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: “Sexual Ethics for Today’s World.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 41: Sexual Ethics for Today’s World appeared first on The Revealer.

Here are a few photographic highlights from that evening.

(Left: Angela Zito, co-founder and co-director of the Center for Religion & Media. Right: Brett Krutzsch, Editor of The Revealer)

(Current and former staff, writers, and friends of The Revealer)

(NYU Center for Religion & Media notebooks and name tags)

(Elizabeth Castelli, a former visiting scholar at the Center for Religion & Media)

(Kali Handelman, 3rd Editor of The Revealer)

(Simran Jeet Singh, frequent contributor to The Revealer and postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Religion & Media)

(Co-founders and co-directors of NYU’s Center for Religion & Media: Angela Zito and Faye Ginsburg)

(From left to right: Kali Handelman, Simran Jeet Singh, and Liz Kineke)

(Friends of The Revealer and the Center for Religion & Media)

(Left: Ayala Fader, Revealer podcast guest and contributor to The Revealer. Right: Brett Krutzsch, Editor of The Revealer)

Here’s to our first 20 years!

The post 20th Anniversary Celebration Photos appeared first on The Revealer.

(Palestinian and Israeli flags. Image source: ABC News)

While countless publications offer a daily hot-take on the violence that has been unfolding in Israel and Gaza, we thought readers might be interested in articles that offer greater background on the conflict. Here, we offer a selection of curated articles, some from The Revealer and others from elsewhere, that will give you nuanced insights into the issues facing Israelis and Palestinians today.

Articles in The Revealer

1) What Does BDS Really Mean?
Adele Oltman
The movement to boycott Israel is divorced from the day-to-day problems facing Palestinians, and new strategies are urgently needed

2) Book Review: In Jerusalem: Three Generations of an Israeli Family and a Palestinian Family
Rebecca Alpert
A personal reflection on the conflict in Israel/Palestine and a review of Lis Harris’s book

3) Prophetic Except for Palestine: Social Justice and Reform Judaism
Martha Schoolman
Reform Judaism promotes social justice activism in the United States, but stays mostly silent on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians

4) El Pueblo de Israel: Evangelicos and Christian Zionism
Amy Fallas
Why have so many evangelical Latinos embraced Jewish rituals and Zionism?

Articles from other publications

1) From 1947 to 2023: Retracing the Complex, Tragic Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Natasha Li and Jean-Luc Mounier
An explanatory timeline from immediately before Israel’s establishment to today

2) We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other
Ariel Angel
A reflection on how Jewish groups should respond to what Hamas did and what the Israeli government is doing

3) After the Israel-Hamas War: Palestinian Perspectives
Yezid Sayigh and Khalil Shikaki
A conversation between two experts about what they think will happen following this war

4) Bibi’s War: How Incompetence, Opportunism, and Rejection Led to a Catastrophe for Israel and Palestine
Jay Michaelson
How Netanyahu’s decades of cynical policies, corruption, and lust for power have led to this horrific moment

The post Background Reading on Israel and Palestine appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Getty Images)

The following excerpt comes from Rebecca Epstein-Levi’s When We Collide: Sex Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics. The book explores contemporary Jewish sexual ethics by putting rabbinic texts in conversation with feminist and queer theory.

This excerpt comes from the book’s fourth chapter, “STIs: Infection, Impurity, and Managing Social Contagion.”

***

STIs are one of the paradigmatic risks of sexual interaction; no doubt many of us remember being shown appallingly magnified slides of genital warts as part of our high school sex ed curricula’s attempts to scare and disgust us into abstinence. STIs sit at the intersection of individual sexuality and public concern. Further, because STIs are issues of public concern that are transmissible by specific forms of social and physical contact, they offer a strong parallel to rabbinic frameworks of ritual purity.

When we talk about STIs, there are four critical things to know: First, STIs are incredibly common—and, in fact, far more common than they need to be. Second, STIs are real risks that can have important consequences on both an individual and a public level. Third, those risks are eminently manageable. Fourth and finally, the public perception of STIs, the seriousness of their consequences, and the extent to which the tools available to manage them are used effectively and justly are inextricably entangled with multiple systems of gender, sex, race, class, and ability-based oppression.

STI risk cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed. Simply exhorting people to avoid sexual risk doesn’t work: abstinence-only sex education neither prevents people from engaging in premarital sex nor reduces rates of unplanned pregnancy or STI transmission. Effective management strategies do exist, but they are complex and multifactorial. Modern medical science has developed treatments, vaccines, and physical and chemical methods of prophylaxis that make consensual sex, for those who have access to these wonders, safer than it has ever been at any point in human history.

However, STIs are far from a strictly technological problem. Technological advances are an essential component of STI management, but they are not sufficient, because STIs are socially transmitted among fundamentally social beings. The social components of STI transmission affect the efficacy of our technological tools for STI management in serious ways. [Medical misinformation] and disparities in access to medical care, combined with stigma against people who are infected and faulty reasoning about the moral effect of proactive STI prevention and sex education, mean that potentially effective methods of treatment and prevention fail to reach those who need them most. Furthermore, racial, sexual, and economic minorities overwhelmingly bear a higher burden of risk both in terms of infection rates and in terms of access to prevention, testing, and treatment. [And] the social climate around matters of sexual health makes frank and accurate discussion of STI prevention and treatment socially and politically difficult and makes it shameful to seek out help or even to know and disclose one’s STI status.

Indeed, the dominant discourses surrounding sexually transmitted infections have overwhelmingly been ones of otherness. During the Italian outbreak of 1496, which the Italians referred to at the time as the morbis gallicus, or “French disease,” and which most historians take to be the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, Italians blamed Jews and Arabs who had recently been expelled from Spain in 1492, many of whom had taken refuge in Italy, as well as the French invaders. By 1526, European writers had begun to connect syphilis’s origin to Columbus’s voyages to the New World, which offered in Native Americans a convenient and mutually agreeable scapegoat.

Otherness encompassed not only race and ethnicity but also class and especially gender. Women—sex workers in particular—were understood as potential sources of infection and as dangerous to men…By the modern era, syphilis, both in Europe and the US, was strongly linked to marginalized racial and ethnic groups—Jews and colonized peoples in Europe, and, in the US, immigrants and especially African Americans. HIV/AIDS was famously characterized as the “gay plague,” and it continues to conjure strong associations with race, class, addiction, and sexual orientation. Indeed, early in the AIDS epidemic, the Moral Majority executive Ronald S. Godwin criticized federal spending on AIDS research because it was “a commitment to spend our tax dollars on research to allow these diseased homosexuals to go back to their perverted practices without any standards of accountability.”

[Understanding] the ways STIs have been linked with and even personified as “deviant” persons or groups is particularly instructive for how we might read information about STIs with empirical justice and hermeneutic competency. STIs as we have framed and continue to frame them feed the worst features of our social structures and our social selves. As long as we treat them as afflictions of a vicious other, we allow STIs to feed our own vices of prejudice, domination, apathy, and greed.

