You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our monthly episodes.

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Religion’s Role in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 42: Religion’s Role in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine appeared first on The Revealer.

1) If you want beautifully written prose full of astute observations about the dire situation of the political far-right in the United States, you should check out Jeff Sharlet’s newest book. Sharlet was The Revealer’s first editor. Don’t miss his new and powerful New York Times bestselling book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.

2) If insights into today’s white evangelicals interest you, take a look at Jill Hicks-Keeton’s work. She is the author of The Revealer article, “The ‘Slave Bible’ Is Not What You Think.” Her new book explores how white evangelicals interpret the Bible based on how they view the world, a process that is constantly changing despite their claims that the Bible possesses unchanging truths. Check out her incisive Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves.

3) If you’re looking for books about religious innovation and queer religious people, we have a fascinating book to recommend on LGBTQ Muslims. Katrina Daly Thompson, author of The Revealer article, “Breaking Down Gender Binaries, Building Muslim Community,” released a new book this year on how queer, transgender, and nonbinary Muslims are transforming Islam. Thompson’s book, Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America, is insightful and filled with important stories.

4) With the New Year approaching, you might make some resolutions—even some that include dieting. In her new book, Catherine Newell, author of The Revealer article, “The False Messiahs of Space Exploration,” investigates the religious and scientific dimensions of diet culture. Don’t miss her engaging and fascinating new book, Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating.

5) Our next recommendation is not a book, but an intriguing web comic series by a scholar of religion. Created by Matthew Cressler, author of The Revealer article “Exorcists, Abusers, and When Catholic History is Horror,” the series explores American Catholic racism and social justice activism. Check out the enthralling first installment of the comic series Bad Catholics, Good Trouble.

6) For our final recommendation, we would like to suggest (with great enthusiasm) the excellent books we profiled in 2023 on the Revealer podcast:

*The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism by Lerone A. Martin.
Revealer podcast episode: “The FBI and White Christian Nationalism”

*Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials by Jennifer Caplan.
Revealer podcast episode: “Jewish Comedy”

*The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety among White Evangelicals by Sarah Diefendorf.
Revealer podcast episode: “Evangelicals’ Anxieties and Their Politics”

*Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States by Eziaku Nwokocha.
Revealer podcast episode: “Vodou, Gender Variance, and Black Politics Today”

*The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America by Sandra Fox.
Revealer podcast episode: “Summer Camp and American Jews”

*Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision by Diane Winston.
Revealer podcast episode: “Reagan’s Religious Vision for America and the Impact Today”

*Sacred Pregnancy: Birth, Motherhood, and the Quest for Spiritual Community by Ann Duncan.
Revealer podcast episode: “The Spiritual Birthing Movement”

*When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics by Rebecca Epstein-Levi.
Revealer podcast episode: “Sexual Ethics for Today’s World”

*The Church’s Unholy War: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Orthodoxy by Nicholas Denysenko.
Revealer podcast episode: “Religion’s Role in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”

Happy reading!

The post The Revealer’s Winter Reading Recommendations appeared first on The Revealer.

(Poster for Yellowjackets)

In Showtime’s hit horror-drama series Yellowjackets, a girls’ high school soccer team (the “Yellowjackets”) from New Jersey experiences a plane crash on the way to their 1996 national championship game. Survivors are forced to scavenge in their crash location—somewhere in the forests of Ontario—which they eventually deify and name “The Wilderness.” As months go by without rescue, the girls engage in ritualized cannibalism for survival. Meanwhile, in the show’s 2021 present, viewers learn that a handful of the Yellowjackets were rescued, but that they have remained silent about their survival strategies.

Readers of The Revealer know this. In September 2022, Valerie Stoker published an essay for The Revealer titled, “On Religion and Modern Life in Yellowjackets and Severance.” As she offers synopses of each show, she unpacks how both deploy religion to explore themes of suffering, violence, and bewilderment. Regarding Yellowjackets specifically, Stoker contends that the team “repeat[s] old patterns” of tribalism for survival—they erect shrines, project their feelings onto the gods, and develop a religion of reciprocity between them and their most proximate deity, The Wilderness. Even for the presumed atheists (e.g., the character Natalie), religion remains imprinted upon the human psyche.

I’ve thought a lot about Stoker’s ideas of repetition in light of the writers’ and actors’ strikes. With fewer new releases, many of us have found ourselves repeating old patterns of viewership and rewatching old episodes of favorite shows. Some thinkers have suggested that there could be psychological benefit to doing this. When experiencing cognitive overload, viewers can rely on the shows they love—and know—without adding to their psychic plates. “Watching something new inherently involves thinking,” says Jennifer V. Fayard, “but there’s no guesswork, cliffhangers, or stressful anticipation when watching an old favorite.”

The show I rewatched the most during the joint strikes is Yellowjackets. My reason for rewatching it, however, was the opposite of generating psychic calm. Rather than taking comfort in what I knew, I wanted to see what I didn’t know—what I had missed or misunderstood. I had hoped that if I rewatched carefully, I could better understand what was happening throughout the two seasons. As viewers of the show know, Yellowjackets is a bit of a mystery: we don’t know the full extent of how or why particular teammates survive beyond the forest. We don’t even know how many survive, let alone why. The Wilderness appears and acts as it does. Is there an empirical reason for the river turning red? Is there a logical explanation for why a tree emits heat in the dead of winter? What are all of the carved symbols about? Will everything eventually make sense or is this another Lost?

As a biblical studies scholar, I am trained to acknowledge the work of repetition. Stories within the Bible are told multiple times and repeat themes from non-canonical sources. There are two creation accounts in the Bible. There are two flood narratives. Even Jesus’ life is told in four different ways, and that’s just accounting for the canonized Gospels. Scholars typically describe this multiplicity as a reflection of the human condition; because humans make sense of the world in differing ways, the Bible includes multiple tellings from various points of view. While the biblical authors may have crafted similar stories independently of one another, many did not. Writers instead borrowed from other writers. They looked to other sources and then offered alternative versions—versions that were similar but could still accommodate differing or even changing needs and standards. The author of Matthew’s Gospel, for example, borrowed what he liked from Mark’s Gospel and then added his own perspective. The author of Luke’s Gospel did the same. Scribes copying sources for circulation also made changes as they wrote, even if minimal. For those who wish to venture into a more robust alteration of Jesus’ life, I suggest reading the non-canonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Trust me.

Rewatching a television series is not the same as rewriting a text, at least not literally. The act of rewatching, however, is likely to conjure new ideas within viewers, the kind that could spark further interpretations and revised retellings. What follows then is an experiment in interpretive replication—a rare duplicate within The Revealer. Like the Bible’s second creation account or Matthew’s response to Mark, my investigation of Yellowjackets shares commonalities with Stoker’s review (e.g., noting the show’s focus on ritual, cults, and trauma) but also follows altered treads. I focus in particular on the power of “the repeat,” not just within the show but also within our own rewatchings. I also emphasize the show’s second season, which was not yet released when Stoker wrote her piece. This essay also continues to engage the Bible because, well, it’s what I do. At the risk of burying the lede, my overall contention is this: retelling our stories with room for change and further thinking is one of the best things we can do for ourselves to process suffering and to cultivate care.

***

Apropos my argument, I’ll start with a repeat: in Showtime’s hit horror-drama series Yellowjackets, survivors of a 1996 plane crash are forced to scavenge in their crash location, “The Wilderness.” A handful are eventually rescued but remain silent about their survival strategies for decades.

In both the 1996 and 2021 timelines, the trauma of the crash, starvation, and subsequent survival methods alter the structure of the characters’ psyches. Team members who live beyond the forest have, to varying degrees, post-trauma effects of hypervigilance, flashbacks, nightmares, and dissociations. Their experiences of starvation and suffering resist coherent narrativization, another common effect of trauma, and are often expressed in the 2021 timeline through post-trauma reenactments such as skinning a backyard squirrel (Shauna), beheading the family dog (Taissa), or operating a stuck-in-the-past, 1990s themed video store (Van). Repeatedly, the survivors simultaneously display and recreate their traumas.

