Revealer Podcast Episode 2: Yoga and Emotional Wellbeing

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to alter our lives, we know many of you are dealing with anxiety, grief, and stress. The second episode of the Revealer podcast is here for you!

In this episode, host Brett Krutzsch chats with Dr. Shreena Gandhi to discuss all things yoga. Their conversation starts with a discussion about why yoga has been especially popular among white women. From there, the episode focuses on yoga as a therapeutic practice, how people are using yoga to address trauma and anxiety, and how to practice yoga during a global pandemic.

If you’ve never practiced yoga (like our host Brett Krutzsch), or if you’ve been doing yoga for years, you will find this episode illuminating and helpful.

You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss any of our monthly episodes.

Without further ado, here is episode 2 of the Revealer podcast: Yoga and Emotional Wellbeing.

Happy listening!

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 2: Yoga and Emotional Wellbeing appeared first on The Revealer.

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Kali Handelman: It’s pretty common that published conversations like this take place at a distance, but the coordinates of our respective locations seem particularly poignant right now because, in a strange convergence of coincidences, I am writing to you from London, just a few miles from where the Epidemiological Society of London once convened, not too far from the statue of John Snow’s Broad Street Pump, and also pretty close to Imperial College, which produced the study that many credit with having finally turned the tide toward more extreme measures to protect the public from the coronavirus pandemic in the US and UK. And, even more coincidentally, you are multiple time-zones away from me, but only a few miles from where I grew up, which is, infuriatingly, not far from where one of the first American cases of coronavirus made the news back in early March.

 It’s not all serendipity that has brought us “together,” of course. I am surely not even close to the first person to remark on the uncanny prescience and relevance of your work. But that prescience is, of course, not a coincidence, and I wanted to speak with you so that you could help us think through our current moment and — importantly — its history, using what you have learned and the critical lens you are developing.

 So, I am hoping that first you can give us a quick introduction to your research subject. The project, of course, predates coronavirus, as it also predates Trump’s election and all of the calamities that have occurred since. How did you first come to this particular study and its convergence of topics?  

Anjuli Raza Kolb: In the broadest possible terms, my research subject is colonial science and postcolonial poetics. My book is about how the “epidemic of terrorism” became a kind of common sense after September 11— so much so that I don’t think most people would even think of epidemic here as a metaphor! As an American Muslim, however, the language rang really discordantly for me right from the start. As I began a serious study of colonialism and postcolonial literature, I kept coming back to the many ways the War on Terror looked like a colonial war, and I set out to understand why the epidemic metaphor became such an easy and ready way to talk about relatively isolated acts of violence outside the legal framework of state-on-state violence. What I discovered is that anti-colonial insurgency in India — Britain’s largest and most lucrative colony in the age of high imperialism — was persistently tethered to both the cholera epidemics (which were frequently imagined as purposive violence against British troops or simply “revenge”) and also Muslim “fanaticism.”

“Love in the Time of Corona” in Times Square

It hardly bears repeating here that far before the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, European literature, history, and medicine were fond of linking diseases and pestilences to the East and what we now call the global South. I couldn’t compass this whole history in a single book, and many other better scholars (Hans Zinnser is one I particularly adore) have written about these issues in ways I’ve tried to honor and build upon. In a way this was lucky for me, though, because it helped me to focus and see how Islam in particular has been on the receiving end of a really persistent and patterned version of this pathogenic xenophobia in ways that truly have gotten worse over time, not better. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that the hatred and fear of Muslims has been the most persistent driver of U.S. foreign policy for the better part of two decades, while anti-Black hatred drives most of our domestic or internal colonial “wars.” With regard to Trump and the coronavirus pandemic—of course I didn’t know of these eventualities when I started researching this book. I will say, however, that the longer you immerse yourself in materials like these, the less shocking these outcomes appear.

KH: Right, that’s a really useful way of thinking about what I was calling “coincidence.” It’s a trained practice of immersion and interpretation. And, in fact, one of the main things I wanted to ask you about was the method of interpretation you developed for thinking about the relationships — historical, political, ideological, literary, discursive — between epidemics and (what is called) terrorism. You do the work of both naming your subject “the epidemic imaginary” and calling for and modeling a method of interpreting epidemiological texts using an “epidemiological mode of reading.” Can you please explain what “the epidemic imaginary” is and about what it means to read epidemiologically?

ARK: You’ve made the work sound smarter than it is here! Let me start by naming what I mean by epidemiology, which is emphatically not a technical or useful definition for practicing epidemiologists. What I mean is the establishment of a self-conscious and institutionalized (societies, journals, meetings) discipline called “epidemiology” in the late-nineteenth century in Britain and France founded in response to the cholera epidemics. Because the discipline was formed in this moment, we have to take seriously that it is a field of study inseparable from the management of empire.

In the writings of early epidemiologists, we can observe a few habits that are salient to the questions I try to pursue: an interest in weather, climate, topography, and ethnic “character;” a style of writing normally seen in colonial travelogues (a lot of personal reflection and description); a heavy borrowing from sensationalist, Gothic, and Orientalist tales; and a synoptic or multi-vocal perspective that posits, or maybe even theorizes, the dispersed nature of epidemic events as requiring synthesis, collation, and interpretation. This last feature — dispersal and the necessity of synthesizing — also produces some consistent metaphorical operations. The most crucial of these is the way epidemiologists imagine the social body as isomorphic with the human body.

Anatomists and pathologists, who shaped Enlightenment medicine, (to borrow Foucault’s important periodization from The Birth of the Clinic) didn’t really consider the health of the social whole — their methods were more focused on the appearances and sensible changes in body tissues. Clinical practice was different from the study of epidemics, which really took off in the middle of the nineteenth century. Think of the difference, for example, between the optic of a surgeon and that of a diarrheal specialist — the latter needs to know so much about farming, water filtration, sewage systems, routes of travel, and so forth, while the surgeon is responsible for solving the local (proximate) problem that may be the consequence of more global (distal) factors. If the epidemic imaginary metaphorizes the social body as a singular body, as it often does, it faces challenges in scalar translation and interpretation. So an epidemiological reading method is one that attends to both the digestive system of the patient and to the digestive system of the town, region, nation, or globe.

I’m trying to be brief, so this is a little loose. Because I am a literature specialist, I have found it productive to think of the distinction between the gaze of the clinic and the view of epidemiology as akin to the difference between close reading on the one hand and literary history or other comparative and synthetic reading practices on the other. If studying historical epidemiology taught me something about my own methods, it’s that postcolonial criticism tends to work similarly, as a mixture of very tight close reading, constellated juxtapositions (this is like anecdotal data in studies of epidemics), and rangy, systemic thinking. This was a tricky discovery to make because, as you may guess, one doesn’t want to find that one is working in a similar mode to a science that was founded to maintain the economic superiority of the colonial centers, and to oppress and abandon one’s ancestors to the ravages of undernourishment, overwork, and disease.

KH: No, I can definitely see that! But, as you said, you’re a literary specialist and, in your work, you primarily focus on interpreting 19th and 20th century literary texts — from Mary Shelley to Salman Rushdie. You also read Supreme Court decisions and state department publications, though. Which makes me wonder, what are you reading right now? And what does — or would — it mean to read news and commentary “epidemiologically”?

ARK: I am aggressively reading the news! As I think we all are! To your second question, what would it mean to read our contemporary media landscape epidemiologically, I’ll try to give a pared-down answer first, and then a more citational one.

First, there are so many reasons to separate literature from normal or popular discourse, but I think there are more reasons not to. So I always try to look at the pathways along which these genres of writing and speech move, permeate, and inflect one another. Simply put: I think reading epidemiologically means reading to solve a problem that is a threat to collective wellbeing. I’m not equipped to have anything useful to say medically — so what I mean by problem is not the virus itself, but rather the hideous racism and xenophobia we’ve seen in the West in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I’m interested in how mainstream popular literature becomes a kind of hearth around which we gather in these times. So many people, for example, are reading Camus’ The Plague right now — an insanely problematic text that I’ve tried really hard to understand as a “great novel” (I don’t think it’s that great) and also, now, as a feature of our daily news cycle. We have to read the spaces between the two categories. To do this I find myself asking: what are the habits of mind and speech doing harm? How does Camus’ formulation migrate to White House speech writers? How, then, does Trump reorganize this into the hateful discourse that reappears in the mouths and tweets of “minor players”? How have colonized subjects, and now Asian Americans, been forced to weather this storm? How have already abused and marginalized communities suffered not just disproportionately but criminally as a result of the long term and renewed withdrawal of care and social services that is the hallmark of settler colonialism?

To bring things closer to the present, how have incarcerated, unsheltered, and precariously housed people faced levels of danger and harm that are nothing less than immoral? At the same time as we have to continue to do the work and undertake the activism that addresses the blazing inequalities in North American society, we must also be attuned to the rhetoric that normalizes these abuses and perpetuates them in the name of “classical” or American values. Reading this way is a process of compiling data of minor linguistic, behavioral, and discursive racism during a time of heightened ethno-nationalism. Cathy Park Hong (a poet) has published a wonderful essay doing exactly this with regard to the surge of racism against Asian Americans in the last months, as has Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (a scholar) on the long history of anti-Black racism and the current morbidity outcomes of COVID-19. If we agree with the theorists who define disease as a set of biological phenomena responding to social processes^[1] (and I do), we have to believe that our actions determine the course of pandemic and define the disease. Action here includes language.