STIs are also weapons of power-based oppression. Because of their direct connection to behaviors of which societies disapprove and would prefer not to discuss, STIs often serve as an excuse for moral and material neglect—a sort of worldkin of cosmic justice whereby those who misbehave are appropriately stricken, obviating any cause to engage with them or attend to their needs. STIs also act as a metric by which to define out-groups as other, a means to justify ill-treatment of underclasses. Sometimes they are the means of ill-treatment itself, as was the case with the Tuskegee syphilis study. Other times, the out-group is itself pathologized. Poor people, women, and racial and sexual minorities are mapped onto pathogens: syphilis has the body of a beautiful woman, as in many World War II–era propaganda posters; AIDS is the “gay disease.”

(Image by Jackie Ricciardi for Boston University Today)

Discourses of sexual otherness, as well as a lack of frank and accurate public discourse about sex, sexuality, and sexual health, also stymie the successful management of STIs. The consistent portrayal of STIs as the fruits of immoral or antisocial sexual behavior, combined with the view that sex is a fundamentally private matter, means that openly discussing the ubiquity of sex and its attendant risks has not been considered appropriate for polite conversation or thorough public discussion. This is particularly true for adolescents—a group for whom solid education and preventive care is especially important. It is also true even between sexual partners, since “the kind of communication that is necessary to explore a partner’s sexual history, establish STD risk status, and plan for protection against STDs is made difficult by the taboos that surround sex and sexuality.” Such taboos also affect health care providers. Rates of STI screening in primary care settings are far below where they ought to be, a fact that can be at least partly attributed to providers’ lack of comfort asking about their patients’ sex lives—or, conversely, patients’ discomfort with discussing their sex lives with their providers, especially if they worry that the details of their sex lives will cause providers to stigmatize them. Furthermore, at least until quite recently, medical training has offered relatively little about sexuality, since it “continues to reflect the predominant opinion of society that sexual health issues are private issues.”

Thus, any adequate moral account of STIs must, minimally, meet two criteria. First, it must facilitate open conversations about sexuality, sexual risks, and STI status. In practical terms, this means normalizing regular testing, disclosure of STI status, and use of appropriate preventive measures. Second, it must understand that disparities in social stigma and in access to and quality of care are also fundamentally moral issues.

In what follows, I outline a model for thinking about the ethics of STIs that meets these criteria. [I] argue that the mishnaic treatment of ritual impurity offers a promising model for thinking about STIs. The Mishnah, as I demonstrate below, treats ritual impurity as a form of social contagion—an undesirable but unavoidable and manageable consequence of desirable forms of social interaction. Understanding STIs in similar terms, I argue, will do a great deal to reduce stigma and shame and to help us manage STI risk in an effective and humane manner. I discuss the phenomenon of ritual impurity as it appears in the Mishnah, using the Zavim tractate as a case study through which to focus on the aspects of ritual impurity most applicable to STI management. Ultimately, I argue, the rabbis of the Mishnah not only offer us a model for thinking about the ethics of sex and public health; they also offer us a way to think more broadly about the ethics of risk. Crip theory, as I argued in chapter 2, shows us that acknowledging, managing, and honestly living with risk is crip and queer. Mishnaic purity discourse shows us a system by which such practice is also deeply virtuous.

…Here, I examine selected texts from Mishnah Zavim, which deals with irregular genital discharges, or zivah, as type cases. Zavim displays several key traits that offer especially useful models for thinking through contemporary matters of sexual health… First, in Zavim, as with other comparable texts, ritual impurity is ubiquitous and ultimately unavoidable. This is a critical corrective to regnant depictions of STIs as diseases of the other, for the Mishnah gives us a picture of socially transmitted contagion as everyone’s risk and everyone’s concern. Second, Zavim, again like other comparable texts, differentiates between multiple categories and subcategories of impurity, each requiring its own procedures of diagnosis and treatment. Here, too, it offers a critical corrective to regnant accounts of STIs as monolithic, such that one is either infected or “clean” and in which one particularly frightening infection stands in for all possible STIs (think, for example, of how “VD” nearly always meant “syphilis” for much of the twentieth century). Third, Zavim distinguishes between what I call the absolute virulence and absolute severity and the contextual virulence and contextual severity of different types of impurity, understanding that while one type of impurity might affect more overall ritual functions and have more overall routes of transmission than others, it does not always follow that it is the greatest concern in any given circumstance. This account offers a framework for understanding similar distinctions within STI epidemiology: while one STI may be more absolutely virulent than others, it does not follow that it is the greatest public health concern in all contexts.

Zavim’s next key trait deals with the ways those who inhabit an impurity-laden world interact with one another. Zavim’s world is one in which intimate human interaction is inevitable, one of social beings who touch each other in multiple ways. It assumes that people will have regular physical interactions with each other: engaging in household or workplace tasks that cause them to touch, shift, or lean on one another, touching or moving shared items that others will also touch or move, and simply sharing physical space in proximity. While all these interactions involve rabbinically recognized routes of impurity transmission, such interactions are nevertheless inevitable and even desirable. This is a deeply important corrective to a regnant sexual ethic that dichotomizes “safe” and “risky” sex and claims that any sex that seems to risk STI transmission is not worth the risks of doing. But Zavim reminds us that almost all social intimacy carries some risk and models a way of valuing that intimacy while explicitly acknowledging its potential to do harm.

Finally, Zavim, like nearly all classical rabbinic texts, treats its subject matter in exhaustive and explicit detail. For the purposes of sexual ethics, however, it is particularly important that the subject matter that Zavim and other purity texts treat in this exhaustive detail concerns socially transmitted contagion. STIs have historically been treated and often continue to be treated euphemistically, through a thick miasma of shame, stigma, and embarrassment. But rabbinic discourse about ritual impurity models a way of talking about social contagion that can clear this miasma through its sheer barrage of detail and, even more importantly, through its willingness to treat that very detail as a subject that is at once worthy of serious thought and yet is so mundane and so unremarkable as to be all in a day’s discussion.

All together, these key traits explicitly encourage an ethic of self-awareness cultivated through practices of regular self-examination, something that is characteristic of mishnaic impurity discourse more generally and that has clear implications for STI management. Virtuous rabbinic agents build their daily routines around practices of examination meant to foster self-control and self-awareness. Rabbinic subjects must then interpret the results of these examinations, usually with either direct or indirect expert aid, to determine whether it is likely they have contracted some form of impurity that requires mitigation. This sort of self-examination is considered virtuous for everyone, not just those who engage in some sort of high-impurity-risk behavior. Self-inventory is not a behavioral sin tax levied against those who are socially or occupationally lax; it is a mental and behavioral ideal to be striven for. In fact, the ubiquitous character of impurity and the subsequent practical need for regular self-examination are, as Balberg argues, best understood as an opportunity to cultivate self-examination and self-awareness as components of a virtuous character in their own right. In other words, that a particular kind of contagion is practically unavoidable for all social actors means that the management strategies necessitated by that contagion also teach us how to be better social actors more generally.

The worth of the Mishnah’s emphasis on socially embedded self-awareness and regular self-examination should become readily apparent when we consider the fact that a significant contributor to STI transmission is simple ignorance of one’s STI status. Perversely, a potential partner who discloses a known and well-managed infection may appear to present a greater risk than a potential partner who assumes or claims to be infection-free but has no concrete information to back up that assertion. Stigma helps perpetuate ignorance, which then, in a vicious cycle, further perpetuates stigma; the less we know, the more we fill that vacuum with the narratives of STIs as diseases of the other that we are already used to.