In addition to trauma, another term evoked regularly by viewers when considering what takes place in The Wilderness is “cult.” A contested term, cult is commonly understood in popular culture as some form of dangerous, evil, mind-manipulating movement (e.g., Heaven’s Gate, Peoples Temple, NXIVM). Scholars of religion are often quick to deconstruct this definition. Deriving from the Latin cultus, “cult” more broadly refers to the act of “cultivating” care, often through the honoring of gods, leaders, and/or ideologies through ritual and rite. This latter definition leaves room for a wide variety of practices, from Christian worship to SoulCycle classes to NFL team fandoms. It also leaves room to consider more earnestly if, when, and how one chooses to describe a cult as dangerous, evil, and/or mind-manipulating.

Repetition is part of this. Recurring rituals are often implemented in cultic spaces to instill a sense of community, meaning, and focus in an otherwise disordered reality. Replication gives us a sense of control. It helps us connect with those around us. And it helps us manage our emotions. When repetition is bound up in trauma, however, it can be difficult to know when it is healing and when it is a harmful product of a psychic split (e.g., ritualized magical ideation).

In the face of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, I didn’t just rewatch Yellowjackets. I rewatched it. And while I don’t think trauma was fueling this choice, ritualistic behavior and the construction of ceremony did ensue. My general routine was this: meet spouse at scheduled viewing time (community), make sure our dogs are too tired to interrupt (sanctuary), pour our glasses of wine (sanctification), light incense (centering), have the remote in hand (so as to rewind and rewatch again when necessary), and be ready to text others if we encountered something new. If someone hadn’t seen Yellowjackets, we reminded them that they needed to, and if someone hadn’t rewatched it, we reminded them that they should. At one point, we even asked friends to help us cast each of our dogs as a Yellowjackets character. Clearly, we became fanatics. Or missionaries. Or both. Were we on our way to creating a cult? Maybe. Probably not a “cool” one, but definitely something.

(By majority vote: Toby is Misty.)

Regardless of how one morally describes the rituals within Yellowjackets, the team does develop a cult by the “cultivating care” definition. At first, the group leader is team-member Lottie, who guides the Yellowjackets through meditative breath work in an attempt to be in touch with the soul of The Wilderness. With teammate Misty’s intervention, however, the group turns into not just a Wilderness-Listening cluster but a Wilderness-Fearing one. Whereas the Yellowjackets once drew playing cards to reveal what chores would be done by whom, they later turn to the cards to see who will be cannibalized for the others’ survival. The team rationalizes this by maintaining that the hunted, killed, and eaten function as offerings to The Wilderness. In the teens’ minds, it is The Wilderness which chooses who draws the death card; “it chooses” and “it chose” become their common recitations. Eventually, team members adorn masks not only to hide their shame and instill fear in the hunted, but to resemble—become?—their surrounding master (a.k.a. The Wilderness). The hunters’ hunger is also understood as mirroring the hunger of The Wilderness. “It’s not evil. Just hungry. Like us,” Lottie retorts. When a life is given—and eaten—The Wilderness is pleased.

(Yellowjackets during a cannibalistic ritual in The Wilderness)

The more I (re)watched, the more I reflected on how the cult of the biblical God is not so different. Biblical theologies often reflect their authors’ convictions about what their God wants or desires. Trauma is part of this. While, at least from a scholarly perspective, there is no such thing as “one Bible” or “one biblical God” or “one biblical storyline”—multiple authors with differing ideologies wrote the stories within the Bible over hundreds of years (also likely with no foresight that their stories would become canonized)—there are shared themes that help tie the narratives together. One is the human tendency to sense-make in a nonsensical world.

Some of the earliest biblical narratives, for example, blame Israelite suffering on the failure of the collective Israelite self to appease the Israelite God. The book of Hosea’s response to the Assyrian invasion of Israel in the 8^th century BCE is a prime illustration of this. According to Hosea, Assyria destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel because the Israelites were worshipping multiple gods. In Hosea’s view, external enemies will no longer invade Israelite territory so long as the Israelites take on a henotheistic ideology with the God of Israel at the helm. This kind of self-blame is a common response to trauma. Self-blame implies that the situation is controllable and even reasonable. This makes the world seem less ominous—less chaotic. Offerings become a central part of this. Although not cannibalistic, human sacrifices are ritualistically donated to the God of Israel, including Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11:30-40), so as to maintain fellowship. So long as the Israelites please their God, their God will please them.

Still, the cult of The Wilderness might appear more daunting. Teens are hunting teens for consumption, using murder as method and Lottie’s calls from The Wilderness as justification for their actions. But the Bible contains horror, too. In Genesis, the Israelite God drowns almost all of the world’s inhabitants. In Exodus, that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart so as to keep the Israelites enslaved in Egypt. In the Gospels, God’s chosen messiah is crucified under the Roman imperial system. And in Revelation, that messiah, now resurrected, burns those who disagree with him for all eternity. Often labeled “texts of terror” by biblical scholars, the Bible is filled with stories of justified abuse, torture, and annihilation.

While much of these terrors lack historical reliability, they still reflect the pain and suffering experienced in antiquity. There remains no archaeological evidence, for example, of Israelites enslaved in Egypt or their mass Exodus from Egypt, but there is evidence of repeated violence, oppression, and forced deportation at the hands of non-Israelite nations. The earliest evidence of an Israelite people (ca 1200 BCE), in fact, stems from an Egyptian stele in which Pharaoh Mernephtah boasts of Egypt’s destruction of communal Israel. This historical terror continues. In 722 BCE, the Assyrian empire destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and forced its inhabitants into other Assyrian territories. In 587 BCE, the Babylonian Empire destroyed the Southern Kingdom of Israel, including the Jerusalem Temple, and forced its inhabitants into Babylonia. In 70 CE, the Roman empire destroyed Jerusalem again, and in ca. 130 CE, the emperor Hadrian founded a Roman city on top of Jerusalem’s ruins and forced local Jews into diaspora.

(Left: 8th century BCE relief of Israelite deportees under Assyria. Right: 19th century CE depiction of Israelite deportees to Babylon by James Tissot.)

This history highlights the extent to which biblical tales are crafted as human responses to human suffering—as ways to narrate and make sense of pain, even if (especially if?) the suffering remains nonsensical. While not necessarily drowning physically, the Israelites and later Jews drown metaphorically—over and over again. Like the Yellowjackets, their communal consciousness is under prolonged, life-altering, life-threatening stress. The Bible’s pull to rationalize these traumas is even bound up in further food ritualization: Israelites and later Jews not only offer sacrifices to their God, but also commemorate their connection to that God through ritualized feast: “Eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast…It is the Lord’s Passover” (see Exodus 12:3-14). To this the New Testament Gospels reply: eat Jesus.

(Left: A scene with the characters in Yellowjackets holding a banquet. Right: 16th c. depiction of Jesus’ final banquet by Joan de Joanes)

More than ritual, however, trauma recovery focuses on stories. Because trauma creates fragments within the self—ones that show themselves through manifestations of psychic disconnect (e.g., hypervigilance, anxiety, flashbacks)—recovery requires building new connections. By naming and giving words to traumatic and posttraumatic experiences, storytelling becomes an act of trauma processing—an act that seeks to make sense of and survive its haunting associations and dissociations. This takes time. Single narrations are rarely enough. We must let suffering speak, as Cornell West so aptly heeds. And then we must let it speak again. This is a process, to be sure, filled with reckoning, revision, challenging, and reality-checking. Engaging revision, asserts Brené Brown, is how we “transfor[m] who we are.”

The Bible does this; its many authors process pain through tellings and retellings of traumatic pasts. While the book of Exodus might offer one telling and understanding of the Babylonian exile and experiences in diaspora, Daniel offers another. And Esther another one still. Again, this is not easy. In many instances, the psychic impact of trauma reveals itself in and through the narrativizing process. In Ezekiel, for example, a text that also responds to the Babylonian exile, Ezekiel plays out his suffering through anxious ritualized eating. His pain in exile becomes so disconnected from its source that it attaches onto his eating habits. Not wanting to lose connection with his deity, Ezekiel imagines his limited food intake—a limitation likely caused by the realities of exile in addition to the pain of it—as deserved (self-blame) and wanted by his God. At one point, he even thinks his God is the one choosing what he can and cannot eat, when he can eat, and where. Food within the Bible is thus not just about honoring the Israelite God or commemorating a God-human relationship; it is also about grappling with posttraumatic anxiety and the fact that bad things still happen under that God’s jurisdiction. It is about a people attempting to rationalize their suffering while also yearning for their God to love them.