My more citational answer is that reading epidemiologically (this is a quality of practice, not a technical definition!) in the midst of an epidemic also means letting go of the pressure to create new paradigms and theories, new methods and lenses — and instead to strategically pluck what is most useful and most tactical. So thinking with Eve Sedgwick, I’d ask: can we read symptomatically without paranoia? In the very first weeks of the Wuhan outbreak, I picked up Ling Ma’s Severance. A friend left it at my place over winter break. As a kind of object lesson in paranoid vs. rangy epidemic reading: I didn’t know that it was about disease and late capitalism. One lonely day I thought — I need a fun novel to lift my spirits, maybe this pink book is right! After ten pages, I realized this was no random “Oh, thanks for letting me stay in your apartment” gift. My friend gave it to me because it was about everything I care about and study: race, waste, ennui, fevers, cults, suburbia, apocalypse.

A paranoid approach to this happenstance might linger with the psycho-social (why did she leave me this book, what’s she trying to tell me about my career, my nation, my personhood?) or with the socio-psychic (oh no, there’s a deeper, different message here, the story about the fevered is actually about reproduction, the plot about bibles is secretly about cults). With this canny book in particular, all those things are there, and none of them are. Ma is so sharp about how we talk about those things, what the news sounds and looks like during a crisis. So I am trying to read with her. Reading symptomatically without paranoia means taking the literary epidemic at face value (it’s not trying to teach us that God hates us, it’s not a fucking metaphor), and to think about how a genre like speculative fiction is just straight up made from language and narrative patterns that reflect the actual events at our doorstep. Literature, in this mode, is not a “what if this insane thing happened,” but a “what if we could see more clearly what already is happening.”

To return to the practical — what I want is for the people who care to pay attention to the literariness of our moment, to poetic device, to the analogies our leaders make between political and “natural” phenomena. I have my own sense of how these work, but this is a project that cannot have too many analysts: I want everyone to have a strong opinion on what it means when Andrew Cuomo says the pandemic is just like 9/11. In my view, naturalizing metaphors almost always depoliticize. In the case of Cuomo’s 9/11-coronavirus analogy, he says the likeness is because they’re both “random.” When we ascribe randomness or non-human agency to events like this, it’s so easy to ignore the ways our political and economic systems have set up and maintained inequality, and how this inequality plays out in a raced, gendered, and classed calculus of harm and death. A sense of “randomness” also maintains heightened panic, which feeds a 24-hour news cycle, incessant surveillance culture, racist policing, borderline fascism, and insane spending on the military. Invoking 9/11 makes great soundbites for a politician in a crisis, but despite the amazing corps of medical workers flooding into New York from around the country to help, we know more (voting) Americans (including members of my own extended family) don’t really care about the residents of New York. They only care about the stories of American exceptionalism the tragedy of 9/11 enables.

KH: Which brings me to a question about media itself. In your book you talk about “the efflorescence of the terrorism plot in literature, television, and film.” I wondered about this word, “efflorescence,” which you use pretty often. It’s an interesting sort of biological metaphor in and of itself, and to me, it reads as almost mystical, and maybe even a bit passive. I wondered, though, if we could think more about how epidemiological discourse — such as the terrorism plot itself —  “spreads”? What does it mean when we talk about a trend or a trope “catching on” (nevermind “going viral”)? What kind of agency do we see at work?

ARK: You’ve hit on something so important here — it’s incredibly hard to stay away from biological metaphors and the passivity they imply! I won’t make too much of it, because frankly you raise a good critique of my own writing habits, and I want to give it due respect. At the same time, if we want to linger with the metaphor, the etymology of efflorescence links it to plants in bloom, and as even a hobbyist plant lover knows, this can take some coaxing.

With regard to the question of agency, efflorescence “takes place” and is kind of passive, but it can also be enjoined to occur or continue when conditions are made favorable. I think the ground was made fertile for the terrorism plot in literature and film by a president, George W. Bush, who imagined and staged himself like a hero in a thriller. The consequence, culturally, was that it paid to write a sensationalist terror plot. Once a network picks up a show like 24 or Homeland, and the ratings skyrocket in a climate of fear stoked by warmongering leaders, a structure of incentives is installed.

You’re right that “spread” makes us think cultural phenomena like this are passively moving through our minds and laptops. I dispute this vigorously. These stories are opportunistically reproduced by studios, publishing houses, universities, and distributors because they make money. My own career is subject to this kind of critique: I have received fellowships because I work on terrorism and Islam — these resources were made rapidly available after the start of the War on Terror by the State Department and the many educational institutions that are supported by federal funding. A graduate fellowship I was offered (and declined) was funded by the Critical Languages Program. To my dismay, I learned this did not mean languages with a robust tradition of literary criticism, but rather languages critical to national security. The way the culture industry makes money is linked to the incentive to continue the scandalous spending on the military, paramilitary, intelligence services, police forces, and arms manufacturers. The floral metaphor begins to look entirely inappropriate when we dig into the analysis. I am sorry for using it, and sorry to drag plants into this mess!

KH: As you have so thoughtfully demonstrated here, metaphors and questions about what metaphors do are obviously central to your work. In your book, you write about how epidemiological thinking takes a social metaphor, “routes” it through biological and medical thinking, and then re-applies it to the social. A genealogical summary I found incredibly helpful. A recent article in the New Yorker by Paul Elie called “(Against) Coronavirus as Metaphor” draws on Susan Sontag’s seminal work^[2] to argue that we need to shift away from the metaphors of virality and speak “literally” about our present moment if we are to have any hope of approaching and understanding it “clearly.” I have to say, it struck me as somewhat ironic that he leaned so heavily on the idea of “literal” language here, as though the colloquial “literally” isn’t one of our most overused examples of figurative speech. But that point aside, what do you make of Elie’s argument given your own thinking about what you call “the metonymic relation between a Western idea of Islam and the terror of a global epidemic.”

ARK: Elie is writing against this stubborn, faux-profound custom, returning, as so many of us have done, to Sontag. Elie explains, “Sontag’s work suggests that metaphors of illness are malign in a double way: they cast opprobrium on sick people and they hinder the rational scientific apprehension that is needed to contain disease and provide care for people.” Speaking in his conclusion of this “hindrance,” Elie points out what is to me the most important insight these early days of COVID-19 have brought, namely that

[O]ur disinclination to see viruses as literal may have kept us from insisting on and observing the standards and practices that would prevent their spread. Enthralled with virus as metaphor and the terms associated with it—spread, growth, reach, connectedness—we ceased to be vigilant. Jetting around the world, we stopped washing our hands.

I agree with the first part of Elie’s claim, but taking a slightly broader view — one that includes the history of the terrorism-as-epidemic metaphor and its future ramifications — I would go farther. This metaphor didn’t just keep us, passively, from observing the practices and standards that would prevent a pandemic; it pointedly suppressed these priorities and concerns by activating the belief that the immense wealth of the new imperium would by some trickle-down method keep “us” safe from the diseases afflicting the poor, the brown and black, the hungry, and the weak.

The lethal machinations of capitalism and liberalism are everywhere tied to racial and religious persecution. These systems are particularly and purposively bad at keeping people alive and healthy, let alone thriving. The withdrawal of communal care (including access to clean water, basic healthcare, and adequate housing) that results in maintaining racial and religious others on the brink of death, in states of profound precarity, is foundational to neoimperial sovereignty, even as neoimperial politics wax ethno-nationalist. This is partly what Achille Mbembe had in mind when he revisited Foucault’s important studies of biopolitics from below and outside, broadening the historical geography of Foucault’s theory of biopolitics to coin the term “necropolitics.”

Mbembe’s necropolitics attempts to “account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective.^[3] From rising hate crimes against Asian Americans and immigrants to the criminal abandonment of nearly everyone in America outside of the white, property-owning classes, we are seeing Mbembe’s principle at work daily, before and during the pandemic as surely as we will after. How does the War on Terror intersect with what very quickly became known as the War on the Virus? Does it matter that nearly all of these terms operate metaphorically, and that we nevertheless suffer concrete and irrevocable material harm because of them?

KH: I wonder how we can think about these metaphoric failures together with what you’ve said about the epidemiological imagining of the body politic (that is, perhaps one could say, the “public” in “public health ) as isomorphic with the world at large. Because, of course, as you explain, we don’t all imagine ourselves as one united global body, we divide and exclude and draw boundaries along lines of race, gender, class, religion, etc. Which means that the people excluded from “the body politic” of the hegemonic power are dehumanized, and are, in your words, rendered “distinctly at odds with the human” by “the rhetorical effects of imperial disease poetics.” Or, more bluntly to the point, you write simply: “In this scheme, terrorists become subhuman—microbial, cancerous, viral.” How do you see that kind of dehumanization playing out now?

ARK: I’ve been returning to this — one of the earliest snarls I was trying to sort out while writing the book — a lot lately. We are seeing the dehumanization of East Asian people (by accident) and Chinese people (on purpose) play out in many of the same ways as we have seen the dehumanization of black Americans, Caribbean people, and Central and South Americans for centuries, in many of the same ways we have seen indigenous people and Muslims from all around the world — particularly the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa — dehumanized and likened to diseases and contagions, swarms and plagues, in pointed moments of political strife, for centuries. It is no mistake that this vilification is pointed at those who do our dirty work, make our goods, suffer labor conditions fully enfranchised Americans would never accept. It is so easy to paint workers as filthy, guilty, ignorant. Take, just for a small example, the uncensored reflexes of disgust that Western commentators avow when they describe the “teeming cities” and “wet markets” in China, as if global agribusiness and catastrophic monocultures have contributed nothing to the evolution of zoonotic viruses.

This is so depressing it’s hardly worth saying: global capitalism, driven by finance centers in New York and London will come up with any excuse to blame its others for anything it can, anything that will support the perpetuation of profit. It’s a nightmare that the same people who for years have demonized the notion of “martyrdom” as a Muslim pathology are now calling for people to sacrifice themselves to re-open the economy.

To understand how this metaphor keeps on working, despite changes in our conception of the body and the shape of geopolitics, we have to understand what Western — largely English — philosophy has bequeathed to us from Hobbes forward: there is no thinking the global body politic without its internal others, without borders and exclusions.