That must change. We should encourage knowing more, something that cannot happen if we dread to discover that we might have an STI because we know so little about them and think of them as marks of social shame and moral disgrace. The Mishnah’s emphasis on socially embedded self-knowledge and self-examination offers an alternative vision. The specific traits of Zavim’s treatment of impurity—the ubiquity of impurity, the importance of a fine-grained differential diagnosis among many subtypes of impurity, the distinction among contextual and absolute virulence and severity, the recognition of the many types of transmission-risking intimate social interactions that a person might experience on a given day, and the overarching practice of talking about contagion in exhaustive detail—provide the beginnings of a blueprint for achieving that vision.

Rebecca Epstein-Levi is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 41 of the Revealer podcast: “Sexual Ethics for Today’s World.”

The post What the Rabbis Can Teach Us About STIs appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Georgia State University Research Magazine)

During his eulogy at Aretha Franklin’s funeral in 2018, Reverend Jasper Williams, Jr. shocked many in attendance, as well as the wider Black community, when he attacked Black families and Black culture instead of honoring the woman dubbed “the Queen of Soul.”

“Where is your soul Black man when I look into your house, there are no fathers in the home no more. 70 percent of our households are led by our precious, proud, fine Black women. But as proud, beautiful, and fine as our Black women are, one thing a Black woman cannot do, a Black woman cannot raise a boy to be a man. She can’t do that.”

Responding to backlash in his eulogy’s wake, Rev. Williams stood by his comments saying, “In order to change America, we must change black America’s culture… We must do it through parenting. In order for the parenting to go forth, it has to be done in the home.”

Rev. Williams is but one prominent voice in a long history of religious, cultural, and political leaders who depicts the high rate of Black births outside of marriage—and Black single mothers—as a moral failure. These “authorities” blame Black “culture” and “immorality” for a diverse range of issues Black Americans face, from poverty to violence to incarceration.

Often neglected in these conversations, however, is that the breakdown of the traditional Black family is a relatively new phenomenon; it began in the 1960s and directly connects to the prison boom fueled by governmental policies targeting African American men. Similar to Black families who were enslaved and torn apart through forced sales or death, generations of Black men and their families faced forced separation and inhumane treatment through mass incarceration—and the effects are ongoing. For a large segment of the Black population living in segregated, under-resourced, and over-policed neighborhoods, governmental policies that targeted Black men for incarceration contributed to the decline of intact Black families; faith in God, religious practices, and belief in marriage was not what could protect them.

Slavery and the Black Family

During the 246 years of American slavery, enslaved Black people could not legally marry or lay claim to their own children. In “The History of Slave Marriage in the United States,” Darlene Goring, Louisiana State University professor of law, explains that enslaved people of African descent could not legally marry because they were considered chattel property, and could not enter into any binding contract, including marriage. Enslaved people “could not confer legitimacy upon their children, even those born to putative slave marriages.”

Black men had no ability to protect or provide for their wives or children, who could be physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by the white enslavers or sold away, never to be seen again. The testimony of one Black man, John S. Jacobs, who was born into slavery in 1815 and escaped to freedom in adulthood reflects this situation:

“To be a man, and not to be a man—a father without authority—a husband and no protector—is the darkest of fates. Such was the condition of my father, and such is the condition of every slave throughout the United States: he owns nothing, he can claim nothing. His wife is not his: his children are not his; they can be taken from him, and sold at any minute, as far away from each other as the human fleshmonger may see fit to carry them.”

Enslaved Black women, whether they had a Black male partner or not, were at risk of sexual abuse, assault, and impregnation by the white men who enslaved them. A 2020 study examining the DNA of 50,000 people whose grandparents were born in U.S. regions touched by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade found that European men contributed three times more to the gene pool of African Americans than European women, meaning white enslavers regularly raped, impregnated, and forced Black women to bear their children. Those white men, for the most part, did not acknowledge their children’s paternity, nor suffer social stigma for fathering children with Black women they enslaved and left to raise on their own.

Although they were denied marital rights while enslaved, after the Civil War Black women embraced the institution of marriage. Following emancipation and for the next fifty years, from 1890 through 1940, Black women, on average, married at an earlier age than white women. In 1950, Black women between the ages of 40 to 44 were more likely to have married than their white women counterparts.

Studies of Black Americans in the 1960s

Two important reports published in the 1960s sounded the alarm about critical issues facing Black Americans: The Moynihan Report and the Kerner Report. Both were written to critique civil rights legislation. Moynihan, a historian and eventual U.S. senator, wanted President Johnson to know that legislation alone would not remedy racial inequality. The Kerner Commission, on the other hand, argued that legislation had not gone far enough and much more government intervention was needed to achieve racial equality. While the latter was largely ignored and forgotten, the former still influences American perceptions of Black America. Moynihan concluded that the decline in traditional Black marriages and absence of married Black fathers in households were the main reasons African Americans faced inequality and adversity. His recommendations included adhering to patriarchal Christian notions of family, a perspective that remains foundational for many conservative Americans, both Black and white.

To mark the 50^th anniversary of Moynihan’s 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, the Atlantic published an annotated version of the report by historian Daniel Geary. Geary summarized Moynihan’s key points:

“Moynihan claimed that family instability was the main reason why African Americans would fail to achieve equal results with other American groups. He traced the roots of the problems he perceived in African American family structure to slavery and past discrimination. However, because Moynihan argued that African Americans’ own characteristics, and not ongoing institutional racism, explained their failure to compete on equal terms, some critics charged him with ‘blaming the victim.’”

As an Irish Catholic, Moynihan held Christian notions about the importance of traditional, patriarchal families. He believed that model was superior to any other family structure. According to Geary, Moynihan asserted “that the family was the basic unit of society derived in part from his Catholicism, which he credited with giving him the perspective that ‘family interests were perhaps the central objective of social policy.’” But Moynihan’s claim that the cause of Black “pathology” was the breakdown of Black families was hypocritical: the last time Moynihan saw his own white father was before he abandoned the family when Moynihan was ten.

Even in its day, the report was controversial, with some praising it and others condemning it, including prominent African Americans, feminists, and civil rights activists. In 1971, psychologist William Ryan coined the term “blaming the victim” to refute Moynihan’s claims and to show how blaming African Americans for their unequal place in society allowed whites to justify anti-Black racism and social injustice.

The Kerner Report came on the heels of major unrest in African American communities and directly refuted Moynihan’s thesis that Black pathology was the cause of racial inequality. In July 1967, after two years of major uprisings in nearly 50 Black communities across the country, President Lyndon B Johnson signed an executive order forming the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Chaired by former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, the 11-member Presidential Commission worked to investigate the cause of the uprisings. After seven months of fact-finding, the Commission released the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Report, on February 29, 1968.

In stark contrast to the Moynihan report, the Kerner Commission report placed the blame squarely on the anti-Black racism and white supremacy permeating every aspect of American society. “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

Though the report became an instant bestseller, President Johnson was disappointed that it didn’t credit his administration’s Great Society programs for its influence on Black progress. Johnson was also upset that the report highlighted the extreme disparities still facing Black Americans. He lamented privately that the report called for solutions he did not have the political capital to obtain. Johnson complained to Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, that the commission recommended his administration spend $80 million to rectify racial inequity. After over a decade of funding the Vietnam War and rising inflation, he did not believe his budget was substantial enough to cover those costs. Johnson never publicly mentioned the report.