Yellowjackets similarly immerses viewers into the traumas of its characters. We see them experience a plane crash, death, more death, starvation, hallucination, and the destabilization of their mental capacities. Even more than Ezekiel, viewers are set up to feel for the characters—to identify with them—as the episodes progress. By the time the Yellowjackets eat their second victim and call on Lottie’s connection to The Wilderness for justification, some of us might identify with their justification too. Through the processes of introjection and association, we sympathize with their attempts to survive. We understand their limited capacity to reason under these conditions. And we also understand, as psychotherapist Glenn Patrick Doyle writes on trauma, that “[w]hen we are in pain, we will do almost anything to get out of pain. We will believe anything—or anyone—who seems to have answers.” In the case of Ezekiel, this includes the idea that God wants Ezekiel to suffer. In Yellowjackets, it includes the belief that The Wilderness chooses who suffers. “How else,” as Lottie puts it, “do we explain what happened out there?”

By the time a group of surviving Yellowjackets gather in the storyline’s present—seemingly the first instance of such a gathering since their teen years—viewers want them to reconnect the parts of themselves that remain ruptured. They want the survivors to cultivate care for themselves—to speak, finally, about what happened to them, and to then speak it again. Some survivors try, and in doing so repeat old patterns, showcasing all the more their need to try and try again to integrate their pain into their conscious selves: Lottie hallucinates. Van falls prey to magical ideation. In fact, Van goes as far as wanting a Wilderness repeat; she seems to think an offering to the forest will cure her cancer. During one of our rewatching ceremonies, my spouse declared it stunning that none of the characters, as far as we know, had developed an eating disorder. Perhaps in Season 3 we will learn of another survivor who, like the biblical Ezekiel, imagines The Wilderness choosing what she can and cannot eat, not just in the past, but in her posttraumatic present.

The Wilderness, of course, does not choose by itself. There is a dyadic charge between the Yellowjackets and The Wilderness. The Wilderness may choose for the team, but the team also hunts—and eats—for The Wilderness. It is hard to know when one becomes the other. Perhaps they always were the same. Viewers see the clearest evocation of this dyad in one of the final scenes of Yellowjackets’ second season. “You know there’s no ‘It,’” adult survivor Shauna says in alluding to The Wilderness. “It was just Us.” To which adult Lottie responds: “Is there a difference?”

The Bible is also human-constructed with the depths of the human condition expressed within it. And like Yellowjackets’ Wilderness, neither the Bible nor the God within it speaks for itself. The Bible is made and remade by its interpreters, often through the motivations and projections those interpreters put onto it. “The Bible Says,” for example, can be a weaponizing phrase, reducing biblical stories to a biased monolith. Many of us are familiar with these claims, the ones that benefit the ideologies of the interpreter at the expense of others: “The Bible Says” gays are damned to hell (it doesn’t). “The Bible Says” women must be subservient to men (it kind of does, but it also heavily implies the opposite by glorifying women chopping off men’s heads). Thus even the idea that the Bible “is” anything stems from interpretive bias; “it is rooted in Protestant faith claims around sola scriptura, the theological idea that the Bible is the full revelation of God and needs no intermediary tradition that impacts its meaning or interpretation.” What the Bible “says,” in other words, is as much a reflection of its interpreters as it is of ancient traumas and subsequent human retellings and responses.

In its multiplicity of meaning, exacerbated by both internal and external re-examinings and recapturings of narrative, the Bible, akin to Yellowjackets, reveals human hungers: Hunger for reason. Hunger for processing. Hunger for a provider that, even in its own terror, will not forget its people. But the Bible and Yellowjackets also warn us of the dangers of limited interpretive possibilities. Relying on the singular “The Bible Says” might indeed be parallel to “The Wilderness chose.” Both are reductionist. And both mask the reality that the Bible and The Wilderness are human-made. Perhaps, then, expanding our limits—rinsing, repeating, and retelling our stories while being open to additional or even counter information or explanation—is one of the best things we can do for ourselves. This is not just about trauma narration or the need to speak pain and then speak it again. It is also about looking back on where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, and how we’ve coped with an openness to do and see things differently. I understand that this may seem like a simple conclusion. Our post-2016 political moment, however—one that will require many tellings and retellings in order to process—reveals just how much this thesis is in need of saying and saying again.

This to me is cultivating care, which is oddly enough what I got from ceremonially rewatching Yellowjackets during the writers’ and actors’ strikes. I do hope, however, that if someone else were to watch and rewatch the show, they could figure out why the river turns red, why the tree is so hot in winter, and what in The Wilderness’ name is up with that symbol.

Sarah Emanuel is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. Her area of research includes biblical studies and its relations to trauma. She lives on the coast with her wife, pets, and espresso machine.

The post On Cults, Yellowjackets, and Rewatching Shows appeared first on The Revealer.

(Interior of Synagoge Rykestraße in Berlin. Photo by Bezirksamt Pankow)

It’s a decidedly blustery day on Karl Marx Street in Eisenach, in the eastern German state of Thuringia. Gold and rust-tinted leaves scatter the ground of a small park marking the site of the town’s former synagogue—burned down by a Nazi mob on Kristallnacht, the nationwide pogroms on November 9, 1938.

Tucked away in a quiet corner not far from Eisenach’s theater, the memorial is one of 32 sites across Thuringia—spots where synagogues were desecrated or destroyed that night in 1938. Of the many previously active synagogues, only a few remain today. Only one has been rebuilt for weekly services. The others are marked by memorial stones and stairways leading to nowhere—including empty lots or garden plots, apartment buildings, and even a grocery store. Where the small town of Vacha’s synagogue once stood, there is now a hobby shop.

These places dot the east German landscape, from Potsdam to Zwickau, Dresden to Magdeburg. Along with other memorials like Stolpersteine—stones with brass plates bearing the names of Holocaust (Shoah) victims, laid in the pavement in front of their former homes and businesses—they stand as stark reminders of the absent presence of the region’s once thriving Jewish population. They are places where the palpable influence of eastern Germany’s Jews remains potent, even where they are no longer present.

(Image of Stolpersteine. Photo by David Sedlecký)

They also signal the Jewish community’s present absence. Since the Shoah, under sometimes radically conflicting conditions, a range of diverse Jews have returned, resettled, and restored a sense of Jewish life across the former East German Republic (GDR). But the community is less-than-half what it was in pre-war Germany.

In places like Berlin, Leipzig, and Erfurt, Jews’ stories over the last century speak to lives lived between far-right politics and those of the far-left, communism and capitalism, growth and decline, remembrance culture (Erinnerungskultur) and an ominously encroaching antisemitism. Looking at East Germany–past and present–through Jewish eyes reveals today’s controversies are nothing new.

The challenges Jews in Germany faced following the Holocaust, including perils to their very existence, have shaped Jewish lives in the east for decades. The story of how under such conditions they still preserved their heritage is decades long. Now, facing declining demographics, a resurgent antisemitism, and fearing a far-right political turn, eastern Germany’s Jewish communities are once again under threat. And, once more, they are not only preserving their heritage, but claiming their place in German society.

Building a Life in the “Land of the Perpetrators”

To say the least, Germany’s Jewish community has gone through numerous tragedies and triumphs over its 1,700-year-long history. Using the broadest definition of who is considered Jewish, its current community stands at 225,000, the third largest in Europe. But before the Shoah, there were an estimated 525,000, accounting for around 1% of Germany’s pre-war population.

That the community is relatively large today, given the near-complete extermination of Jews within Germany from 1933-1945, is a miracle, said Reinhard Schramm, chairman of Thuringia’s Jewish community.