On the question of internal others, we have also managed ways of thinking about the global body’s malignancies as invaders that nevertheless reside inside the social corpus. This is why the virus is such a good metaphor: sure it starts from outside, but, conveniently, we can also act shocked when it reorganizes our cellular function: we can call it both foreign and self-same; incorporated (literally) and disincorporating, or disintegrating. The figure of the global body politic evolves as our understanding of disease evolves, and as the viruses themselves evolve: it is very good at othering anything that threatens the presumed norm of health, from inside or out.

KH: So far, we’ve been talking about religion a bit obliquely, as something presumably contained in the category of Islam and, much more troublingly, “Islamic terrorism.” One of the threads I found fascinating in your book was the way you trace the twin cholera epidemics to twin mass-movements of religious pilgrims: the first, among Hindu pilgrims in 1817, and the second, among Muslims traveling from India to Mecca on Hajj in 1831. Can you tell us more about how you think about religion in this genealogy of epidemiological thought and politics?

ARK: I want to be super clear that I don’t think religion per se has very much to do with these political ebbs and flows. Our mutual friend Abby Kluchin once blew my mind by explaining in incredibly straightforward terms something I should have realized before: that religion qua religion was, like almost every other divisive category, ossified by the massive knowledge-producing machinery of imperialism to taxonomize and divide people, to set them on courses of political self-sabotage and mutual destruction.

In modern South Asia, where a lot of my research has taken place, more people practiced and still practice daily spiritual lives that cleave to no single book or set of beliefs, that are fulfilling and opportunistic by turns, that change when they have to, and that insist on god as a mobile and flexible presence. This is also to say a lot of Muslims engage in non-Quranic practices of meaningful spirituality and so on and so forth. Likewise with every other “religion” I know.

Cholera treatment in British-occupied India

Early epidemic studies looked for causes and sought to make sense of how people lived and moved. They were not really interested in what people worshipped or what they believed. It was politically expedient to displace the very real challenges to managing empire from environmental mistakes (the first cholera epidemic likely exceeded endemicity because of deforestation and military movement by the East India Company) and organized political action to “religious practice.” Turning “religion” into an ethnic and racial category made it easier for the historians and bureaucrats of the British and French empires to exonerate the movements of global trade in the dissemination of disease and to locate “heathen” worship as the source of rampant infection. When colonial officers, politicians, and bureaucrats began to describe religious ideology as “contagious” or “infectious,” they were building on myths they had already peddled about Hindu melas, Muslim hajj, Bedouin nomadism, and Near Eastern “filth and crowds” as permanent features of the “religions” they hated.

We’ve talked a bit about the chromatic racism (colorism) that accompanied the visual culture of Orientalism (there’s much more to say about that than can fit here)–Hindu art especially was ransacked for evidence of how diseased bodies were just like those of the infidel gods — blue, purple, black, incontinent, wasted, inhuman, and more. I’m not sure that the symptomatology of COVID-19 has been racially linked yet to horrible old stereotypes about East Asians, but there’s a deep and influential history in Orientalist discourse about the passivity and fatalism of Asiatics — linked to Buddhism, but also Hinduism and Islam — that I am guessing will become part of the racialized discourse of the pandemic soon. During our discussion, you sent me this article debunking the “Confucian obedience” fallacy with regard to the South Korean response to the pandemic — and I’m glad we have people writing against this kind of silliness with such speed — but I think we’ll see a lot more ethno-determinist takes in the coming months and years.

KH: As obviously relevant as your work is to thinking about Islamophobia and the pandemic, I found it also got me thinking about other recent events and crises. First, you reminded me that the concept of immunity is actually borrowed from the language of sanctuary — that is, a sacred space where one is protected from arrest. Which immediately made me think of the post-2016 election sanctuary movement, mobilized in the face of a president who referred to “migrant caravans,” deploying a rhetoric familiar from your archive in which cholera outbreaks were associated with “the arrival of ships, of caravans, of fugitives or pilgrims, of individuals, and with the progress of armies.” And now, since we began this conversation, Trump has declared the Coronavirus an “Invisible Enemy” that warrants the “signing of an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration to the United States! [sic]” Can we use epidemiological interpretation to think about anti-immigrant discourse, broadly speaking?

ARK: Absolutely. I don’t want to belabor the point, but I would say anti-immigrant and also homophobic discourse in the decolonial era is always tethered to and fully burgeons in the light of the epidemic metaphor, if not in the actual study of epidemics, where we also see entrenched racism and heteronormative violence being expressed in study design, outcomes, and pharmaceutical inequities. We have to maintain focus, for example, on the vilification of gay men, Haitians, and Sub-Saharan Africans in the AIDS crisis. It’s hard to talk about a figure used so promiscuously that it almost ceases to have meaning. What the coronavirus pandemic has revealed is that it never entirely ceases to have meaning, even when it almost does. I am thinking here of the way John Roberts, upholding the Trump “Muslim ban,” suggested that if an epidemic were to occur in a region, of course we would bar people from that place from entering the United States. Banning Muslim immigration to the U.S. in 2018 was premised on a not-yet-manifest idea of plague; the pandemic now retroactively ratifies this putatively racial exclusion.

KH: Similarly, citing examples such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s minor poem “Cholera Cured Beforehand,” you write about how:

[M]any scholars of cholera and its cultural history have shown the disorder’s ostensible preference for the lower class—evidence for example in the address of Coleridge’s poem to the ‘Useful Classes’— was only further accentuated by the way in which the disease seemed to inscribe itself of the body as an accelerated impoverishment.

Do we carry this through in our discourse now about “essential workers”?

ARK: I’m not sure we have language yet for identifying the bodily effects of this disease with cultural features we project onto others — Chinese people in particular, who have become the undeserving scapegoat in the worst versions of this story. Certainly there is something like aghastness and shock when people with access to what is supposed to be the most scientifically advanced, if far from the most egalitarian, healthcare system on the planet fall sick, are hooked up to ventilators, and die.

One of the things that I will say has been most infuriating as a sort of hopeful and well-meaning person during this time is seeing how often people revert to the ridiculous pabulum of “diseases know no race or class” — how the COVID-19 pandemic is the “great equalizer.” You certainly don’t need to be a scholar of disease and the history of epidemics to know that this is utter nonsense. The virus has no preference except for what allows it to proliferate, and there is no surer determinant of outcomes than economic privilege. The U.S. has seen — I want to say extraordinary, but the truth is they are utterly ordinary — disparities between the number of cases and deaths among working class people and communities of color and their white bosses, employers, managers, and neighborhood gentrifiers.

NYC subway on March 31, 2020

In New York City, where the pandemic has thus far inflicted the most devastating losses, these disparities are visible neighborhood by neighborhood; they magnify the already-indefensible environmental and economic abuse that maintain the second-class citizenship of Black and brown Americans, not to mention undocumented, detained, and incarcerated people. If we stop personifying disease as a thing that can have or express preference, we will be forced to confront our own social system’s preference for the already well and the already healthy, the total ejection of anyone not capable of or willing to submit their lives wholesale to the enrichment of corporate shareholders. If we do this, we will face the total demise of the economic system in which we are forced to live.

I say this in a hopeful way. I have been trying to come to terms with something I am calling “catastrophe mania” — that is, the weird admixture of sorrow and excitement that comes not only from being a person who thrives under conditions of extremity (good in a crisis, terrible under most other circumstances), but also from an embarrassing place of intellectual prepper’s comeuppance. The more serious writers and theorists I look up to have taught me to see the everyday we lived in before as a total emergency.^[4] There is a comfort in feeling that others might finally have to recognize this state of affairs, that it might push us to do something about it. I reject in the strongest possible terms the kind of Zizekian nonsense that all but demands us to collective suffering for the sake of revolution. Fuck that opportunistic noise, even if the money from the book he has apparently already written about COVID-19 is allegedly going to Médicins sans frontières. Now that it is here, though, in spite of our best efforts, I would be lying if I said it hadn’t given me some hope in the last weeks. At the very least, hope that a few students would look at their lives and the choices they might make differently, with more urgency, and more energy toward the responsibility to others’ spiritual and physical wellbeing.

KH: Lastly, a maybe fun question: I want to talk shit. By beginning your study with cholera, we are knee deep in scatology the whole way through this work: from Coleridge’s poetic discharges to the Gates Foundation’s support for the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. Of course, this shit isn’t funny. It’s based in centuries of racist renderings of Indians, and particularly Muslims, as unclean. But now, I’ve been observing a kind of return of the clean-assed repressed: from toilet paper hoarding, to a rush on bidets, to this quip on Twitter, to the New York City Department of Health’s memo on safe sex in the time of coronavirus, which defined “rimming” to much fanfare. I wonder what you think is going on here?

ARK: HA! Well, you’ve put your finger on it. I feel like a million years ago on the first day of an anthropology class someone said, “The first things we study are death, reproduction, and excrement,” all of which are wrapped up in this current moment’s anxieties. For LGBTQ people, as for racial others, these “concerns” are pernicious, policing, and often inflict further harm. I’m also thinking about the history and the present state of blood donation, nationalism, race, and the continued pathologization of queer sex. On a lighter note, I am obsessed with loosey goosey armchair sociology that posits Iraq’s relatively lesser death toll with Muslims’ obsessive five-daily ablutions, and Italy’s catastrophic outcome with “double cheek kissing.” I mean what unscientific cultural analysis, but also: we Muslims do love to wash! I have recently offered lota tutorials to anyone who will listen, and have been proselytizing about “Muslim showers” or commode-side spritzers for as long as I’ve been out of diapers. The NYC Health Department’s warning against rimming in a time of pandemic is joyfully joyless and anti-social. They also recommend self-pleasuring in the warmest terms. The tone is insane — I love it — it goes right into the canon of bad objects. I can’t wait for some wiser millennial’s take on corona-cooking, social distancing, and ass play. May we all resume rimming as usual in due course!