The Kerner Report detailed the numerous issues plaguing Black communities, none of which had to do with a lack of morality or the breakdown of the traditional family unit. Historian and author Alice George sums up the report’s finding in Smithsonian Magazine’s “The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened.”

“Bad policing practices, a flawed justice system, unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression, and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination all converged to propel violent upheaval on the streets of African-American neighborhoods in American cities, north and south, east and west. And as black unrest arose, inadequately trained police officers and National Guard troops entered affected neighborhoods, often worsening the violence.”

The Kerner Commission Report had many recommendations to remedy racial inequality. The proposals included enforcing laws to end employment discrimination, increasing the minimum wage, creating one million new jobs in the public sector, and encouraging Black business ownership. It also included expanding opportunities for loans in the “ghetto,” developing efforts to eliminate segregation in schools, providing quality education in Black neighborhoods, producing 600,000 low and moderate-income housing units by the next year and six million units over five years, and changing police operations to end misconduct and provide more adequate police protection.

The Johnson Administration only adopted one recommendation from the report, which was to try to develop Black community support for law enforcement, including hiring more Black officers.

Two months after the Kerner report was released, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and uprisings erupted in over 125 cities across the country. Johnson chose not to run for reelection, and Richard Nixon, who had criticized the Kerner report and promised to “meet force with force, if necessary, in the cities,” was elected to the presidency.

What the Moynihan and Kerner commission reports did agree upon, however, was that the levels of Black unemployment and under unemployment was untenable. That situation only grew more dire after the 1960s. In 1970, 70% of African Americans in the “urban core” of large metropolitan cities, worked in manufacturing. By 1987, following deindustrialization and the migration of American industries overseas, the industrial employment of Black men sank to 28 percent; crack cocaine scourged Black communities, and violence spiked with rival groups trying to control the illicit drug trade.

(Illustration by Angela Hsieh for NPR)

Rather than infuse millions of dollars into Black communities, as suggested by the Kerner commission, the federal government’s response to these issues was to wage war. Johnson first called for a War on Crime in March 1965. After Moynihan’s report, Johnson turned away from his War on Poverty and toward funding, training, and arming law enforcement to surveil and police African Americans. Nixon greatly expanded these policies and called for a War on Drugs in 1971; he also expanded the prison system to hold larger segments of the Black population for much longer sentences. By 1984, the Black unemployment rate had nearly quadrupled since the 1950s. Between 1984 and 2005, the number of federal and state prison and jail facilities were built at an average rate of one every 8.5 days. Federal and state governments poured trillions of dollars into funding an overwhelmingly white male workforce to staff the lucrative prison industry, from policing to corrections to prosecution to prison construction, and at the expense of the lowest-income and most marginalized Black Americans.

Incarceration and the Decline of Black Marriages

Statistics regarding the high number of Black births to unmarried women today are often weaponized to paint Black women as immoral and Black men as absent fathers who do not provide for their families. Most people do not connect the Black out-of-wedlock birth rate with the American prison boom. Pew Research shows that the percentage of unmarried American women giving birth started to rise in 1980 (18.4%) and climbed every year until it peaked in 2009 (41%), with Black women disproportionately having the highest number of out-of-wedlock births. During the “prison boom,” from 1973 through 2009, The Sentencing Project found that there was a seven-fold increase in the prison population. “Between 1985 and 1995 alone, the total prison population grew an average of eight percent annually. And between 1990 and 1995, all states, with the exception of Maine, substantially increased their prison populations.”

Although Black men only made up around 6 to 7 percent of the American population, they accounted for the largest percentage of people locked up during the prison boom. In “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration,” Bruce Western and Christopher Wilden, sociologists and leading scholars on mass incarceration, detail:

“In the twenty-five years from 1980, the incarceration rate tripled among white men in their twenties, but fewer than 2 percent were behind bars by 2004. Imprisonment rates for young black men increased less quickly, but one in seven were in custody by 2004. Incarceration rates are much higher among male highs school dropouts in their twenties…Incredibly, 34 percent of all young black male high school dropouts were in prison or jail on an average day in 2004, an incarceration rate forty times higher than the national average.”

After his election in November 1993, President Bill Clinton spoke to a convocation of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, the same church where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his last speech. Echoing Moynihan and what Rev. Jasper Williams would preach 25 years later, Clinton said:

“But unless we deal with the ravages of crime and drugs and violence and unless we recognize that it’s due to the breakdown of the family, the community, and the disappearance of jobs, and unless we say some of this cannot be done by Government, because we have to reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul, and the truth of human nature, none of the other things we seek to do will ever take us where we need to go.”

While individuals are ultimately responsible for their behavior, Clinton’s emphasis on the breakdown of the family, as well as his suggestion that Black people need to connect with their “spirit” and “soul,” grossly oversimplified complex factors that contributed to violence, drug use, and drug sales in Black neighborhoods. No amount of prayer or marriages could bring back manufacturing jobs or other living-wage employment for blue collar Black men, or account for the lost tax revenue from the white residents and middle-class Black Americans who fled to the suburbs and took their small businesses with them. Nor could nuclear families or frequent church visits fund chronically underfunded public education, health care, mental health support, and addiction treatment in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

One year after his speech, Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was the largest crime bill in history, allocating $10 billion for prison construction, expanding the death penalty, and eliminating federal funding for incarcerated people to pay for college. Activist and author Premilla Nadasen wrote, “The act intensified police surveillance and racial profiling, and locked up millions for nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession.” According to Bruce Western, “By 2000, among non-college black men, aged 22 to 30, the jobless rate… stood at 29.9 percent.” When Western adjusted the unemployment rate to include Black men excluded from the employment market because of incarceration, the actual Black male unemployment rate for that age group was 42.1 percent. Black women fared even worse after Clinton’s welfare “reform,” which elevated the number of Black women in poverty or prison, forcing numerous children into foster care.

Rather than assist Black communities, these policies led to increased racial profiling; Black people were disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for drug-related offenses, even though Americans across ethnic backgrounds use drugs at similar rates. The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s study first published in 1995, and revised in both 1998 and 2003, found that whites, non-white Hispanics, and African Americans had recently used illegal drugs at a percentage (6.4 percent) indistinguishable from each other. According to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, arrests for simple possession of marijuana “accounted for nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990s.” The ACLU also documented that between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million marijuana arrests, of which 88 percent were only for marijuana possession. A 2000 Human Rights Watch report called the racial disparities in Black incarceration for drug offenses a “national scandal.” In ten of the worst offending states, Black men were sent to prison on drug charges at 27 to 57 times the rate of white men.

For Black incarcerated men, religious beliefs or practices did little to alleviate the burdens placed on them and their families during and after imprisonment. Western and Wildeman noted that imprisonment “significantly alters the life course” of a man by disrupting his chances at gainful employment, creating legal barriers to skilled and licensed occupations, hindering access to welfare benefits and public housing, and diminishing the likelihood of marriage or cohabiting with the mothers of his children. In 2009, only 16.7 percent of Black men had been married by age 25, compared to 28.7 percent of white men and 32.8 percent of Hispanic men. By 2010, 45 percent of Black children had a parent who was incarcerated. Incarceration disrupted the potential for traditional Black marriages among scores of low-income Black men; it left many Black women to raise their children as single mothers.