Born in the town of Weissenfels, in 1944, to a liberal Jewish mother and a Protestant father, Schramm was one of some 15,000 German Jews liberated by Allied forces in 1945. Some who stayed had a non-Jewish spouse or parent, surviving in hiding like Schramm’s family, who were concealed in a holiday home until the end of the war. Others survived, somehow, in concentration camps and ghettos like Theresienstadt.

After the war, Schramm said efforts to rebuild the decimated community in Germany’s east started immediately. In the early days, this community included two groups: a small segment of Jews who managed to flee the region and decided to return, as well as thousands of displaced newcomers and refugees from Eastern Europe. Historian Annette Leo, who was born in West Germany in 1948 before coming to East Berlin with her parents in 1952, wrote that both Jews from Germany and elsewhere “shared a common hope for a brighter future for Germany.”

Yet both populations of Jews struggled to feel at home in what Leo called, “land of the perpetrators.” Within a couple years, more than 90% of Jewish refugees in Germany, whether in the West or East, moved on—mostly to the United States and Palestine. Those who stayed behind banded together to provide each other with economic, social, and religious support. By 1948, there were more than 100 Jewish communities and in 1950, the Central Council of Jews in Germany (ZWST) was founded. The Jews who remained felt they could not only survive, but possibly even thrive in a rebuilt Germany, shaping what the country could become in the wake of war.

Jewish Life in a Time of Socialism

Those nascent hopes, however, were complicated by the increasing political, economic, and social divisions between what became West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG), and East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). Under their respective occupying governments, the two Germanys followed different paths. West Germany was allied with the U.S., the U.K., and France, becoming a rapidly developing capitalist country with a robust market economy. In contrast, East Germany allied with the Soviet Union, becoming a socialist “workers’ and peasants’ state” under a highly centralized government that struggled to find its economic footing.

The divide between East and West also split Germany’s Jewish population, with 70 communities in the West and just eight in the East. Though largely overshadowed by their counterparts in the West, communities in eastern cities like Dresden, Erfurt, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and Schwerin did their best to sustain a vibrant Jewish life over five decades of socialist rule. Overlooked for decades, their stories are now being retold through efforts like that of the Jewish Museum of Berlin, which recently opened an exhibition, “Another Country: Jewish in the GDR.” According to Leo, who contributed to the Berlin exhibition, without permanent rabbis or cantors, and often having to import kosher food from neighboring Eastern European countries, “the attempt to reestablish Jewish life [in the East] took place under contradictory conditions.”

Although officially atheist, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government “supported the founding or reconstitution of the Jewish communities and ensured that the returnees and immigrants received the basic necessities of life (a roof over their heads, clothing, health care, and additional food rations),” Leo shared. Many of the returnees, in fact, made the conscious choice to help rebuild Germany under the guise of a more equitable, socialist society. Several became prominent members of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) or held positions of prominence in the arts or academia. Among them were anti-fascist painter and graphic artist Lea Grundig (1906-1977) and composer Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), famous for penning East Germany’s national anthem.

But antisemitism was still rampant, both among the authorities and in the general population. In 1952, an antisemitic show trial against leading Jewish state and party functionaries took place in Czechoslovakia.  Eleven of the accused, headed by Rudolf Slánsky, were sentenced to death on trumped-up charges, including high treason against the soviet state. According to Reinhard Schramm, Jews in the GDR “were scared because Prague was close.”

Antisemitism plagued the GDR. Schramm said Jews were accused of being “rootless cosmopolitans” and “Zionist traitors,” as GDR leadership took a more pro-Arab position with regard to land issues in Palestine. Some Jews were even interrogated. Despite the promise of restitution, the Soviets and later, the GDR state, neglected to return the vast majority of property stolen from Jewish owners in the 30s, citing Jews as “sabotage of the economy.” In 1952, the state said “capital stolen from Jewish capitalists” was not subject to reparations. During this time, around two thirds of all Jews living in the GDR fled.

As East Germany’s political and cultural hub, Berlin boasted the largest Jewish community in the GDR. In a city literally divided, a wide spectrum of Jews came together to try and construct a sense of communal life through holiday celebrations, summer camps for kids, and organized trips to the sea. These Jews identified as religious and secular, state-aligned socialists and active dissidents. And yet, despite diverse values, they mutually embraced their common cultural origins—founded in a shared value system and forged through persecution.

Long before Berlin’s now-famous New Synagogue on Oranienburger Street was reopened in the 1990s, East Berlin’s several hundred religious Jews gathered at the Rykestrasse Synagogue, chatted at the kosher butcher’s shop in Prenzlauer Berg, and buried their dead at the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, the largest of its kind in Europe. The exhibit at the Jewish Museum Berlin tells the story of people like Jalda Rebling, a well-known hazzan (cantor) who grew up in East Berlin. Her parents’ home was a gathering place for Jewish intellectuals who repatriated to the GDR, sharing in Yiddish their fears and hopes, cultural aspirations, and political machinations. That communal life, Rebling wrote, was vital to her self-understanding, particularly “as a Jewish child in a Berlin suburb, it was very difficult to make friends.”

(Exterior of the New Synagogue in Berlin)

Rebling went on to found a Yiddish culture festival in Germany and Wir für uns in the late 1980s—part of what became the Centrum Judaicum, a place for “creative, modern Judaism” in the 1990s that was gay affirming and progressive. In the exhibit, she speaks nostalgically about Berlin, as a city with many Jewish layers, which needed to be rebuilt and renewed, “sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes as a matter of course.”

According to historian Miriam Rürup, it is this sense of nostalgia for the former East—or Ostalgie—that has helped spark a renewed interest in the GDR’s Jewish history. As director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam, outside Berlin, Rürup says that recent scholarship has opened up new perspectives on everyday life for Jews in the GDR, showing a “great variety of Jewish experiences” and means of engaging with the state.

The Only Synagogue Rebuilt in the GDR

The eastern city of Erfurt, the nerve center for Thuringia’s Jewish community in the GDR, has been a site of everyday Jewish life for centuries. Indeed, Erfurt boasts a 900-year Jewish history and was recently named a UNESCO World Heritage site for its Old City, which includes a treasure of coins, goldwork and jewelry, gravestones, manuscripts, a medieval mikvah (bath used for ritual purification), and a synagogue dating to the 11^th century. But its community almost did not survive after 1945. From a prewar (1930) population of 1,197, only 80 Jews remained in Erfurt in 1954.

Among those who did return, Max Cars—a survivor of the Theresienstadt ghetto—served as chairperson of the community from 1945-1961, leading the effort to rebuild the city’s synagogue, razed by the Nazis in 1938. According to Reinhardt Schramm, during the first service in the rebuilt synagogue, Cars held up the Torah, which survived the Shoah in the safety of the Erfurt Cathedral, as the kernel of hope that would help restore the community. During this first reconvening, on April 25, 1946, Cars lifted the Torah as a reminder of the Jewish will to survive. Reflecting on Erfurt’s multi-century Jewish history, Cars told those gathered, “It is important to prove that the few Jews left alive are true to their faith.”

The next year, Erfurt’s city council granted the community control of the land on which the Great Synagogue stood—one of the few instances when the GDR state came through on its Wiedergutmachung, or restitution, promises—and in 1947, construction began on a new synagogue designed by Willy Noeckel. Funded by the state and inaugurated in 1952, Erfurt’s New Synagogue would be the only synagogue reconstructed in five decades of GDR rule. From an original seed of some 15 members, the community ballooned to 280, with an influx of newcomers from Poland and farther east.

Community leaders also tried to show themselves as an important part of society through active participation in mass organizations and membership in the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Even so, antisemitism remained. “Party leaders called into question the existence of the Jewish state, which was antisemitic in its effect,” Schramm said, “they even questioned whether Jews should qualify for life insurance.”

In such an environment, and with so many synagogue seats still left vacant, Schramm said Jewish life in the GDR was “kind of a niche experience.” They held Hanukkah balls, commemorated funerals, and celebrated the end of fascism at regular events, maintaining a vibrant cultural life as best they could. “When we were not seen as enemies of the system, we were able to continue our normal lives like other people in the GDR. We faced the same issues. We faced the same problems. But nothing in particular special to us,” Schramm said, “We were standard citizens.”