***

^[1] For example: Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism;” Francois Delaporte, Disease and Civilization; George Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological; Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease; Priscilla Wald, Contagion; Erin O’Connor, Raw Material.

^[2] Susan Sontag, Disease as Political Metaphor, New York Review of Books, February 23, 1978 and AIDS and Its Metaphors, New York Review of Books, October 27, 1988.

^[3] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15.1 (2003), 11-40. 12.

^[4] I’m thinking here of poets like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mahmoud Darwish, and also scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Rob Nixon, Fred Moten, and Vanessa Agard Jones.

***

Kali Handelman is a Contributing Editor for the Revealer. She is also a freelance academic editor and the manager of program development at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Anjuli Raza Kolb is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where she teaches poetry and postcolonial theory and literature. Her scholarly book Epidemic Empire is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2020, and she is completing two collections of poems: Janaab-e Shikva (Watchqueen), after the Pakistani poet Iqbal, and Mantiq al Tayl (Birdbrains). Her poems, essays, and translations from Urdu have appeared or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Triple Canopy, The Poetry Foundation, FENCE, Critical Quarterly, Guernica, Words Without Borders, The Yale Review, and more.

The post Epidemic Empire: A Conversation with Anjuli Raza Kolb appeared first on The Revealer.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

***

In the fall of 1984, Harper’s magazine hosted a spirited discussion between renowned television producer and writer Norman Lear and then President Ronald Reagan. “Dear Mr. President,” the letter began, “I am deeply troubled by what seems to be an endorsement of the so-called Christian Nation movement in many of your recent speeches. While I fully respect (and would fight to protect) your right to whatever spiritual and religious beliefs you prefer, I am concerned that you not use the office of the presidency as Evangelist in Chief or to further the notion that any particular group of Americans is to be accorded special standing because it practices any religion.” Lear willingly accepted the fact that Americans, including the President himself, had the constitutional right to express themselves freely, yet he was hesitant to admit that conservative political religions were not attempting to curtail the very same individual liberties in an act of religious tyranny. “Mr. President,” Lear elaborated, “without freedom from religion we could have no freedom of religion.”^[1]

The President’s prompt response assured Lear that he had no intention of representing what Lear called “the Christian Nation movement” in any of his social policy decisions. “I certainly do not support the notion that any group of citizens is to be accorded special standing ‘because it practices any religion,’” Reagan responded. “The goal of our nation must always be to achieve the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society.” Despite Reagan’s philosophical differences with Lear, his description would prove quite prescient since his notion of the “orderly society,” and the values and ethics through which it could be realized, would contribute to defining two very important developments in late twentieth-century America: the emergence of the culture wars as both idea and social phenomenon, and the terms of a new conservative consensus.^[2] More importantly, the discussion between Lear and Reagan spoke to the impact of Southern California and the larger Sunbelt on postwar American religious life as understood from the sound stages and writing rooms of “the Dream Factory,” known otherwise, as Hollywood, California.^[3] Due in large part to the clarity of their respective positions, the arguments between Lear and Reagan were nothing less than dramatic, as a former television writer went head-to-head with a former actor over the means and ends of the orderly society in a pivotal moment in late twentieth-century America.

President Reagan with Rev. Jerry Falwell

In many ways, Lear’s disagreement with Reagan was the product of nearly a decade of organizing and activism in defense of what was popularly referred to as, “the American Way.”^[4] Lear had been on the collective radar of conservative activists, journalists, and organizers since the premiere of his 1971 hit situation comedy All in the Family. Despite, or because of, the inclusion of the word “family” in the show’s title, the program faced virulent criticism for its naive or “indecent” material by some of conservatism’s most well respected names including writer William Buckley and evangelist Jerry Falwell.^[5] In fact, Falwell would later declare Lear to be the “number one enemy of the family in America” during the show’s run on CBS. This seemingly innocuous difference in opinion between Lear and Falwell over the nature of television programming, however, effectively illuminates the contested character of the American family at the time and the ways in which liberals and conservatives understood it during what scholars refer to as the Culture Wars.^[6] It also speaks to the liberal religious reliance on culture in order to make political claims about public life and how best to regulate it in contested times. This approach to politics, however, cut in both directions: it facilitated the rise of the Religious Left, but it also facilitated the same Left’s estrangement from the public square and gradual fall over the course of the 1970s.

Nevertheless, Lear’s religio-political work became especially significant in these contests when he and other Hollywood writers sued the FCC, along with television networks NBC, CBS, and ABC, over a perceived curtailment of their freedom of expression as a result of adopting “the Family Viewing Hour” in primetime. Despite the largely conservative notion of family that would help mobilize a generation of voters, it was Lear who inaugurated the decade with his vision of family and family values as part of the federally protected public interest on network television. In this way, Lear’s activism was indicative of a broader style of organizing and argumentation commonly referred to as the Religious or Spiritual Left in American public life, a style that viewed the public square as its own creation and deserving of federal protection and regulation in the name of the public interest.^[7]

Lear with the All in the Family cast

Lear’s involvement in the entertainment industry drew his and others’ attention to the activities of conservative Protestants and their protests much earlier than many of the journalists, academics, and political commentators who encountered them in the public square as part of a story or formal study of “the Christian Right.”^[8] As such, Lear’s decision to found the non-profit organization People for the American Way (PFAW) in 1981 came out of his observations and careful analyses of right-wing organizations, speakers, and preachers— namely those who constituted the ascending “Electronic Church” and the Moral Majority. In this sense, Lear can be understood as one of the more significant interpreters of the “New Right,” “the Religious Right,” and/or “the New Christian Right” in the recent American past as understood from the vantage of the burgeoning “Religious Left.”^[9] These phrases not only functioned as terms of historically contingent description for Lear and his supporters, but also as powerful rhetorical stereotypes of conservative religiosity run rampant in the public square.^[10]

Due to the publicity and character of Lear’s arguments, his religio-political writings and activism were defended vociferously throughout the 1970s and 1980s by interfaith organizations such as the National Council of Christians and Jews and mainline Protestant organizations including the National Council of Churches and the The Christian Century.^[11] In light of this support, Lear first decided to compose a satirical movie based on the lives of two preachers in order to articulate his criticisms of the Christian Right and its methods of exclusionary politics and tax evasion.^[12] Despite the assistance of fellow comedy writers Robin Williams and Richard Pryor, Lear decided to go in a different direction due to the urgency he felt from the growing collective weight of televangelist influence over American media. “Then one day, while working to realize the film we envisioned, my concern reached its peak. I had tuned in to Jimmy Swaggart and caught the reverend, Bible in hand, railing about a constitutional issue that was due to come before the Supreme Court and asking his ‘godly’ viewers to pray for the removal of a certain justice,” Lear recalled. “That was the last straw for me—I had to do something.”^[13]

Lear was not the only one to be disgusted by what he saw on the television screen during this period, yet it is his story, and those who supported him, that remains to be told in the recent history of American religion and the wars of culture that have characterized subsequent American political debate since the 1960s. On the one hand, this is a story about cultural victory, one signifying a given community’s ability to shape and even dictate culture to those eager to consume it.^[14] On the other, it is a story about what may be gained by this power over the long term, and what is lost in the short term in the realm of politics itself as understood as the deliberation and negotiation of power by means rarely agreed upon by the combatants. In this sense, those who defended the ability of public reason to govern public discourse by deploying it against their political enemies were making an argument about how the public square should be constituted and on whose terms. As illustrated by the following analysis of Norman Lear’s career in media and non-profit activism, this vision, broad as it may have been, ultimately lacked the capacity to include those who it seemed to care about most: most notably, Archie Bunker himself.

In other words, whether it was publisher William Rusher, political operative Kevin Phillips, or Bunker himself, Lear and his various supporters within the Religious Left had difficulty seeing past the caricatures Lear himself was partly responsible for creating of conservatism in the public square. In this sense, many of the struggles and challenges that American religious liberals have experienced since can be understood as largely self-inflicted in nature as they gradually lost the ability to speak to the masses due to the successes of Lear’s form of popular, yet relevant entertainment on a mass scale. In many ways, this study demonstrates why such irony remains largely unrealized to this day, and as such, unexamined in both popular and academic imaginations.

***

^[1] Norman Lear and Ronald Reagan, “A Debate on Religious Freedom,” Harper’s (Oct 1984): 15-20. For more on political religions, see Jason Bivins, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).

^[2] See Jeffrey K. Hadden, “Clergy Involvement in Civil Rights,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 387 (January 1970): 119.

^[3] See Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers, (New York, NY: Martino Fine Books, 2013 – reprint, 1950). For more on California’s liberal religious cultures, see Eileen Luhr, “Seeker, Surfer, Yogi: The Progressive Religious Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Place in Encinitas, California,” American Quarterly 67, 4 (Dec 2015): 1169-1193.

^[4] Wendy Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement,(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).

^[5] William Buckley, “The Nightmare of Norman Lear,” National Review (November 27 1981): 1441.