In spite of Clinton’s and Rev. Williams’s belief that issues facing the Black community could not be remedied by the government, the opposite was true. Federal and state policies aimed at lowering the number of incarcerated people in overcrowded prisons did lead to declining imprisonment rates. This caused a sea change for Black men, despite the Black rate of births outside marriage peaking at 72% in 2010 (that also marks the end of the prison boom) and holding steady for almost a decade. As illuminated in a new study, from 2009 to 2019, the incarceration risk of young Black men fell by 44 percent. This coincided with Barack Obama’s presidency, during which time Obama passed legislation to reform drug policy and expand access to healthcare with the Affordable Care Act. Unsurprisingly, the rate of incarceration of Black men and women fell every year. From 2000 to 2020 violent crime in America, and youth offenses also dropped, in spite of the declining rate of traditional marriages across all ethnic backgrounds. In 2021, the rate of unwed Black births had declined to 70.1% compared to 68.5% for Indigenous women, and 52.2% for Hispanic women.

Though the rate of white women giving birth outside of marriage today (27.5%) is now higher than the Black rate (23.6%) when Moynihan wrote his report in 1965, there are no reports about the moral failings of “white culture” or “white pathology.” Like Moynihan, Clinton, and Rev. Williams, too many Americans continue to view the low rate of traditional Black marriages through a moral lens. They insist that Western Christian notions of traditional marriage will solve vast social problems.

The time has come to stop blaming Black people, culture, and the decline of traditional Black marriage for the persistent issues African Americans face. There are advantages for children raised in a household with both parents fully participating and financially contributing to childrearing and schooling. Yet, the government must do its part by remedying centuries of stolen wealth, oppression, and inequality inflicted on Black people. This requires ending the drug war, reducing prison populations, decriminalizing and diverting many offenses to end unnecessary police contact, racial profiling, and court involvement, and investing in Black communities by fully funding education, healthcare, substance abuse treatment, community resource centers, and violence prevention.

Alessandra Harris is a writer, author, wife, and mother of four, who earned degrees in comparative religious studies and Middle East studies. Her fourth book, In the Shadow of Freedom: An Enduring Call for Racial Justice, is forthcoming from Orbis Books in spring 2024.

The post The Myth of Black Morality, the Black Family, and Mass Incarceration appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image creator and source: Doug Chayka for AARP)

Rosh Hashanah services in New York, New Jersey, and California were disrupted this year by bomb threats. Donald Trump’s Jewish New Year message accused liberal Jews of destroying America and Israel. And Elon Musk produced an antisemitic dog whistle by suggesting that George Soros and company were out to destroy Western civilization. This news cycle formed the background noise to my reading of Rabbi Diana Fersko’s We Need to Talk About Antisemitism, which is to say that her book could hardly be more timely.

Fersko is the senior rabbi at the Village Temple in Manhattan, and New Yorker readers might remember that she took to the streets of her neighborhood during the pandemic to forge community. As the introduction to We Need to Talk About Antisemitism makes clear, even in a city with a critical mass of Jews, she and her congregation have not been immune to the contemporary surge of anti-Jewish hate crimes. In June 2021, she arrived at her synagogue to find its glass door shattered; a baseball bat was the weapon of choice in this crime that evoked the specter of Kristallnacht, the 1938 night of broken glass at Jewish institutions, businesses, and homes in Germany. “Can anyone really recover from seeing their house of worship desecrated?” is the question that sets the stage for her call to action on the antisemitism that, almost unbelievably, plagues the 21^st Century.

Explanations for antisemitism’s persistence abound, and Fersko addresses several in her book. One is that antisemitism is a contagious virus, a neat reversal of the antisemitic canard that Jews are the purveyors of illness. Another is that antisemitism pits Jews against the “highest values of any given society,” which helps to explain historical changes in antisemitic ideas. When Christianity reigns supreme, Jews are cast as Christ-killers; when human rights take center stage, “the Jewish state is labeled as the single most heinous violator” of those rights. Ultimately, Fersko favors the theory that not talking about antisemitism enables its survival. This, of course, drives her focus on not only insisting that we talk about antisemitism but also shifting HOW we talk about it.

Fersko identifies the “political left” as her “own community,” and one of her aims is to call out that part of her chosen family’s contributions to antisemitic discourse. Although she is careful not to conflate lefty antisemitism with the “violence committed by white supremacists,” she nevertheless insists that “antisemitism needs to be named and shamed wherever it exists, even when it’s hard to do so. Sometimes we avoid talking about antisemitism because it comes from our neighbors, friends, colleagues, and schools. Sometimes we avoid talking about antisemitism because it’s way too close to home.”

To illuminate contemporary antisemitism, Fersko adroitly weds the left’s concept of microaggressions to the foundational story of Exodus. In Exodus, Egypt is known as Mitzrayim, the “narrow place.” Antisemitic microaggressions narrow Jewish possibilities for being in the world:

“Small but persistent insults bring us closer to that narrow place. They diminish Jewish identity into something put upon us by others. They stuff us back into that restrictive existence. Narrowing is an attempt, albeit often an unwitting one, to constrict the diversity that runs wild through the Jewish people. Narrowing shrinks our Jewish identity into a basic box of prepackaged American ideas. It denies the breadth and nuance of Jewishness. It ignores our history. When the Jewish people are narrowed, we tend to feel less comfortable in mainstream culture. This process increases incrementally until we don’t feel we can be outwardly Jewish at all.”

The supposed compliment that someone looks “Jewish but, you know, pretty” depends on stereotypical assumptions that put Jewishness at odds with physical attractiveness and robs the community of its physical diversity. The “soft antisemitism” of humor often narrows Jews into a cheap, whiny people. And if the mass media primarily tells stories about the dead Jews of the Holocaust or those who escape from the supposed horrors of Orthodox Judaism, then we drastically limit cultural ideas about Jews today. Such narrow ideas about Jewish looks, lives, and behavior ultimately encourage Jews to commit microaggressions against themselves and other Jews.

For Fersko, when it comes to racial talk about Jews, microaggressions quickly turn into macroaggressions. She rightly points out that the White Jew is often a caricatured figure who represents the “epitome of whiteness and everything terrible about it.” Flyers on a college campus that read “Ending White Privilege Starts With Ending Jewish Privilege” exemplify this tendency.  Even as she decries such antisemitic figuring of the White Jew, she strives to do anti-racist work and to promote alliance politics. Writes Fersko, “I do want to acknowledge that I have the advantages of whiteness based on my appearance,” and “rather than fomenting tension between Black and Jewish communities, we should fight the twin hate of antisemitism and racism together.”

At one point, however, Fersko insists that “many of us don’t feel white,” as if individual feelings are the arbiter of racial positioning in an admittedly complex U.S. racial hierarchy. Similarly, her explanation for titling a section of the race chapter “Black Extremism” seems misguided at best:

“I’ve chosen to label this section with the term Black extremism to remind us all that these ideas are by definition extreme—they do not represent the mainstream of the Black community by any means. And they should not be confused with a discussion of Jews who are Black. Instead, this perverse ideology is upheld by fringe groups like the Radical Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam.”