Evidence of this vibrancy comes from those like Raphael Scharf-Katz, who was the Chair of the Jewish Regional Community of Thuringia from 1985-1994. Scharf-Katz used his camera to capture not only his family’s private life, but also developments in Erfurt’s Jewish community, including life-cycle celebrations, and festive occasions at the rebuilt synagogue in the early 1950s. So vibrant was the community, that Jewish journalist Alfred Joachim Fischer described it in 1948 as “one of the best in Germany” with a “well organized” religious, cultural, and social life that far outshone others he’d seen in the Soviet Zones or in the West. Even so, underfunded, aging, and suffering the effects of a slow, but steady attrition, just 30 members remained by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Since 1990, however, the Erfurt community has had a bit of a renaissance, thanks in large part to new members from the former Soviet Union. When Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders in the late 1980s, there was nothing holding back the roughly two million Soviet Jews from finding new places to call home. They came from Moscow and Kyiv, Odessa and Riga. Many went to the U.S. or Israel, but tens of thousands also made their way to Germany, especially East Berlin, either to maintain geographic proximity to their homeland, because of political and economic expectations, or for stability and better prospects for their children. Jewish communities grew significantly, reopening kindergartens, schools, and youth centers. New synagogues cropped up. Since the 1990s, 30 new synagogues were constructed.

In Erfurt, Scharf-Katz was able to welcome some 200 Jews from the former Soviet Union and, today, Schramm said it is thanks to these newcomers that the Jewish Community of Thuringia numbers around 800, of which 500 live in Erfurt. “Make no mistake,” he said, “though the change came almost silently, Jews from the former Soviet Union have ensured the continued existence of our community.” According to Sharf-Katz, “The immigrants and their descendants, most of whom speak Russian, have forever changed our religious, cultural, and political life.”

Contemporary Contradictions

During a visit to Erfurt’s synagogue in October 2023, a small collection of flowers and candles marked the front of the space. These mementoes included prayers and well-wishes following Hamas’s attacks in Israel on October 7. Israeli flags were available for pick up in the lobby and synagogue staff said they had only received words of support and sympathy from the broader community. As I left, however, I passed a clearly marked police van with two officers standing outside, monitoring the entrance.

Antisemitism has been prevalent in Germany since before the early October attacks and the Israeli state’s reprisal in Gaza, with incidents on the rise in the country for the last few decades. In 2022, Germany’s Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism (RIAS), documented 2,480 incidents. According to German police, that number was 2,032 in 2019, including a synagogue attack in the eastern city of Halle. In 2010, there were 1,268 such incidents. The roots of this uptick in hate speech, attacks, and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are complex, and include a mix of right-wing political extremism, the influence and appeal of global antisemitic rhetoric on the internet, and conspiracy theories surrounding current events like the pandemic and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Along with antisemitic vandalism and assaults, Jews in Germany’s East—where the populist, anti-migrant, far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been leading in polls for months—fear further harassment and violence. Given Germany’s history leading up to and during the Holocaust, the potential political power of such parties is particularly alarming to the Jewish community.

Despite public support for, and financial backing from, the German Federal Government, some Jews, like Igor Matviyets, aren’t sure they are going to stay in Germany. Migrating from Ukraine with his family when he was seven, the Jewish politician for Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) considers the country his home. But Matviyets wonders how long that feeling will keep him rooted in Halle, the largest city in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. With the AfD’s rising political prospects, Matviyets and other Jews are openly speculating about whether they might leave if right-wing extremists become part of a state government. “I have thought about this again and again,” Matviyets said, “but the risk is high enough that we may have to pack the suitcases and go once more.”

Warning that people from outside should not be quick to judge the East or blame it for the rise in various forms of racism and xenophobia in Germany, Schramm said he is confident that democracy will win in the former GDR. “The only way to defeat antisemitic forces is as a community,” he said, “We know what our problems are. We are also Ostdeutsche citizens. We understand the issues. We can address them together.” To that end, along with local politicians, he has been engaging with right-leaning groups like student fraternities, which have frequently been linked to antisemitic crimes. Schramm said he hopes such forces won’t succeed in upcoming state elections in Thuringia in 2024.

As a man born in eastern Germany, who came of age in the GDR and Eastern Bloc countries like Poland, Schramm is not planning on going anywhere. For now. Emphasizing that antisemitism isn’t solely an East German problem or a German one, but a worldwide responsibility, Schramm remains optimistic. “But even in my family, there are different opinions about this. My wife says that if the AfD wins, she doesn’t know what to do. It’s hard to assess.”

Reminded of the Jews who returned after pogroms in the past, as well as community leader, Max Cars, as he reconvened the Erfurt community in 1946, Schramm said, “Jews know how to remain, to be faithful. I am optimistic that in 30-50 years, we will continue to have a normal Jewish life here in east Germany.” Part of that means, he said, never forgetting what went wrong and trying again, no matter the conditions, to make things right.

Ken Chitwood is a religion scholar and journalist based in Germany.

The post Contradictory Conditions: Jewish Life in East Germany, Past and Present appeared first on The Revealer.

(Illustration by Debora Cheyenne)

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter needs no introduction. Many fans and music afficionados alike agree that she is the best entertainer of her generation, and arguably among the best entertainers ever. Her stratospheric superstardom is so multi-layered that it supersedes what the world of entertainment has previously seen.

Her Renaissance album, tour, and now film are an homage to Black music, dance, and culture. As part of her tribute to disco and house music, she centers the creative contributions of Black and LGBTQ communities to these genres. Renaissance also give us glimpses into her personal spiritual practices, which she began offering in the visual albums Lemonade and Black Is King. Beyoncé leads us to a unique space where Black culture, history, and spiritualities intersect in a dizzying array of provocative lyrics and jaw-dropping performances.

However, Renaissance offers more than just entertainment. Through music and dance, Renaissance is doing the culture-shifting work of centering Black and queer communities that have been, and continue to be, harmed by whitewashing, marginalization, and discrimination.

Beyoncé achieves this liberating work in artistically unique ways while also standing her ground against many Christian detractors. Her Renaissance song “Church Girl,” for example, has raised the ire of many conservative Christians. She contrasts the conservative ideal of a “Godly Woman,” a woman who dresses modestly and follows her husband’s leadership, over against a self-empowered, body positive “bad girl” who feels free to dance, believe in herself, and speak her mind. Beyoncé is giving voice and permission to women who feel restricted by the church’s judgmental gaze. “Church Girl” has become an anthem to many Black Christian women and to the growing trend of Black women who are leaving Christianity and seeking out African-based spiritualities instead. This spiritual shift is an important phenomenon within African American Christianity on its own; as Beyoncé continues to share her own spiritual practices she adds to the visibility of this growing spiritual innovation.

The Beyoncé Bump

Yelp’s economics website Yelp Data, uses the term “Beyoncé bump” to refer to the increase in spending that local markets have experienced when her tour comes to town. In Philadelphia, for example, which hosted the beginning of the American leg of her tour in July 2023, Yelp reported a considerable increase in cash flow to restaurants, hotels, beauty services, and to small businesses owned by women, LGBTQ persons, and other minority owners as her fans intentionally searched out these businesses.

By the time the tour concluded in October 2023, it had earned $580 million, more than all of her previous concerts combined. Billboard reports that the tour sold 2.8 million tickets across 56 shows throughout North America and Europe.

Renaissance’s impact extends beyond economics. Renaissance pours libations to Black dance music and honors the legacies of earlier performers. In the album and on the tour, Beyoncé reminds the world that Black people created disco, house, funk, rock & roll, and the blues. She names iconic and historical figures of Black music throughout various songs. Even a casual listen to “Break My Soul” (The Queens Remix) gives the listener a bibliography of mostly Black women performers, including the “Godmother of Rock & Roll,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Tharpe is the blues/rock & roll guitarist who influenced the likes of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley. Her legacy became a casualty within a music industry that literally whitewashes people of color. Tharpe was a Black female gospel and rock & roll artist for whom the music industry had no place, leaving her to fall from communal memory. Beyoncé reclaims Tharpe’s place as an innovator, and rock & roll as Black music.