^[6] For the standard work in this field, see Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

^[7] For the latest account of the Religious Left, see Doug Rossinow, Marian Mollin, and Leilah Danielson, eds., The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2018). For a broader collection on the same topic, see Rebecca Alpert, ed., Voices of the Religious Left: A Contemporary Sourcebook (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000). For a more historical account of liberal religion generally considered, see Matthew Hedstrom, The Birth of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Leigh E. Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012). For more on the religious left in real time and its definition, see Nadia Marzouki, “Does the United States Need a Religious Left?” Social Science Research Council (January 23 2019). Available here: https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/01/23/does-the-united-states-need-a-religious-left/ (Accessed February 22nd 2019). For historian Rebecca Alpert, the “religious left” speaks to “a range of issues with common themes of peace, justice, and support for the disenfranchised and speak from a religious perspective. The religious left is composed today of groups and individuals with progressive political values that are undergirded by their religious beliefs in justice, freedom, and peace. But these groups and individuals do not agree about all of the issues that comprise a progressive political agenda…the religious left is multifaceted rather than cohesive. The absence of theological or political consensus contributes to the inability of the religious left to have a unified voice or a stronger public presence today” (2). “Any study of the Religious Left,” argues Alpert, “must include the voices of Muslims, Buddhists, and Native Americans, as well as Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.” Since the term “Religious Left” is arguably as ephemeral as “the Religious Right,”my usage of the term is more out of necessity than it is out of convenience. In short, Lear’s career in media is representative of a Religious Left understanding of American religion and politics as illustrated from outside the confines of traditionally institutional settings, such as churches or synagogues. As such, Lear’s work illustrates why liberal religious activism in the name of the first amendment and religious freedom finds many of its most effective tools of organizing and argumentation outside “religious” settings and vocabularies. This tactic has arguably been American religious liberalism’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. As it gains power and influence in culture, it loses its ability to speak to a religio-political vision of the nation and its inhabitants. As a result, liberals of various sorts may be able to influence and shape culture, or even win wars of culture, but largely at the expense of political power itself. Lear’s career in media is the paradigmatic example of American liberalism’s over reliance on culture for its politics-making. Counter intuitively, such influence has resulted in a form of cultural revolution by way of popular culture at the expense of a political one via an emphasis on class. For more on this sociological argument, see Daniel Bell, “Afterword (2001): From Class to Culture,” in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell, 3rd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 447-503. For more on “halfway houses” within American Religious Liberalism and the Religious Left, see David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

^[8] My understanding of conservative Protestantism follows the lead of historian Timothy E. W. Gloege, who argues that the term describes evangelicals who “emphasize that their individualistic relationship to God is with a person, generally a ‘he.’ Their individualistic, ‘plain’ interpretation of the Bible is superintended by dispensational assumptions that keep the most radical implications of the Bible in check…and generally, they consider social reform a fruit secondary to evangelism.” I support Gloege’s notion that evangelicals have made themselves “the public face of conservative Protestantism.” While this has been a remarkable “rhetorical achievement…it was precisely that.” See Timothy E.W. Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 13.

^[9] My usage of quotation marks around “the Christian Right” and the “Electronic Church” is intended to suggest that such terms are largely fictitious ones, inventions of a collection of liberal and conservative actors in the public square during the 1970s designed to capture a particular religio-political sentiment in the name of electoral politics.

^[10] These stereotypes were arguably the product of what literary theorists identify as (political) metonymy and synecdoche, specifically liberal ones. In each instance, a linguistic “part” stood in for a larger social “whole,” whereby “the new Christian Right” functioned as a metonymy for conservative Protestant Christianity within the US by representing the social whole through the rhetorical part. These arguments, and their application to the study of religio-political discourse since the 1960s, are in the preliminary stages of development.

^[11] Martin Marty, “A Profile of Norman Lear: Another Pilgrim’s Progress,” The Christian Century (Jan 21 1987): 56-60.

^[12] My emphasis on conservative Protestant “method” resonates with Gloege’s analyses, which contend that “The lasting significance of The Fundamentals project laid in its methods, not its contents. It pioneered a means of creating an evangelical ‘orthodoxy’ out of an ever—shifting bricolage of beliefs and practices, each varying historical significance and some entirely novel…The Fundamentals thus pointed the way forward for modern conservative evangelicalism by modeling the methodology for creating, and constantly recreating, whatever ‘orthodoxy’ the present moment required.” There is no better evidence for this argument during the period under study than the actions and cultural productions of evangelist Jerry Falwell and his advocacy group, the Moral Majority. The creation of the bible scorecard, a document that evaluated the Christian character of a politician or person in office based on a predetermined conservative policy agenda, was arguably part of evangelicalism’s ability to carry out and successfully execute instances of improvisational orthodoxy. For Gloege, The Fundamentals “replaced doctrine with the performance of orthodoxy facilitated by modern promotional techniques.” Perhaps most importantly, “the work created an imagined community of Protestants united in their opposition to theological modernism” (11, 163, and 181).

^[13] Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience, (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2015), 330.

^[14] Jay Demerath III, “Cultural Victory and Organizational Defeat in the Paradoxical Decline of Liberal Protestantism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34, 4 (Dec 1995): 458-469.

***

Benjamin Rolsky received his Ph.D. from Drew University in American Religious Studies. He is currently an adjunct instructor at Rutgers University and Monmouth University in New Jersey. His work has appeared in academic and popular venues including Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Christian Century, The Los Angeles Review of Books, CNN Opinion, and the Religion and Culture Forum at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests include religion and politics, the study of popular culture, and critical theory. Rolsky’s first monograph, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond, was  published with Columbia University Press. He plans to begin research on a second book project that examines the history of the New Christian Right across the 20th century.

The post The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond appeared first on The Revealer.

I have found myself uncomfortable with the state of Israel since it began its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank more than fifty years ago. Spending my Junior year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1969-1970, I was often ill at ease with the idea that the Jewish state I had admired from afar had become an occupying power that celebrated its military exploits with gusto. Learning songs about how the “blue and white flag” conquered the Straits of Tiran and other such expressions of joy at their victory in the 1967 War was at odds with my experiences of protesting the war in Vietnam on my campus at home. The lesson I derived from that year in Israel was that I was an American Jew, not an Israeli, despite the fact that my education was being paid for by the American Friends of Hebrew University in an effort to encourage me to fall in love and make Israel my home.

Returning to the states and entering rabbinical school, I committed myself to American Jewish life, sometimes lamenting the close connection the community had to Israel, sometimes being involved with organizations like Breira and New Jewish Agenda that protested the Occupation, but mostly ignoring my community’s pervasive Zionism and my discomfort with Israeli policies.

It was not until years later in the mid-1980s, when I no longer worked in the Jewish community, that I felt free to write and speak publicly about those concerns. It was a lonely pursuit. There were not many Jewish spaces where it was acceptable to question whether it was possible to have a Jewish state that was both ethno-religious and democratic. And I was not always comfortable with Palestinian violence as a response to the state violence Palestinians experienced at the hands of the Israeli government.

But things changed. Left-wing Israelis began to re-examine their history and expose the settler colonialism at the root of the establishment of the Israel. Palestinian civil organizations began the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction of Israel, a non-violent response to Israeli state power. An organization, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), provided Jews like me with a way to support the Palestinian cause. I became part of the rabbinic cabinet in JVP, and a leader in the Religious Scholars for BDS at the American Academy of Religion. In those ways, I finally found a home with colleagues to protest, lament, and articulate my political concerns.

***

As a BDS supporter, I probably should not admit to appreciating or even reading this book’s version of “the conflict” as Harris and most Israelis call it, told through the experiences of two Jerusalem families, a left-leaning Ashkenazi Jewish family and an indigenous Palestinian family living in West and East Jerusalem, respectively. The equivalence that she makes between the families and her willingness to tell the story from both perspectives seems contradictory to someone like me who can no longer countenance the horrors Palestinians experience at the hands of the Israeli government and military. Listening to Jewish Israeli voices, even (or maybe especially) the dwindling minority who themselves question the democratic possibility of the Zionist enterprise, is problematic. This book could be easily accused of “justice washing”—implicated in the Israeli government’s campaign to brand Israel as a democratic society that allows all kinds of dissent.

If I am boycotting Israel, then shouldn’t I boycott books that tell the Israeli side of the story? Should I be listening to their voices? Some left-wing Israelis support a boycott, seeing it as the only way to call the world’s attention to the plight of Palestinians under Israeli rule. Should I forsake my principles to read a book by someone I admire? Despite these doubts, I read on. It turned out to be a good decision.

Perhaps because Harris is open to telling this story from both sides, this book can do more to awaken awareness of Israel’s horrific rightward turn than any one-sided account could. Harris begins by revealing her reason for writing and sharing her point of view. She explains that she feels “implicated by the way Palestinians were treated,” noting that as a secular American Jew she “could never quite shake the conviction that the country’s antidemocratic moves, whatever else they were, were so contrary to the Jewish values I was raised with.” While we have chosen different paths, I think Harris and I end up at the same place. The stories she tells provide crystal clear evidence of the divergence between the key Jewish value we were both raised with, “to treat others as you would like to be treated,” and what is taking place in Israel today.

In the prologue, Harris quotes a Jewish Israeli friend who, on a peaceful night in the desert, responds to her request to talk about the Palestinians by commenting, “Wake me when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over.” She closes with an excerpt of a poem by Palestinian writer Taha Muhammad, which hints at a similar theme:

After we die
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,

and on all that we’ve longed for,
and all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrefy
within us.

These two comments typify the sadness that permeates the book. No one expresses hope that a resolution will exist any time soon. What is particularly striking, however, is how hopeful Harris herself remains. Her work helps us understand how the situation became so intractable, and how individual people manage to cope, even if few share her optimism.

The Jewish Israeli family Harris profiles in the book is not representative of the common attitude for Jews in Israel to “wake me up when it’s over.” Instead, the Jewish family she introduces readers to—that of Ruth Cohen—is an outlier that showcases the ever-diminishing number of Jewish Israelis who advocate for Palestinian rights and who fight to make their voices heard. Ruth’s husband Yaron published widely on the government’s failures to end the Occupation. Ruth’s brothers have been part of the small group of men and women (Soldiers Against Silence, Breaking the Silence) who have publicly described the atrocities they saw committed by their fellow Israeli citizen-soldiers against Palestinians at checkpoints and at war. Yaron’s daughter Talya, who is involved with several human rights groups that fight legal battles to protect Palestinian property from destruction by settlers, has taken the most radical position, openly questioning the necessity of a Jewish state now or in the future.