Separating out the good Black people from the bad Black people isn’t an act of alliance politics (and Jews who are routinely asked to pass a litmus test on Israel should know this). Viewing “extreme” Black people as uber-antisemites is no more salutary than viewing White Jews as uber-white supremacists. Rather, we need to recognize that antisemitism and anti-Black racism are in the air that we all breathe, no matter our identity.

Given that the charge of “Black extremism” has traditionally been used to short circuit racial justice movements, this rhetorical choice undercuts anti-racist commitments. While Fersko mentions Black Jews several times in this discussion, she does not include their writings or perspectives on being at the intersection of antisemitism and anti-Black racism. For example, when she mentions Jewish institutions fostering relationships with law enforcement to combat antisemitism, she does not recognize the specific and complex security needs of Jews of color in a racist state. Synagogues that racially profile Black Jews may be secure but remain narrow places.

Predictably but compellingly, Fersko insists that talking about antisemitism means that we have to talk about the Holocaust and Israel. Although there’s lots of Holocaust talk in contemporary culture, most of it is in the form of memes and metaphor. We use the Holocaust to talk about school shootings, vaccine mandates, or abortion. Such use means that the Shoah “is no longer presented as a tragedy in its own right. Now it’s a vehicle for someone else’s cause. A path to something else.” This “Flat Holocaust” de-Jews the Shoah, paves the path for Holocaust denial, and results in a millennial generation that is historically illiterate. To combat such illiteracy, Fersko offers “Fela’s Story,” a survivor testimony, at the end of the book; reading about the “actual Holocaust” and what Fela “witnessed and endured” can begin the “fight against the flattening of the Holocaust.”

The relationship between antisemitism and Israel/Zionism is vexed and complex. Discussions of this relationship are acrimonious (how’s that for understatement!), and Fersko is acutely aware that she is taking on an “unwinnable task.” Despite such trepidations, she forges ahead in making the argument that “anti-Israel antisemitism is the socially acceptable Jew hate of our day, the antisemitism en vogue, the antisemitism that feels right, necessary even for some people, especially in my beloved liberal world.” Anti-Zionist discourse frequently makes Jews suspect in progressive spaces, even when the issues at hand are not Israel-related. When a professor will only write a recommendation for students whose position on Israel passes muster, or when “annual apartheid week” imagery promotes such classic antisemitic ideas as the blood libel, then the way we talk about Israel narrows political and educational possibilities for American Jews.

(Rally on January 5, 2020 to bring attention to rising antisemitism. Image source: Jeenah Moon for Getty Images)

Following Hamas’s massacre of Israelis in October, social media was a bracing place to be, and Fersko’s argument seemed to be gathering evidence post by post. Many leftist academics, in particular, seemed at pains to ignore Hamas’s human rights crimes against Israeli Jews; instead, they chose to focus on the provocation of occupation and the necessity of decolonization.

Fersko not only names anti-Zionism as a contemporary form of antisemitism but also admits her worries about doing so. Such forthrightness about her own Jewish journey and sensibility is present throughout the pages of this explanatory and activist text. When discussing the tendency of Jews to “narrow their own identity,” she recalls the ways in which she “creat[ed] a separation between my secular self and my Jewish one.” For example, she learned not to share with friends her family’s lovely tradition of celebrating “’Erev Birthday’—beginning a birthday celebration the night before the day of birth—to keep the custom of Jewish holidays beginning at night.” In Antisemitism: Here and Now, historian Deborah Lipstadt urges Jews not to inadvertently reduce Jewish identity to the experience of Jew hatred; Lipstadt’s marvelous formulation is that we need to focus on Jewish joy as much as the “oy.” Fersko’s stories of hiding erev birthdays or struggling to imagine joining in when a child sings a Hebrew song on the subway rather than admonishing that child to tone down her Jewishness, certainly illustrate the losses Jews sustain from antisemitism. However, those stories also reveal the joys to be had by actively naming and resisting this particular “ism.”

The clear guidelines Fersko provides for changing the conversation and thus the climate for American Jews is a much-needed breath of fresh air. She insists that we name antisemitism, that we refrain from tokenizing some Jews over others, and that we shun “groupthink.” Rather than using Jews in “American power struggles,” we need to allow a diversity of Jewish expression and celebrate Jewish life. These conditions are necessary for American Jews to continue to flourish in the United States. Not coincidentally, these conditions are also aligned with a healthy democracy that respects the separation of church and state.

We Need to Talk About Antisemitism is likely to fuel not only talk and action but also disagreement. In 2023, such wrestling with antisemitism is necessary work for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Helene Meyers is Professor Emerita of English at Southwestern University. Her most recent book is Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition.

The post Jew Hatred in the 21st Century appeared first on The Revealer.

(An Orthodox church in Ukraine destroyed by Russian forces. Image source: Evgeniy Maloletka for Associated Press)

In Odessa, a missile strike in July 2023 sent fourteen people to the hospital, including four children. The attack pulverized a sacred site – Holy Transfiguration Cathedral, the spiritual center of Odessa’s Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine (ROCU). And while Russia’s assaults on Ukraine have taken civilian lives, the attack on the cathedral was a warning shot – they were taking aim at Ukraine’s Orthodox soul.

Russia claims there is no difference between Ukrainians and Russians. Russian political elites point to their common spiritual heritage as a symbol of their unity. So, why would Russia attempt to destroy a cathedral they claim as their own? The reason: Russia believes Ukraine has betrayed its ancestral unity by creating its own independent Orthodox church.

Besides this feeling of religious betrayal, many factors motivated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Putin’s desire to make Russia into a worthy successor of the imperial and Soviet eras; Russia’s dislike of the West and America in particular; Putin’s hope to reconfigure the energy market to strengthen Russia and punish Europe; and, Russia’s desire to punish Ukraine for its aspirations to distance itself from Russia and establish an anchor in Europe.

All along, Ukraine was central to the success of Putin’s initiatives. Annexing the resource-rich portions of Ukraine would help Putin strengthen Russia and enhance its influence in the energy sector. Occupying Ukraine would also permit Russia to expand its ideological sphere and attempt to transform Ukraine into a nation that rejected European values.

The invasion has gone far beyond a mighty force subduing a smaller and weaker army. Russia has indiscriminately killed civilians, raped women, kidnapped children, and targeted nuclear facilities. Putin has been charged with war crimes.

What has animated such a bloody war with broad Russian support?

The answer, sadly, is hate.

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has been a vehicle for promoting hate of Ukrainians. Their leader, Patriarch Kirill, fanned the flames of hatred less than two weeks after the invasion when he justified the war on the grounds of a metaphysical battle between good and evil.

(An Orthodox priest conducts a service for Russian soldiers. Image source: Alexey Pavlishak for Reuters)

The origins of Russian enmity toward Ukraine are complicated. Historically, Russia and Ukraine can legitimately trace their beginnings to the historic state of Kyivan Rus’. Kyivan Rus’ takes its name from Kyiv, one of the small city-states that adopted Orthodox Christianity in the late tenth century. Vladimir-Suzdal, a principality that succeeded Kyivan Rus’, became the most important city-state in the northeast at the end of the thirteenth century after Mongolian invasions ruined Kyiv. By the time Moscow achieved primary power in the northeast, Kyiv was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with an Orthodox minority in Catholic realms.

Modern Ukrainian identity is largely Central European, shaped by encounters with Poland and Austria. Modern Russian identity, in contrast, derives from the initial formation of a ruling imperial dynasty in the fifteenth century.

While Ukraine and Russia have common origins in the medieval city-states of Rus’, their encounters reflect a mixture of cooperation and coercive subjugation. For example, in the seventeenth century, the Ukrainian leaders of the Cossack hetmanate in Poland were tired of Catholic policies that favored Orthodox converts to Catholicism. Ukrainians made a treaty to accept the protection of the Russian tsar at Pereiaslav in 1654.

Ukrainians benefitted from the treaty, at least initially. Their shared faith and patrimony with Russia granted them access to coveted positions in the Church and the imperial governing apparatus. Ukrainians became high-ranking officers in the imperial court. They were educated in the finest institutions in Europe. Many Ukrainians affirmed their fraternal bonds with Russia, anchored in their Rus’ ancestry.

But Russia’s patronage of Ukraine came at a price. Beginning with Tsar Peter 1, Russian rulers absorbed Ukraine ever more deeply into Russia’s control. Under Catherine II, Russia began to “russify” Ukraine, attempting to blot out Ukrainian identity. Russification continued and intensified in the 19^th century during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I.

Russia responded ferociously to any Ukrainian challenges to Russia’s place as the dominant partner in the relationship. It used the Church as a vessel both to punish and control Ukrainians. In 1709, the Russian Orthodox Church anathematized the leader of the Ukrainian Cossack regiment, Hetman Ivan Mazepa. Anathematization is the most severe punishment the Church imposes. It is reserved for apostates and heretics – people who either betrayed the Church or promoted false doctrines. The anathematization of Mazepa was a way of shaming a leader who betrayed the Tsar. Mazepa became the forerunner of Ukrainians who were punished for challenging their Russian masters.

When Ukraine attempted to establish a sovereign state during the revolution in the early 20^th century, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine also attempted to secure its independence from the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Orthodox Ukrainians held a council in 1918 to determine their own fate. In the beginning, it appeared they would vote in favor of absolute Church independence – known as autocephaly. But the Russian bishops who presided at the council removed a contingent of autocephaly supporters from the delegation to ensure that the Ukrainian Church would not secede. This manipulative act alienated supporters of an independent Ukrainian Church, who remained committed to securing autocephaly for themselves.

Orthodox Ukrainians tried and failed to create an independent church three more times. The first attempt in 1921 was polluted by their hasty decision to use a controversial process for appointing bishops. The movement revived in German-occupied Ukraine in 1942, but the Soviet defeat of the Nazis and the annexation of Western Ukraine to the Soviet Union made all Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Ukraine subordinate to the ROC.

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), under the strict supervision of the Soviet Union’s Council for Religious Affairs, groomed and appointed Metropolitan Filaret to oversee Ukrainian church life from 1966-1992. Metropolitan Filaret was a native of Ukraine who knew the Ukrainian language and was appointed as a dominant native to control the Ukrainian spirit of independence. Filaret carried out this objective with great cruelty throughout the Soviet period.

In the late Soviet era, Gorbachev loosened state restrictions on religious freedom. An independent Ukrainian Orthodox church (UAOC) emerged in Western Ukraine and thousands of parishes left the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) to join this new church. The UAOC and the Ukrainian Church of Moscow came into immediate conflict over parish property.

Filaret changed his tune when Ukraine became independent in 1991, calling for autocephaly for his church. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) denied his petitions despite the unanimous support of the Ukrainian bishops. When Filaret refused to retire quietly, the ROC deposed him in 1992 and released his personal file to the media, exposing his secret mistress and family to the public.

To punish Filaret even further, in 1997 the ROC went back to its playbook and unleashed its most potent weapon on Filaret: anathematization. Filaret shared the same fate as Mazepa – they were both cast out of the church in shame because they refused to submit to Russian subjugation.

For the next twenty years in Ukraine – approximately 1998 to 2018 – an uneasy status quo prevailed in the church. One Ukrainian Orthodox church remained under Moscow, while the other, the Kyiv Patriarchate, was nominally independent. Both communities claimed to be the legitimate church of the Ukrainian people. The Ukrainian church under Moscow joined the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in executing a media campaign that stigmatized the Kyiv Patriarchate as schismatic, radical, and uncanonical (illegitimate). The Ukrainian church under Moscow was loyal to the ROC and maintained relations with Ukrainian political elites who favored close relations with Russia.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC’s) media campaign ruined the Kyiv Patriarchate’s reputation. The anathema placed on Filaret extended to all of the faithful of the church he led – including millions of believers in the Kyiv Patriarchate. The ROC labeled Filaret, the Kyiv Patriarchate, and other pro-Ukrainian religious groups as Neo-Nazis and radicals in a multi-year torrent of hate speech.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC’s) assault on Filaret and the believers of his church – along with Greek Catholics and other Orthodox practitioners who supported independence – intensified during the Maidan Revolution of Dignity in 2013. People gathered on Kyiv’s Independence Plaza – known as the Maidan – to protest President Yanukovich’s decision to renege on an association agreement with the European Union and to join an economic alliance led by Russia. The protest escalated into a revolution when Yanukovich’s riot police wielded violence to suppress the crowds, killing over one-hundred people and wounding dozens. The Maidan ended with Yanukovich’s ouster. Russia responded with violence, first by annexing Crimea, and then by supporting separatists in Donbas.

Anger, a sense of betrayal, and hatred fueled Russia’s violent response. Many Russians viewed Ukrainians as traitors for choosing Europe over Russia. Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) clergy blamed “radical nationalists” and America for attempting to destroy Russia via the Maidan. Some Russians went so far as to claim that Russia needed to defeat the forces of evil in Ukraine.

Russia’s venomous accusations against Ukraine aimed to create and enable discrimination and violence. The hate speech campaign labeled some Orthodox Christians as schismatics (church separatists), nationalists, and heretics. The rest of the world’s Orthodox churches refused to share communion with the Kyiv Patriarchate and considered their clergy and faithful to be outside of the church.

One Orthodox church maintained diplomatic relations with the Kyiv Patriarchate – the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the senior church among the world’s Orthodox churches. Constantinople worked behind the scenes to try to reunite the Ukrainian Orthodox churches, beginning in 2015. In 2018, Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko, announced that he had an agreement with Constantinople to unify the Kyiv Patriarchate and the church under Moscow, creating a new Orthodox church completely independent of Russia. While this deal catalyzed a process creating a new church – the Orthodox Church of Ukraine – most of the leaders of the Moscow-affiliated church refused to participate and claimed the new church was an illegitimate organization.

In 2018, Putin, along with Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, and Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, asserted Russia’s right to defend believers of the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox church in Ukraine, implying that the creation of the new church warranted Russian intervention.

(Image source: Mikhail Svetlov for Getty)

The creation of a new Ukrainian Orthodox church increased Russia’s belief that Ukraine had betrayed them during the 2013-14 Maidan Revolution of Dignity. Indeed, Russia’s desire to punish Ukraine for the Maidan Revolution contributed to Russia’s invasion in February 2022—a war forcing religious leaders to demonstrate their loyalties.

Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) have used religious language to promote the invasion of Ukraine, repeatedly calling for the defense of the Fatherland. Kirill came under fire for suggesting that death on the battlefield is a sacrifice that forgives a soldier’s sins.

Meanwhile, Metropolitan Epifaniy, the leader of the new Orthodox church, condemns both Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) relentlessly and calls upon the faithful of his church to support Ukraine’s military.

Metropolitan Onufry, of the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox church, is embattled. Ukrainian political and religious leaders were already irritated with him for maintaining an anti-war position from 2014-2022. Onufry attempted to straddle the line separating support for Ukraine from loyalty to the ROC. The invasion forced him to show his cards.

In May 2022, Onufry attempted to distance the Ukrainian church under Moscow from the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) by declaring independence. Independence is not autocephaly, though, and the Ukrainian security service (SBU) began a vigorous investigation of suspected collaborators with Russia in the ranks of the Ukrainian church under Moscow. The SBU placed maximum pressure on the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox church by evicting them from the Kyiv Pechers’ka Lavra monastery shrine, one of Eastern Orthodoxy’s most beloved sacred sites. The Ukrainian Parliament is currently considering a draft law that would ban the ROC from Ukraine. If passed, the law would effectively make the Moscow-affiliated church illegal.

The standoff between the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian church under Moscow is a serious problem. Ukraine has been warned that passing the law violates freedom of conscience. Ordinary clergy and laity of the Ukrainian church under Moscow have already suffered from discrimination. Passing the law will put the rights of several million believers at risk.

The religious situation in Ukraine was already messy before the war. And yet, the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC’s) promotion of the Russian invasion, coupled with the tensions between Orthodox practitioners in Ukraine, threaten the fragile unity of world Orthodoxy and the security of the Ukrainian people. The situation seems hopeless, but the two Orthodox churches in Ukraine and the world’s Orthodox churches can take action to resolve the dispute among the Orthodox in Ukraine and hold the ROC accountable for its justification of the war.

The other Orthodox churches have been observing this spectacle while refraining from intervention. No one wants to invoke the wrath of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and its media machine. But praying for peace and calling for humanitarian aid is not enough. Other churches should mobilize efforts for two initiatives: 1) hold Patriarch Kirill accountable for his actions by convening a tribunal, in direct response to the request of hundreds of clergy from the Ukrainian church under Moscow; and 2) work to create an Orthodox mechanism that promotes the normalization of peaceful relations between the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox church and the new Orthodox church.

Convening a tribunal to hear the accusations against Patriarch Kirill would show that the Orthodox world is taking the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC’s) role in assaulting the Ukrainian people seriously. The tribunal could lead either to Kirill’s removal from office or his isolation. This would be an important step to show that the other Orthodox churches are not complicit in minimizing Russia’s crimes and will not use entitlement as an excuse to protect a leader from justice.

The Orthodox churches can intervene in Ukraine by recognizing the Moscow-affiliated church and the new church, establishing normal relations with both institutions, and encouraging them to share prayer and communion. The crucial step here is to express Christian love for the clergy and faithful followers of both churches.

The Ukrainians themselves can take actions to strengthen their position by working from the bottom up. The clergy and laity of the Ukrainian Orthodox church under Moscow and the new Orthodox church can work together, pushing their hierarchies to resume a dialogue. Ukrainian religious unity is the key to disarming the Russian Orthodox Church’s use of hate speech to blame Orthodox separatists for Orthodox religious divisions. The attack is weakened and eventually becomes impotent if the separated parties publicly unify.

The blood of the Ukrainian people cries out from the ground for justice. The Orthodox churches of the world and in Ukraine have the means to minimize Russian influence and to hold leaders who use the pulpit to promote hate and violence accountable. Let us hope that they have the courage to use these means.

Nicholas Denysenko is Emil and Elfriede University Professor and Chair and Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University in Indiana. He is the author of The Church’s Unholy War: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Orthodoxy (Cascade, 2023).

The post Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches as a Battleground in Russia’s Invasion appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

This fall, The Revealer turned 20! Founded by NYU’s Center for Religion and Media in 2003, the publication has taken on a variety of forms in its first two decades. What initially started as a website to correct mainstream media’s religion coverage grew into an award-winning online magazine that publishes incisive articles about religion’s place in our world.

On October 18, we gathered to celebrate the past 20 years. The evening was a welcomed opportunity to reflect on the many projects funded by NYU’s Center for Religion and Media and the exceptional people who have contributed to The Revealer. We also honored the visionary founders and co-directors of the Center for Religion and Media, Angela Zito and Faye Ginsburg, without whom The Revealer would not exist.

The Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Our 20^th anniversary also gave us the chance to applaud The Revealer’s growth. Our readership has risen remarkably over the past few years, and we are tremendously grateful to everyone who reads and shares our articles. We are also thrilled with the number of people who listen to the Revealer podcast. And we’re moved by the organizations who have honored The Revealer with awards in recent years, including the Religion News Association, the National Association for LGBTQ Journalists, the American Jewish Press Association, and the Medical Journalists Association.

As we reflect on The Revealer’s legacy, we remain committed to providing you with insightful articles about the varied roles religion plays in society. Our November issue is no exception. The issue covers topics of significance to many of you, including the war in Ukraine, antisemitism, racial inequality, the violence in Israel and Palestine, and more.

The November issue opens with Nicholas Denysenko’s “Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches as a Battleground in Russia’s Invasion,” where he explores the sizeable role the Orthodox Church has played in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Then, in “Jew Hatred in the 21^st Century,” Helene Meyers offers a review of the book We Need to Talk about Antisemitism and considers ways to address today’s rampant antisemitism. Next, in “The Myth of Black Morality, the Black Family, and Mass Incarceration,” Alessandra Harris considers why so many political and religious leaders blame Black inequality on the rate of unwed Black parents (and their assumed lack of morality) rather than on the mass incarceration of Black men. Following that, in “What the Rabbis Can Teach Us About STIs,” an excerpt from When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics, Rebecca Epstein-Levi turns to the rabbis of the Talmud to offer a way to destigmatize sexually transmitted infections today. And, for those who would like a better understanding of the situation in Israel and Gaza, in “Background Reading on Israel and Palestine,” our editorial staff offers a curated list of articles from The Revealer and other publications that offer important insights about the conflict.

The November issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Sexual Ethics for Today’s World.” Rebecca Epstein-Levi joins us to discuss how our sexual behaviors reflect and influence our broader social interactions. We discuss what it means to be sex positive, what the rabbis of the Talmud, writing more than a thousand years ago, have to teach us about sexual risks, and why, in a world that is deteriorating from war, climate change, and right-wing politics, it is especially important to pay attention to sexual ethics now. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As I reflect on The Revealer’s achievements these past 20 years alongside today’s wars in Israel and Ukraine, the rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism, racial inequality in the United States, and the prevalence of white Christian nationalism in our halls of government, I remain as convinced as ever about The Revealer’s importance. In a media landscape with unending daily hot-takes about religion and politics, The Revealer aims to provide a much-needed well of nuance and highly-researched insights that illuminate the intricacies of the issues we face. Our work here is as urgent as ever, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

Thank you for being part of The Revealer’s first 20 years. Here’s to the next 20!

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post The Revealer Turns 20! appeared first on The Revealer.