“Break My Soul” (The Queens Remix) continues the lyrical acknowledgment of more groundbreaking performers such as disco legends Donna Summer, Grace Jones (repeated for emphasis), “Empress of Blues” Bessie Smith, and jazz great Nina Simone. The roll call continues with Aaliyah, Solange Knowles (her sister and artist in her own right), Missy Elliot, Janet Jackson, Roberta Flack, Anita Baker, Diana Ross, Jill Scott a.k.a Jilly From Philly, Rihanna, Sade, Madonna, Whitney Houston, and Lauryn Hill. As a professor who teaches a course in Black Cultural Arts, I can say that Renaissance is a helpful teaching tool for Gen Z students who do not know the contributions of many of these artists. This song alone does the heavy lifting in a course designed to teach students about the trajectory of Black music from its roots in the blues to nearly every genre within contemporary American music.

Renaissance’s Queer Culture

“Bad Bitches To The Left…Money Bitches To The Right!” – “Pure/Honey,” Renaissance

Much of the music in Renaissance is rooted in the creative style and sounds of Ballroom culture. Ballroom, as depicted in the television show Pose and the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, features various “houses” of performers vying for the top spot in pageant like “drag balls.” For decades, Ballroom has provided safe creative venues by and for Black and Latinx LGBTQ folks.

In Renaissance, Beyoncé pays homage to the Ballroom tradition in the song “Heated” where she declares herself, “mother of my house” and calls out the well-established houses of Extravaganza, Balenciaga, Balmain, Ninja, Mugler, and Mizrahi. The lyric “Uncle Johnny Made My Dress…” loops through the background of “Heated” as a shout-out to her own uncle who made clothes and inspired Beyoncé by introducing her to the music and culture represented in the album. She notes on her website that he was her “Godmother.” Renaissance is dedicated to Uncle Johnny, the person who showed Beyoncé the ingenuity and creativity within the queer world of Ballroom and its fiercely competitive traditions of innovative fashion, dance and performance.

References to Ballroom extend through the tour. Concert performances include a catwalk and voguing. Beyoncé establishes an inclusive party vibe where everyone is welcome.

(Photo from a ballroom in New York City in 1998. Image by Catherine McGann for Getty Images.)

As part of its homage to Ballroom culture, Renaissance is a love letter to disco and house music, two sub-genres of Black funk and soul music, and an extension of Black dance and performance traditions. Renaissance re-centers all of these components within the realm of Black cultural production. House music, for example, first emerged within the context of urban, underground gay clubs in Chicago, New York, New Jersey, and Detroit in the late 1970s, most notably under the influence of iconic DJs Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles. Many people within these communities had been ostracized from their homes, families, and churches, and sought to create new spaces where they could be free, safe, and accepted. Dance clubs became those places. As I’ve written elsewhere, clubs and dance floors became spiritual sanctuaries. Gospel House became a sub-genre of its own, serving as both resistance to religious exclusion and its own form of liberation theology in which LGBTQ people declared themselves loved and seen by God. In the wee hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning, club goers created their own spiritual revival through ecstatic dance to pulsating music. Renaissance is steeped in this culture. By featuring this music, Beyoncé tells the story of its creators, icons, innovators, and club goers. Those who were excluded now have the spotlight on Beyoncé’s stages. Those who may conflate house music with European electronic dance music are corrected with lessons in Black music and dance culture. Renaissance resists the whitewashing of Black music and dance and corrects the erasure of LGBTQ people.

“Beyoncé won’t save you!” 

Beyoncé continues to be a target for many Black conservative, evangelical Christians who oppose her work. These Christians claim Beyoncé’s music is “Satanic,” that she is engaged in witchcraft, and that she encourages her followers to perform demonic rituals. They scrutinize her visual images, hand gestures, artistic productions, and song lyrics in search of evidence that she and her family (husband Jay-Z and sister Solange Knowles) are literally in league with the devil. One image from her album Black Is King, in which she wears a crown of horns, is particularly inflammatory. Some Christian critics take this imagery to suggest an alliance between Beyoncé and the pagan god, Baphomet. Conservative Christians continue to cite these images as proof of Beyoncé’s allegiance to the devil, despite Beyoncés overt attempts to correct this oversight by proclaiming her intention to channel Hathor, an African deity that pre-dates Baphomet and wears a crown of horns.

(Image from “Black is King”)

Ministers such as Bishop Patrick L.Wooden, Sr. use their pulpits to disparage Beyoncé and the Knowles-Carter family, vehemently discouraging their parishioners from listening to any of their music or attending their concerts. Wooden refers to the song “Church Girl” as “demonic trash and sacrilege.” Pastor Tiphani Montgomery went viral for reprimanding Christians who are Beyoncé  fans, noting that Beyoncé is “a witch hosting large scale covens.” While these claims seem outrageous, there is a longstanding conspiracy theory that names Beyoncé and Jay-Z as members of the Illuminati, a secret society of the powerful elite, who demand sacrifices and loyalty in exchange for fame and wealth. Untimely celebrity deaths are often attributed to the Illuminati calling in a debt. While these conspiracies seem far-fetched, the stories are pervasive and somehow remain just under the surface of mainstream culture.

Among many problems with these accusations, they reveal people’s ignorance of the African spiritualities that Beyoncé references in her work. As I write elsewhere, the colonization and religious conversion of African peoples throughout the diaspora to conservative, evangelical Christianity has resulted in a wholesale rejection of African religions, viewed as illegitimate and demonic. Beyoncé offers another perspective on this topic by centering African culture and spirituality in Lemonade, Black Is King, and Renaissance.

Beyoncé educates audiences about African culture and spiritualities. In the album Black Is King, she centers the work of African designers, performers, and artists. The album is a retelling of The Lion King, and depicts a coming-of-age set of vignettes featuring a young African boy on his journey into self-knowledge and maturity. The entire project’s visuals present the beauty and contributions of African people; the music, imagery, clothing, and lyrics inspire conversation, debate, and education.

For many people, Africa remains captive to a dominant colonial narrative of an impoverished continent whose people are constantly in need of foreign protection and support. As such, the truth of Africa’s wealth, vast cultural diversity, far-reaching history, pre-colonial empires, and contemporary urban sophistication remain unknown to most of the world. Beyoncé is changing that narrative. Her album Lemonade gives audiences a peek into African cultural richness, including her own spiritual practices. The Lemonade song “Hold Up” offers several insights into her personal spiritual practices, including fasting, wearing white, abstaining from mirrors and sex, and being baptized in a river. Many of these rituals are part of ceremonial practices associated with the traditions of Ifa and Vodun. The video for “Hold Up” features Beyoncé walking through a rush of water in a yellow dress, reminiscent of the West African Orisha of rivers, streams, beauty, and fertility, Oshun. Likewise, the Black Is King song, “Black Parade,” references Oshun, ancestor veneration, and Beyoncé’s practice of charging her crystals in the moonlight.

Beyoncé’s music influences and reflects the already growing trend of African American women leaving Christianity to explore African spiritualities. Documentaries such as Ancestral Voices    and news stories illuminate the phenomenon of those exploring the traditions of Ifa, Vodun, Lucumi, and Hoodoo. Where evangelical Christians continue to protest the re-emergence of interest in these practices, they are met with the resistance of African people throughout the diaspora seeking their roots and ancestral connections. Descendants of Africa throughout the world feel drawn to know themselves more fully and to find spiritual empowerment, and Beyoncé reflects and celebrates this deep connection to the continent.

***

The “bump” that Beyoncé gives to Black culture and spiritualities has yet to be fully seen. Scholars, writers, economists, artists, influencers, and religious leaders continue to watch, critique, and measure the effect of every project she takes on. Renaissance is not only an entertaining dance album, it IS a renaissance itself that recalls and showcases the contributions of legendary artists past and present. It functions as a historical and cultural gallery for Black and queer creativity to be remembered and acknowledged as the foundation of disco, house, and dance culture.

Black spiritualities are also prominently on display in this cultural renaissance. Beyoncé’s body of work pushes the boundaries of Christian theology, spurring theological reflection and discussions as her global audiences are introduced to diverse Black spiritualities beyond the monolithic, conservative Black Church by pointing toward a cosmos filled with African deities, ancestors, and rituals. In these ways, “the Beyoncé bump” includes a multi-faceted artistic renaissance that continues to lift our collective cultural competence long after the last dance. Because, as Beyoncé tells us herself, “the Renaissance is not over.”

Darnise C. Martin, Ph.D. is a lecturer in the African American Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University. She is the author of Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church.

The post Beyoncé Gives Us a Black, Queer, and Spiritual Renaissance appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image by Getty Images)

My favorite Christmas jingle was written and performed (loosely speaking) by my daughter. Like most kids, she loved Christmas, since it was the season when her grandparents tried to see if they could literally bury her in gifts. At least a couple of those gifts, putatively, came from Santa.

As a longstanding Jewish person, I never believed in Santa—my parents explained early on to my brother and me that my peers were all duped by a coordinated campaign of jolly bearded duplicity and warned us not to disabuse them. We were dutiful, and kept the secret, as far as I remember. We might have felt a little superior about it, which seems forgivable, since we were five and six at the time.

My family was never particularly religious, and I’ve only gotten more secular and assimilated over time. So I was happy enough for my non-Jewish wife’s parents to disgorge great gouts of Christmas presents rather than great gouts of Hanukkah presents; the small child was ecstatic either way.

Still, 5000 years of history is hard to toss out entirely, and I have to admit I was a little leery about lying to my daughter in order to advance the Christmas rituals, however jolly.

So I didn’t lie. I told my 4-year-old daughter, “Santa Claus isn’t real.”

And she got a big smile on her face and said in a sing song, “Yes he is! I don’t believvvvee you!” Then she dissolved into giggles.

Which put me in my place, I guess.

My daughter didn’t know it at the time, but her little foray into Christmas singing had a great deal of Jewish precedent. Jews have written and performed much of the contemporary Christmas music canon.

Christmas is in many ways central to American identity, and Jewish Christmas songs have (like my daughter) claimed that American identity for Jewish people, helping Jews fit into America. Jewish songs can also (like me) express distance or ambivalence about the season and its meaning. The Jewish Christmas music tradition is both about belonging and not belonging, about belieevvvveing and not believing. If America is a winter wonderland, that winter wonderland has, in part, been built by Jewish people. Though sometimes we maybe still shiver a bit.

The Mixed Meaning of Christmas for Jewish Immigrants

Jewish immigrants to the United States had very different experiences with Christmas in their countries of origin. As Joshua Eli Plaut explains in his 2012 monograph A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish, German Jews in the nineteenth century were well-assimilated and often had Christmas trees in their homes. Theodor Herzl, for example, generally viewed as the father of the Zionist movement, had a Christmas tree at his house in Vienna. A rabbi expressed dismay at Herzl’s adoption of the Christmas custom, but Herzl wrote in his diary, “I will not let myself be pressured! But I don’t mind if they call it the Hanukah tree—or the winter solstice.”

Christmas had a rather dissimilar meaning for Jews in Eastern Europe. Pastors there on Christmas preached antisemitic sermons blaming Jews for the death of Jesus, frequently inciting violence and pogroms. In Warsaw in 1881, a stampede in a church on Christmas day killed dozens. The public blamed Jews, sparking a three-day riot in which numerous Jewish women were raped, two Jews were murdered, 24 were hospitalized, and more than a thousand Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed.

Immigrants brought these varied experiences of Christmas to America with them. Jewish children and parents were attracted to the Santas and the presents and the trees. But as Christmas became institutionalized as an American tradition (it was declared a federal holiday in 1870), American Jews could also feel alienated or excluded. Jewish Christmas music became a way to express both attitudes—Jewish Christmas enthusiasm and Jewish Christmas skepticism.

White Christmas For All

Jewish Americans weren’t the first to create a secular Christmas tradition. Clement Clark Moore’s famous 1823 poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas” and cartoonist Thomas Nast’s famous drawings of the rotund, jolly Christmas icon helped Santa displace Jesus as the holiday’s most familiar image by the end of the 19^th century.

But while they didn’t initiate the trend towards secularization, Jewish songwriters and performers eagerly embraced it. Benny Goodman, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants and a popular bandleader, recorded “Jingle Bells” in 1935 with an all-star band including (non-Jewish) trumpeter Bunny Berigan and (non-Jewish) drummer Gene Krupa. Singer Mel Tormé wrote “The Christmas Song” in 1945 in the middle of a sweltering summer in an effort to beat the heat—a song about a frigid Christian holiday written during a heat wave by a Jewish composer.

“Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and “Do You Hear What I Hear?” were also created by Jewish writers. Probably the most critically acclaimed Christmas album of all time, 1963’s A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector, was masterminded, like the title says, by Spector, who was Jewish. Of the ten best-selling Christmas albums of all time, at least two—Barbra Streisand’s 1967 A Christmas Album and Kenny G’s 1994 Miracles—are by Jewish artists.

The most famous and influential Jewish Christmas song is undoubtedly Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.” Berlin’s wife was Christian, and they celebrated Christmas at home, according to Plaut’s A Kosher Christmas. In fact, Berlin’s three-week-old child died on Christmas day in 1928; he and his wife visited the baby’s grave on the holiday most years.

Berlin wrote the song, however, in 1941, when he was working in Hollywood and couldn’t make it home to the East Coast. The song’s dreamy wistfulness (“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas/just like the ones I used to know/Where the treetops glisten and children listen/To hear sleigh bells in the snow”) is about missing family, living and dead. It’s a vision of a de-Christianized heaven.

That heaven is particularly American. Berlin’s biggest previous hit was the patriotic “God Bless America.” Berlin thought, presciently, that “White Christmas” would be even more successful.

(Cover image of an Irving Berlin White Christmas album)

The song first aired during the Kraft Music Hall radio show, sung by Bing Crosby just weeks after Pearl Harbor. U.S. soldiers preparing to travel to Europe or the Pacific embraced the lyrics for their vision of an idealized home front, covered in gentle gleaming drifts of peace and goodwill. Crosby was hesitant about performing “White Christmas” for the troops overseas because it “invariably…caused such a nostalgic yearning among the men.” But whenever he tried to cut it from the setlist, the audience rebelled. “These guys just hollered for it,” he said.

Turning Christmas from a religious festival into a celebration of sentimental American values—home, family, public fellowship—made the holiday more inclusive and more accessible to Jews. As Philip Roth wrote, “If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

But cementing American identity with white Christmas snow also had potential downsides. That ambiguity is difficult to miss in what I’d argue is the greatest version of “White Christmas” — the 1956 performance by the African-American vocal group The Drifters. The lead on the record alternates between bass-baritone Bill Pinkney and the dramatic high tenor of Clyde McPhatter. The song’s swing is infectiously bright, defying the melancholy of the lyrics. But at the close, the pace slows and the music drops out. It’s just Pinkney, a Black man singing in an era of Civil Rights demonstrations, caressing the words, “May all your Christmases be whiiiitttte.”

The Drifters’ cover underscores that while Berlin had secularized American identity, he hadn’t integrated it. “White Christmas” is a song that welcomes Jewish people into Christian whiteness by deemphasizing the Christology and emphasizing the whiteness. That leaves out people like the Drifters. But it leaves a question mark on white Jews as well, who aren’t always considered white everywhere. When the Drifters sing “White Christmas,” it’s about the distance between America’s vision of universal brotherhood and the reality of segregation, racism, and violence. That’s not what Berlin intended. But it’s in the song nonetheless.

Rudolph vs. Christmas

You can hear mixed emotions in other Jewish Christmas songs as well—most notably in that other massive Christmas classic, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” by Jewish brothers-in-law Robert L. May and Johnny Marks. Rudolph, per the famous lyrics, has a “very shiny nose,” which makes him a pariah among his fellow ungulates.

All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
“Rudolph, with your nose so bright
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?” 

Then how the reindeer loved him
As they shouted out with glee
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
You’ll go down in history”

Many critics over the years have pointed out that “Rudolph” is a disturbing story. The titular reindeer’s peers mock and bully him because his nose is red and glowing. It’s only when it turns out that his nose can provide light for Santa’s sleigh that the other reindeers accept him. Michael Schaffer at The New Republic argues that the song presents “a dystopia where affection is based on economic worth.”

May, the lyricist, said the song was partly based on his own experiences of childhood, when he was “shy” and “small.” He added that he “had known what it was like to be an underdog.” The song was also written while his wife was in the middle of a long illness that eventually led to her death. May described being “relieved” when Christmas decorations were taken down; thanks to his wife’s illness he “didn’t feel very festive.”

(Robert L. May with Rudolph. Image credit: 18 Doors)

These details of ostracism and alienation are personal; they’re from May’s life story. But they have a wider Jewish resonance. Many Jewish American children, after all, at various times in various places have felt left out during the holiday season.

On the surface there’s a happy message of inclusion, since Rudolph is ultimately welcomed into Christmas fellowship. But in order to be accepted, he first has to be more valuable and better at Christmas than his peers. Donner and Blitzen don’t have to win Santa’s regard through service; they start out beloved. Rudolph has to work at it and prove himself a valuable asset, as Jewish people have often had to prove that they belong, especially at Christmas. Part of the joke in Jewmongous’ acerbic, Christmas-bashing “Reuben the Hook-Nosed Reindeer” is that the song isn’t exactly a parody. It’s just acknowledging Rudolph’s original Jewish subtext.

If “Rudolph” can be heard as an ambivalent acknowledgement of Jewish exclusion at Christmas and “Reuben” as outright Jewish mockery of the holiday, Simon and Garfunkel’s lovely “Silent Night/7 O’Clock News” is somewhere in the middle—functioning as both an expression of nostalgic disappointment in and a critique of Christmas’s promise.

Released in 1966, the track features Jewish singers Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel combining their angelic harmonies on a reverent rendition of the hymn “Silent Night.” At the same time, a simulated news report is read. Over the course of the song, the news rises in volume, drowning out the singing as it details a variety of grim stories of the day—the failure of Civil Rights legislation, the murder of student nurses by Richard Speck, the ongoing war in Vietnam.

The song is an ironic comment on America’s failure to live up to the values it professes on Christmas—love, good fellowship, peace. Sung by a Jewish duo, though, it could also be a suggestion that Christian values aren’t love, good fellowship, and peace at all. If, traditionally, Christmas for some Jews has been a season of persecution, then “Silent Night” is a fitting complement to news of violence and hate. As with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and even “White Christmas,” Jewish Christmas songs often get their power from the fact that they are in some ways also anti-Christmas songs.

Skronking In a Winter Wonderland

Next to my daughter’s semi-musical pledge to Santa, the Jewish musical performance I love the most may be a brief snippet of a Christmas Eve performance by saxophonist John Zorn and friends at the 6^th Street Synagogue, available (though not much viewed) on YouTube.

The band, including bassist Shanir Blumenkranz, percussionist Cyro Baptista, and saxophonist Greg Wall, launches into a noisy free jazz version of “Winter Wonderland.” The tune is gloriously mangled and distorted; rather than strolling happily through a peaceful snowy landscape, it fights its ways through storms and murderous blasts of icicles and sleet gremlins. This is a winter with teeth.

You could see the performance as a bunch of (mostly) Jewish musicians in a Jewish venue deliberately desecrating a Christmas chestnut, giving the bland goyish season a skritchy funky New York makeover. But while “Winter Wonderland’s” lyrics were written by a Christian, the music is by Felix Bernard, who was Jewish, as John Zorn (a man obsessed with the unexpected corners of Jewish music) was certainly aware.

In that context, the performance doesn’t feel like mockery, but like an exultant escape. Zorn and company snap those trite lyrics off and pursue the song’s sophisticated swing into the barrage of cosmopolitan mishigas for which, they insist, it was always intended.

Believing in Not Believing

It’s tempting to give Zorn the last word, or skronk, but it’s not very Jewish to be overly triumphant, especially on Christmas. Jewish Christmas music helped create a secular culture that’s more open to Jewish people in some ways. It’s provided a blueprint for resistance, too. But as Khyati Y. Joshi writes in her 2020 book White Christian Privilege, “Christian beliefs, norms, and practices, and indeed, a Christian way of looking at the world, infuse our society, enjoying countless legal, structural, and cultural supports.”

The fact that most people don’t know that “White Christmas” or “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “Winter Wonderland” were written by Jewish songwriters suggests that Christmas is still, despite Irving Berlin’s best efforts, a religious, Christian-identified holiday, even if it’s also to some extent a secular one. Religious aspects of Christmas are seen as less and less important to many Americans. But at the same time, the right has tried to shame people into dropping the nondenominational “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas”—a silly controversy which nonetheless seems designed to remind Jews, and all non-Christians, that, at least in the eyes of some, we don’t belong in Christmas, or in the U.S.

Still, whether we belong or not, we’re here. My daughter is 20 now. She no longer believes in Santa, though she likes getting Christmas presents. I enjoyed pretending with her that Christmas was our holiday, and that it wasn’t. And I’m proud that she figured out that Christmas was a time for Jewish people to make up our own songs.

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 Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

In a year that has been marked by wars, climate disasters, and hate crimes, I’m thrilled to share some happier news. Last month, the Religion News Association, the largest professional organization for religion journalism in the United States, held their annual awards ceremony in Pulitzer Hall at the Columbia School of Journalism. They honored The Revealer with their first-place prize in “Excellence in Magazine Overall Religion Coverage,” the highest award for a print or online magazine.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The award was based on our 2022 special issue on “Trans Lives and Religion.” The issue features articles on transgender and nonbinary Muslims, Buddhists, and Sikhs; Two-Spirit Native Americans; gender diversity in the Talmud, how Christians can support transgender youth; and what we can learn from earlier anti-queer and anti-abortion legislation to help us address today’s anti-trans lobbying. I am tremendously grateful to the Religion News Association for this recognition. And I am especially appreciative for the great care and insights the special issue’s writers brought to this important topic. Congratulations to them for their award-winning work!

With this exciting news, I’m happy to present you with our final issue of 2023. Our December issue, like most of The Revealer’s issues, covers a range of cultural, political, and media topics. If, at the end of this tumultuous year, you’re looking for a feel-good article, that’s how we’re opening the December issue. The issue begins with Noah Berlatsky’s “Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas,” where he explores the prevalence of Jewish musicians who created and performed much-beloved Christmas music. Following that, we have another upbeat article on music and religion with Darnise Martin’s “Beyoncé Gives Us a Black, Queer, and Spiritual Renaissance,” where she considers how Beyoncé’s Renaissance album and tour present the world with important lessons in Black, queer, and African religious cultures. We then move away from a focus on music and, in “Contradictory Conditions,” Ken Chitwood investigates Jewish life in east Germany to see how Jewish communities have rebuilt since the Holocaust and how they are doing today. Then, in “On Cults, Yellowjackets, and Rewatching Shows” Sarah Emanuel reflects on what can happen when we rewatch television shows and offers a review, based on her repeated viewings, of the religious and biblical motifs in the series Yellowjackets. And, for the fifth year in a row, we are presenting our “Winter Reading Recommendations” of books published this year by Revealer writers that we believe you will enjoy.

The December issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Religion’s Role in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.” While great attention has been given these past two months to the war in Israel, we wanted to make sure we continue to focus on Ukraine as well. Dr. Nicholas Denysenko, author of the November 2023 Revealer article “Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches as a Battleground in Russia’s Invasion,” joins us to discuss the place of Orthodox Christianity within Russia’s war against Ukraine. We explore how Russia has historically used the Orthodox Church to influence life in Ukraine, how Russian Orthodox Church leaders justified the invasion, and what Orthodox Christians and other concerned people around the world can do to help bring an end to the war. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As we say goodbye to 2023, I feel much gratitude to the Religion News Association for their meaningful recognition of our work, as well as to everyone who has written for The Revealer and appeared on our podcast. And I am especially appreciative for all of you, our readers and listeners, for your support. I look forward to “revealing” what we have in store for you in 2024!

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

PS. We don’t publish a January issue, so we will be back with a brand-new issue (and introducing a new columnist) in early February 2024!

The post Ending 2023 with a Meaningful Award for The Revealer appeared first on The Revealer.