The Palestinian family Harris introduces readers to is also unique. Unlike many Palestinians, Niveen Abuleil and her family do not engage in the coping mechanisms of anger and protest even though they have been exiled from their home and live under occupation. They are, as Harris describes, “dug in.” To the best of their ability, they have remained in place, making lives for themselves despite the indignities and deprivations they have faced. Like the Cohens, they are educated professionals. Unlike the Cohens, they are subject to harassments on a regular basis, from forced migration to humiliating experiences at airport security and checkpoints to actual brushes with death. Yet they welcomed Harris into their homes and talked to her about their lives. While their experiences reflect the weariness, longings, and dreams the poet Taha Muhammad described, perseverance, not hatred, is what drives them.

The stories both of these families share with Harris are powerful and poignant, and she narrates them exquisitely. They more than justify a central argument of this work: that the memories shared by individuals across generations should be taken seriously alongside facts derived from the historical record. While those stories form the heart of In Jerusalem, Harris has also familiarized herself with the historical sources, as the extensive bibliography suggests. She does an incredible job of distilling all that history, and making it come alive through the voices of the Cohen and Abuleil clans. These stories make for a vivid entrée into the complexities of Zionism, the Holocaust, the British mandate, and the Muslim Middle East that underlay and determined the present situation.

Harris’s parallel stories of two atypical and traumatized families could have given the reader a mistaken sense of equivalence. But Harris is clear throughout: despite (or perhaps because of) the traumas faced by European Jews and Israel in the past, Israel is currently a powerful state that is oppressing a less powerful people. She states it in no uncertain terms:

Though Israeli officials have never ceased characterizing the nation as a victim, that description now seems ludicrously inapplicable. Is­rael has gradually become a major regional colonial force and, according to some estimates, is among the world’s largest military powers.

This power differential is obvious in the stories told by all the protagonists, but is most abundantly clear when we meet the family outliers, Niveen’s Aunt Rasmea and Ruth’s son Yotam, who themselves are more representative versions of Israelis and Palestinians.

No one in Niveen’s family mentioned Rasmea for the first year Harris spent with them. Rasmea was radicalized when the occupation began. An Israeli court convicted her for her role in the 1969 bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket. She confessed to the crime, and was sentenced to three life sentences. She later claimed the confession she gave was forced and obtained under torture, which Harris describes in gruesome detail. Rasmea served a ten-year sentence in an Israeli prison, was released in a prisoner exchange, and moved to Chicago. She was later arrested in the United States for not mentioning her detention in Israel on her immigration form. She was found guilty by a judge who would not let her enter evidence about the PTSD she experienced that made her want to forget that part of her life. Although that ruling was vacated by a higher court and expert witnesses were ready to testify on her behalf, the Trump administration reclassified her case as a terrorism indictment. To avoid a likely a prison sentence, she took a plea and accepted deportation.

Rasmea’s story is a reminder that while the Cohens and Abuleils pursue peace, the violence on both sides cannot be brushed aside. Harris uses Walter Benjamin’s distinction of sanctioned and unsanctioned violence to suggest that Palestinian “terrorism” is no different from the terrorism of pre-state Israelis who did their fair share of bombing and pillaging of homes and villages; the only difference being that the latter were on the winning side. But her preference, even in this chapter, is to resist that narrative and highlight families like the Abuleils and Cohens, and groups like the Parents Circle-Families Forum, that continue to work for peace and reconciliation.

The chapter about Rasmea is followed by a chapter about Yotam, Ruth’s son from her first marriage. He too is an outlier in his family, having adopted the religious passion of the Haredi lifestyle, dreaming of a messianic age and the rebuilding of the Temple. Yotam believes that in some distant future Jews and Muslims will live in peace together if they reject the Western concept of the nation-state and agree to live governed by Jewish morality. He cannot explain why Muslims would assent to live by Jewish teachings, and Harris finds his idealism perplexing and a bit confusing; not the kind of hope she can make sense of from her secular vantage point.

Despite their status as outliers, Rasmea and Yotam’s stories reveal the contrasting realities of these families’ lives: Rasmea has been forced to give up her dream of returning home. Yotam’s dream lives on, even as it reveals the holy unreality of the present and future of Jerusalem.

That Harris could immerse herself in this world and come away with a counter-narrative that overcomes the brutality, violence, and pain, and tells the story with great nuance and complexity, is a triumph of the power of stories and the perseverance of the storyteller. The book is well worth the read. Moved by her optimism, I am hoping it can change minds if not lives.

Rebecca Alpert is a Professor of Religion at Temple University. She is the author or editor of nine books, including Religion and Sports: An Introduction and Case Studies (Columbia University Press, 2015), Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition (Columbia University Press, 1997).

The post Book Review of In Jerusalem: Three Generations of an Israeli Family and a Palestinian Family appeared first on The Revealer.

Image by Joe Penny

Now at the midpoint—or the near-end, or perhaps the just-beginning—of what we’ll call the Trump Era, we can begin to reflect on the various explanations offered, some already discarded, of “what the hell is going on.” Explanations for what is happening vary, of course, depending on what one thinks is happening. While many have critiqued Donald Trump and his administration for their policies, ineffectual leadership, racism, and sexism, as well as admonishing the Republican Party for enabling and supporting the Trump agenda, other observers have pointed to something more widespread and cultural. Trump, for them, is a symptom more than a cause (but also a cause) of political polarization and social fracture. This group of politicians and political thinkers, mostly but not exclusively on the right and center-right, has been troubled by a litany of concerns: Trump’s vulgarity, the incivility of his more vocal supporters, an increasingly visible activist left, campus protests, and the overwhelming sense that we all cannot, in fact, just get along. For these maladies, they have offered a diagnosis: tribalism.

Tribalism, according to these critics, is a root cause that leads to polarization, partisanship, and “identity politics.” As liberal pluralism cracked up, sometime toward the end of the Obama presidency, we splintered (back) into “tribes.” The people of the United States, at cultural, social, and political levels, are devolving, sliding back into their primitive nature. Conservative writers David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, and Jonah Goldberg; journalists Robert Wright and David Roberts; law professor and author Amy Chua; U.S. Senators Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse; and many more—they all found “tribalism” to be a compelling explanation for political division, factionalism, and incivility.

For these pundits who use the term, “tribalism” comes with a mentality of “identity politics” that pits smaller identity-based groups against each other and against a broadly inclusive and “colorblind” U.S. civil society. For these critics, evidence of tribalism can be found in examples as wide-ranging as the Black Lives Matter movement, surging white nationalism, and rancor between Senators of different parties. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama suggested, “Perhaps the worst thing about left-wing identity politics is that it has stimulated the rise of right-wing identity politics.” In some cases, such commenters bought the argument that white nationalists were simply responding to the overreaches from the left. In recent months, tribalism has been accused of helping spread COVID-19 and killing political liberalism. These works, taken together, make up what I’m calling the tribalism discourse, a popular brand of writing and thinking that uses “tribalism” as both a description and explanation for the cultural politics of the Trump Era.

But why this word? What is it about “tribalism” that seems to have explanatory power to so many popular writers and politicians?

***

The tribalism discourse reveals the anxieties of a tenuously secular age. Amid “fake news,” “media silos,” and unending lies and obfuscation at White House press conferences, some critics have warned that we are in a post-truth era. Objective truth, trust in science, the public sphere, and liberal democracy feel brittle, already cracked and crumbling. Sober reason, the hallmark of Enlightenment modernity, has given way to premodern, fanatical factionalism. Writer David Roberts connects post-truth and tribalism through what he calls “tribal epistemology.” In this way of thinking, people assess information not according to established and widely agreed-upon public standards of objective truth but, instead, according to whether it benefits the “tribe.” “‘Good for our side’ and ‘true’ begin to blur into one,” Roberts writes. If this is the case, then the accomplishments of the Enlightenment, the achievements of a secular age, feel fragile indeed.

Secularization theories posit a progression from the primitive to the enlightened. Secularization narratives describe a society’s advancement from religion to non-religion, or from primitive bad religions to enlightened good religions (the best and most enlightened being no religion and/or liberal Protestantism). But secular, modern people define their own secularity by contrasting it with the insufficiently secular, often in racializing terms: the superstitious, credulous, primitive, fanatical, and the tribal.

Purveyors of the tribalism discourse delineate good politics from bad. Good politics is pluralistic, egalitarian, and civil. Bad politics is factional, identity-based, and uncivil. To be tribal, in this discourse, is to do politics wrong by treating politics like a religion. Much has been made in recent years of the way that social life is increasingly organized around political identity, or how seemingly unrelated facts of age or geography—one’s proximity to a Cracker Barrel or a Whole Foods, for example—can predict voting patterns. There is a lot to say about “why we’re polarized,” and many ways to theorize, conceptualize, and explain these aspects of our contemporary political and cultural moment. But “tribalism”—this “weird euphemism,” as writer Adam Serwer put it—accomplishes something other terms and frameworks don’t, and that is because it folds in a racialized secularization narrative.

***

The label “tribal” has a distinctly colonialist history as a pejorative term imperialists used to rule over the people whose land they colonized. The Trump-Era tribalism discourse keeps this legacy alive. Jonah Goldberg, a writer for the conservative National Review, explains in his 2018 book Suicide of the West, “When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in. Absent a higher alternative, human nature drives us to make sense of the world on its own instinctual terms: That’s tribalism.” By Goldberg’s account, it is natural to be tribal, so the liberating forces of modernity—liberalism and capitalism—are a “Miracle,” allowing fallible humans to transcend their instinctual natures and make something better. But who is the we in “When we fail to properly civilize people…”?

The current tribalism discourse is new, but its frameworks are not. One hundred years ago, in his landmark treatise The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, the famed white supremacist scholar Lothrop Stoddard wrote, “Wherever the white man goes he attempts to impose the bases of his ordered civilization. He puts down tribal war, he wages truceless combat against epidemic disease, and he so improves communications that augmented and better distributed food-supplies minimize the blight of famine…” Stoddard was articulating a theory of whiteness as property, as a justification for colonialism as enactment of rightful ownership, made rightful through the forces of technological civilization over the instincts of tribalism. That same year, 1920, famed Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois defined whiteness as “the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” (Du Bois and Stoddard later had a much-publicized debate; Du Bois won.) Of course, not all critics of tribalism are white supremacists, but whiteness works by obscuring its particularity and pretending to universality, rationality, and the normal. And the secularist tribalism discourse works similarly, to separate the irrational tribalist from rational democratic citizen, marking the former as particular and the latter as universal.

***

Journalists and politicians who participate in the tribalism discourse believe that tribalism is bad, and that it has reached a high point in the Trump Era, but they also often believe that tribalism is inescapable because it is universal. Human nature itself is tribal. Humans naturally divide into groups and make enemies. This idea is central to most writing on tribalism, and it structures an evolutionary secularization story. The Yale Law professor and popular author Amy Chua, in her 2018 book Political Tribes, argues that what makes America great is its unnatural and unusual supersession of our tribal nature. The book rests on the premise that the United States is a “super group,” made up of different cultures and organized by ideas and politics rather than ethnic or racial or religious factions. This super group is organized by “the great Enlightenment principles of modernity—liberalism, secularism, rationality, equality, free markets.” However, Chua cautions, these principles “do not provide the kind of tribal identity that human beings crave and have always craved.” Like Goldberg, Chua recognizes how tenuous being modern can be. Other countries haven’t achieved it, and Americans fail when we expect them to. “We tend to assume that other nations can handle diversity as we have, and that a strong national identity will overcome more primal group divisions.” This misguided optimism, according to Chua, has led to many geopolitical problems, including the fallout of the Iraq War as Americans failed to recognize the depths of Iraqis’ tribalism. At the heart of Chua’s narrative is a sort of evolutionary, perhaps even eugenic, American exceptionalism. The United States has achieved something special and unnatural, evolving out of our primitive natures and escaping the group instinct that pulls back other cultures and countries.

It is for this reason, our dangerously primal drives, that “America wasn’t built for humans,” according to writer Andrew Sullivan. To be tribal is so easy, so natural, so human. Journalist Sebastian Junger offers the following anecdote in his 2016 book Tribe: Benjamin Franklin noted that so many white people joined Native American communities but so few Native Americans, so far as he could tell, seemed interested in converting to Christianity and fully joining “civilization.” Goldberg borrows this story and elucidates the problem: “Why? Because there is something deeply seductive about tribal life. The Western way takes a lot of work.” Civilization, like modernity, must be maintained. Goldberg warns that the natives’ ways of life are seductive, and if we don’t civilize them, they’ll tribalize us, bringing out those base group instincts now suppressed but intrinsic to fallen humanity.

***

The tribalism discourse offers not so much an explanation as an ideological assertion. Chua’s book chapter on inequality and tribalism in the U.S.—which includes the topic sentence “America’s underclasses are intensely tribal”—shows the diminishing returns on this idea’s explanatory power. “Tribalism” applies so widely, so pervasively, that it isn’t clear what it illuminates. The American tribalists include gangs, NASCAR fans, WWE fans, and America’s “two white tribes” (Trump supporters and “coastal elites”). Bad religions, like the prosperity gospel and “narco-saints” (devotees of Santa Muerte), are tribal too. Tribalism is not just for the “underclasses,” though, and it can be found on both sides of the political aisle. Chua writes, “The Left believes that right-wing tribalism—bigotry, racism—is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism—identity politics, political correctness—is tearing the country apart. They are both right.” For Chua, it is natural and even good to be a little tribal, to root for your favorite sports team, make strategic alliances, or support your family members. But it’s easy to take it too far and be uncivil and unduly partisan, and that, she argues, is the problem with the U.S. today. And only robust pluralistic nationalism can overcome tribalism and make America a “super group” again.

Perhaps so many writers have been drawn to the tribalism discourse because it has the air of explanation without the rigor of research. In confusing times, tidy answers can offer comfort (and book deals). Indeed, the whole point of the tribalism discourse, it seems, is to assure readers that they are modern, not tribal, by identifying the credulous other. Permit me one more example from Chua’s book. In a dismissive passage on sovereign citizen movements (groups who believe they not subject to the laws of the United States because they are members of alternative polities and/or subject to higher laws), Chua assures, “As absurd as [their] beliefs sound, the psychological appeal of the movement is easy to understand.” The Washitaw Nation, for instance, which Chua describes with derision and sarcasm, is in fact not easy to understand. They have a complex history and complicated ideas. But tribalists exist outside of history, as stagnating pagans captive to timeless group psychology. Tribalism is supposed to be ever-present and, at the same time, relegated to the past.

The Trump Era is not the first time that “tribes” have featured in a secularization story. In his landmark 1965 book The Secular City, Harvey Cox theorized, “Tribal man is hardly a personal ‘self’ in our modern sense of the word. He does not so much live in a tribe; the tribe lives in him.” The modern subject is a self-possessed individual—“a sovereign, self-owning agent,” as Talal Asad put it. The tribal subject, conversely, is owned by the collective. In the modern world, that’s no way to do politics or religion. Secularism is a political ideology that defines the modern as nonsectarian, public, and above all rational.

And it’s that aspect of the tribalism discourse—the racialized project of liberal secularism—that terms like “polarization” or “fracture” don’t quite invoke. It’s one thing to say that politics these days has gotten divisive and nasty, or to worry about how closely people’s various identities are aligned with their political affiliations. But it’s another to blame these conditions on primitive human nature that some people have transcended, while others slip back into a less evolved stage of the race. That’s what made “tribalism” such a handy framework: a deep colonialist logic that gestures toward universal human nature while ever reassuring the reader who the real moderns are. After all, modernity was always about “us” and “them.”

Charles McCrary is a postdoctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. His book Sincerely Held: American Religion, Secularism, and Belief is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

The post The Trump Era’s Tribalism Discourse: Reflections on a “Weird Euphemism” appeared first on The Revealer.

Photographer: Emily Elconin for Getty Images

In the second week of quarantine in Chicago, I spent a day studying medieval slavery. I was organizing files on my computer (about the only thing I felt I had the capacity to do besides read the news and check in with friends and family) when I started reading one of the PDFs that had been lingering on my desktop: a roundup of scholarship about slavery in the medieval Middle East. The following passage caught my eye:

Geniza records and Arabic documents demonstrate that free Jewish and Muslim women commonly owned female slaves. …The ways in which female slave owners used their slaves, and the terms by which they occasionally freed them, demonstrate that both mastery and patronage culture were themselves gendered.

Buried in a long footnote was an article I noticed for its mention of the sea: “An Arabic Will Written on a Ship.” A minute later, I was staring at a photograph of a 1300-year-old document written on papyrus – a document that may have determined the fate of an enslaved woman. The papyrus had several holes, and the top portion is missing entirely, but the remainder of the document contains a letter from a woman to her relative, potentially her child, requesting that her home and vineyard not be sold after her death. Rather, she decided that her companion on the ship — likely her slave — should live in her home, and the revenue of the land should provide for her. Though this is conjecture, the language of the letter suggests it is a waqf (وقف), or deed for an Islamic endowment.

The author wrote her will while she and her companion were “imprisoned on our vessels” (و قد سجنا في مراكبنا), presumably onboard a ship that was prevented from pulling into port. The scholar who wrote about this will, Alia Hanafi, could only speculate that it was a plague epidemic that prompted eighth-century authorities to keep this ship from docking. Later in the letter, the author prays: “I ask Allah to better our companionship, our health, and our journey.”

Reading about that eighth-century vessel, I could not help but think of the two cruise ships, one in Yokohama and one in the San Francisco Bay, where people were quarantined in February and March this year. According to the New York Times, while the Diamond Princess cruise ship waited off-shore for the cruise company and Japanese government to agree on who was in charge, the work of caring for the 2,700 passengers on board fell to 1,000 low-paid ship workers who were not provided with adequate safety gear or instructions.

Juxtaposing these two situations led me to ask a new question. While slavery is not redeemable in any way, the author of the maritime will decided she owed her slave, the woman she depended on for care and survival, everything. Did any passenger on board the Diamond Princess show a similar kind of gratitude to the unprotected, untrained, and underpaid workers who risked their lives to feed and protect them?

In the days after I read the maritime will, my mind returned to the two women mentioned in the document. For how long had the author of that maritime will planned to free and endow her slave? Was she herself ill — and was this will written on her deathbed? Did she fear illness, if they were indeed quarantined? And what were these moments like for the enslaved woman who was suddenly promised freedom, a home, and productive land? Was the quarantine (if that’s what it was) an experience that transformed the relationship between these two women —master and slave?

The words of those writing or dictating this will were not meant for an audience in the distant future. But documents like this still hold for us a pull, a way into a narrative, and occasionally an example. Someone back then was in a situation that I can relate to — maybe if I know how they managed, it will help me to manage now. This impulse to study the “lessons of history” seems almost commonsense.

But there is another, competing impulse to say that things were much worse in the past, and modern people are much better and smarter now. However, a modern reader’s distance from the past — and from this slave-owning woman — is also more possible for those of us able to distance ourselves from the laborers enabling our present lives. I will not ethically evaluate our lives today in neoliberal and neoimperialist economies according to a medieval yardstick. These were fundamentally different societies with regards to labor, citizenship, state intervention, “human rights,” and any number of relevant issues. But as the unequal burdens of COVID-19 grow, those of us who are surviving by the risk-laden labor of others may be inspired to act by learning about voluntary acts of generosity and protection. It is strange to read of this generosity coming from people we find morally repugnant, like slave-owners, but the strangeness of history can be powerful when we “let ourselves be taken and shaken by other settings.”

What follows are stories of how medieval people behaved towards the workers who kept them alive when faced with calamity and death. Unlike modern European and American epidemics, we can only access these stories through fragments — but let us attend to these fragments.

***

Writing this in the U.S., where the word slavery conjures deeply painful histories for so many Black and Indigenous people, our primary association with slavery is the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And as so many have said before, this past is not past. However, slavery was not one homogenous experience in all places and times. A few scholars go so far as to say this English term has no one coherent meaning for the pre-modern Islamic world. Different slaveries also have different kinds of legacies. For example, in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, people continue to use the racist term ‘abīd (slaves) against Sudanese and other Black people; other historical terms for slaves with different connotations, like mamlūk and jāriya, have no such uses in this region today.

Those enslaved in the pre-modern Islamic world did not live under the same conditions as enslaved people in the Atlantic world. Slaves were a legal category of people (not chattel) with certain rights. An enslaved woman who gave birth to her master’s child was automatically emancipated, and her child was free. Masters and slaves were sometimes of the same “race” and religion. The same religious legal traditions that allowed for and regulated slavery also compelled owners to free their slaves: a highly virtuous deed. However, slavers in the Eastern Mediterranean also commonly abducted, bought and sold their racial Others, including “Circassians,” Nubians, Indians and sub-Saharan Africans.

There is a decades-long, Islamophobic tradition of studying “the history of Eastern racism with the clear aim of establishing moral equivalencies with the racism of the West.” Even though specific kinds of slavery in these regions provided the enslaved with greater mobility, power, or wealth, we should never diminish the harms, alienations, and oppressions of any kind of slavery.

In plague-stricken fifteenth-century Cairo, “most of the deaths were among children, servants and slaves,” many of whom died while sustaining the lives of those around them. During the COVID-19 pandemic, essential workers are more vulnerable to illness and death than those who are able to work from home. With an estimated “29% of Americans able to work from home, social distancing is a luxury . . . largely reserved for America’s higher earners.” What conditions are we sending others to work in, and what are we doing to protect them when their employers do not?

***

Freeing one’s slaves as a final virtuous deed before death was a trope in medieval writing about the plague, such as the Treatise Informing About the Plague written by Ibn al-Wardi in fourteenth-century Aleppo:

One person entrusts his children to others; another bids his neighbors farewell.
Another orders his affairs; another prepares his own shroud.
Another reconciles with enemies; another is sweet to his friends.
Another spends generously; another befriends his former betrayer.
Another sets aside his money for good deeds; another frees his slaves.

The plague in Aleppo eventually killed Ibn al-Wardi. These verses reflect a common notion in the medieval Mediterranean world: “sickness as both punishment and treatment.” On the one hand, illnesses and plague were seen as the effects of sin, and, on the other, it was God’s testing of souls and a means to spiritual health. Those who were generous on their deathbeds may have been motivated by a desire to lighten the weight of their sins and achieve greater spiritual heights after death.

Cairo Geniza

We know about deathbed wills from a rare kind of archive, the Cairo Geniza, where a millennium of documents were preserved in a “scrap pile” of used paper in the back room of a synagogue in Fustat, Cairo. This multilingual archive is challenging to read, full of fragmented and crumpled paper, but it includes rare kinds of documents that don’t often survive from this period — including drafts of letters, prescriptions, and wills. It is a data pool of such magnitude as to provide scholars with unprecedented insight into everyday histories.

Domestic slavery was simultaneously hierarchical and intimate. The character of a domestic slave mattered greatly to her owner; she was sometimes closer to her owner than the owner’s relatives. Female domestic slaves worked primarily as caretakers for their mistresses and their children. While she was disempowered and subordinated, the domestic slave was not an easily replaced, disposable laborer.

But no matter how dutiful a domestic slave was, her labor did not always result in manumission. Two surviving deathbed wills of women in twelfth and thirteenth century Egypt survive from the Cairo Geniza and both women mention their female slaves in their wills. The former ensures that her child’s beloved Sudanese nurse, Sa’adah, will not be separated from her, by willing Sa’adah to be her daughter’s property. The latter, Sitt al-Dalal, said her slave Muna had “attended graciously to me during this and previous illnesses in ways that my mother and sister have not done,” and thus must not be sold or harmed. While one could suggest that a queer relationship existed between these women, no scholars have yet analyzed these relationships with such a lens.

Other slaves during this time worked on ships, including slave ships, and were seen as transmitting disease far and wide. During a plague in fifteenth-century Cairo, historian al-Maqrizi noted the numbers of people who had boarded a slave ship, and how few of them had survived to disembark, only to die in the port soon after arrival. The majority of these deaths were among the enslaved.

The fear of ships as vectors of disease continues. Workers on commercial ships today have not been allowed to disembark during the coronavirus pandemic and are being asked to continue working even though their contracts have ended. Others have been quarantined far from home with no source of income. Though these laborers are working in high risk environments, we don’t often read about these “unsung heroes who are moving . . . goods from point A to point B” in global supply chains whose labor is distant from most consumers.

***

Reading about these scenarios has made me think about the people who are keeping me alive in this quarantine — the many workers who are showing up to grocery stores, those who are keeping them stocked here and abroad, the healthcare providers, the people putting together field hospitals, the people keeping the electricity on and water flowing, the people fighting for student workers like myself to have increased support from our universities.

What do I owe the workers who provide me with clean tap water, electricity, and well-stocked grocery stores? Their work puts them at increased risk right now. Despite massive socioeconomic and health inequalities in America, capitalism is supposed to make this risk “fair.” But the results of inequality — the uneven shares of illness and loss — are stark and immediate. Essential workers, especially those taking public transportation, are dying at higher rates. Together with preexisting conditions and comorbidities, this helps explain the unequal health outcomes for Black and Latinx people. Living near the University of Chicago, I think of my Black neighbors, many living further south, who are disproportionally dying from COVID-19 in this city and others like them across the country. City officials are trying to partner with community organizations to address this, but these organizations need additional help.

Historians have offered us much to think about now. Many point to the way disease is often configured as foreign and the deadly effects this kind of xenophobia already had for Chinese-Americans in San Francisco at the turn of the last century. This othering was perpetuated by a century of films, which have represented the invisible threat in racialized ways.

Still others ask us to contemplate the fact that, because of the coronavirus pandemic, fewer people have died from industrial pollution in China, while we also reckon with the future cost of the Trump administration relaxing EPA regulations to benefit select industries.

Some historians of medicine have reminded us that each epidemic is unique, and that we should not make easy comparisons with historical events because “analogies cause blindspots.” Others have offered us some conclusions from the history of epidemics, reminding us that the way societies, cities, and countries respond is often as devastating for many people as the disease itself: “Epidemics put pressure on the societies they strike . . . They reveal what really matters to a population and whom they truly value.”

Looking into the past can help us see how we can address what our society needs today. At a time when many of us feel less secure, we can set aside resources for our workers by joining local mutual-aid efforts, by supporting worker collectives and demanding more from employers, like protective equipment, paid sick-leave, increased compensation and safer working conditions.

It is easier for those of us born into a world where slavery can only continue illegally to look at medieval slave-owners and feel the horror of their choice to turn a person into property. But several slave-owners looked death in the face and decided to give the entirety of their property to the same people they had once bought.

It is harder to identify ourselves with these medieval people and ask, would each of us have done the same? Or would we have held tighter to what we consider to be ours? We are all embedded in labor relationships, and right now the care we take for each other can mean the difference between life and death. In the face of fear and loss, we could channel these fears towards greater generosity, greater connection with those whose labor is helping us survive, those physically near and distant. We can inculcate a broader sense of who our neighbors are, whom we have claims on, and who has claims on us.

Many people writing about our responsibilities now consider us to be citizens as well as organisms who can infect and be infected: “At the individual level, our responsibilities . . . include the responsibility to wash hands, to stay at home, to cover mouths and noses when coughing or sneezing, but also to be informed and not to panic.” But we could also make more radical claims about our responsibilities to each other – that each of us owes more to the workers keeping us alive than simply paying for services.

Confronted with the looming specter of mortality, how far can we go in our generosity — and can we measure up to the slave-owning woman quarantined on an 8th-century ship? It is a terrifying thing to contemplate putting oneself and one’s loved ones at risk by going out to work or volunteer when one has the choice — but is it right that some of us have this choice because of wealth and privilege, and some do not? When we think about the past through the actions of ordinary people in times of calamity, their traces may point us towards actions more surprising and transformative than the advice offered to us by voices in the present.

Shireen Hamza is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University, working on the history of medicine and sexuality in the premodern Islamic world. She is also a managing editor of the Ottoman History Podcast and editor-in-chief of Ventricles, a podcast on science, religion and culture. 

The post Freeing Workers: Labor and Plague in the Islamic World appeared first on The Revealer.

I hadn’t come back voluntarily; I was here for my father’s funeral. He’d been sick for ten years and I thought I’d be prepared for his death. Turns out I wasn’t ready to face it, especially in a place that once caused me so much pain.

My husband, Michael, clutched my arm. “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” blared on the organ. Louder still were the whispers playing in my head. Sinners. God will punish you with the plague. You will suffer. You will burn.

Moving toward our seat, my pent-up anxiety was subdued by the creaking sound of people shifting in their pews. Inexplicably, I’ve always loved hearing that noise.

Catching my breath, I opened a Bible and took in its aroma. Old and dusty, with a hint of pine, it smelled like my favorite bookstore. I was overcome with a sense of familiarity. But I also felt longing, regret, and trauma.

I looked at the stained glass windows for comfort, like I used to do when I felt uncomfortable at Sunday Mass. As a closeted gay teenager in a conservative Catholic family, that happened quite often. I stared at my favorite, an image of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus in what looked like a thousand shades of blue, and searched for answers. