident was evidence that antisemitism was still alive and well.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

No one in the group protested that explanation for why someone in the West Bank might hurl a rock through an Israeli bus with a visibly Jewish driver. And I will be honest, I did not give it considerable thought at the time. Much of the world, in various times and places, has been hostile and murderously violent toward Jews. But that fact does not explain Palestinian frustration at Israel for the restrictions placed on their lives or their rage at Jewish settlers who have taken over large swaths of the West Bank.

In the years after that trip my ambivalence about Israel grew. I eventually read the book New Jews by Caryn Aviv and the late David Shneer. In one chapter they address something I had long felt but had never been able to articulate: Israel is not central to Jewish identity for many Jews. Instead, many American Jews see New York City as their kind of Zion, as the place where Jewish culture thrives and that has abundant space for queer, leftist, food-obsessed, humorous, Hasidic, and secular Jews. New York City as the epicenter of the Jewish world made sense to me.

But making New York City my proxy Zion meant I stopped paying close attention to Israel and Palestine. I even got annoyed when people asked my opinion on the area, as if every Jew should be an expert on Israel’s political workings or expected to justify the Israeli government’s actions.

Like others, any distance I tried to put between myself and Israeli politics came to a halt in the months following October 7. At first, I was horrified by the atrocious violence Hamas committed. I remain aghast by what they did to Israelis and by the danger they knew they were bringing to everyone in Gaza. And I have been alarmed by the rising antisemitism that pre-dates this attack, but that has become more visible since October.

And then there is Israel’s retaliation, which appalls me in its excessiveness. Israel has effectively destroyed Gaza and killed more than 30,000 civilians in the process. Even when Israel finally agrees to a cease-fire, which many Jewish groups and people around the world have been demanding, then what? There is virtually no functioning or livable Gaza for the remaining people on that small strip of land to return to when this ends, not really. The destruction is on a massive scale, as is the loss of life. A cease-fire, while necessary and urgent, is but a mere respite in a profound problem that will not end until Palestinians have their own sovereign state.

I know I am not alone in having mixed emotions when I try to process the situation in Israel and Gaza. Students in my graduate course at NYU this semester reported that they are afraid to say anything about the conflict in other classes for fear of causing offense or saying something ill-informed. That fear is not good for any of us, or for finding viable solutions for our divisions abroad and at home.

With these complicated thoughts in mind, The Revealer’s March issue explores, from perhaps unexpected vantage points, issues facing Palestinians, how to better comprehend the conflict in Gaza, antisemitism, and evangelical politics. Our March issue opens with Ken Chitwood’s “From Puerto Rico to Palestine, with Solidarity,” where he investigates the reasons for alliances between Puerto Rican and Palestinian activists and how they are responding to the war in Gaza. Following that, in “From Scrolling to The Scroll: A Model for Learning about Crises that Demand Our Attention,” Sharrona Pearl reflects on how people can better understand the situation in Israel and Palestine by resisting hot-takes and focusing instead on slow learning to address such complicated issues.

The March issue also explores instances of antisemitism in popular culture and how they not only reflect but influence actual life. In “Oppenheimer, or How to Use Jews to Justify the Atom Bomb,” Noah Berlatsky considers how Oppenheimer uses antisemitism as a way to rationalize the United States developing and using atomic bombs, even though antisemitism had nothing to do with why the U.S. dropped bombs on Japanese cities. Berlatsky compares this logic to how the Biden administration has supported violence in Gaza. Then, in “Crucifying the Musical Christ,” Ian Mills surveys two Broadway musicals, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, and highlights how each presents Jews as partly responsible for Jesus’ death, a narrative that has led to violence against Jews for centuries.

And, for our final examination of religion in popular culture, in “Music to Make People Believe: The Soundtrack of White Evangelical Culture,” an excerpt from God Gave Rock and Roll to You, Leah Payne shares what Contemporary Christian Music reveals about conservative Protestant hopes and aspirations in the United States, both religious and political.

The March issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Contemporary Christian Music’s Political and Religious Messages.” Leah Payne joins us to discuss why evangelical leaders invested so heavily in this industry and why they especially wanted it to resonate with teenagers. We discuss the racial, religious, and nationalistic ideas this music broadcasts, the music’s messaging about gender, and what Christian pop culture reveals about what conservative Christians want in the 2024 U.S. election. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

When the fighting in Gaza concludes, I hope many of us do not lose sight of what the people of Gaza need. First, they will need safe homes, food, and hospitals. They will need new schools and counseling centers. They will need to rebuild a society that has been mostly destroyed. And hopefully, in time, the people of Israel will find ways to heal from the October 7 attacks and elect a government that sees the necessity of Palestinians governing their own state as an urgent imperative and understands their obligation to make sure Palestinian lives can flourish too.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: On Israel and Palestine appeared first on The Revealer.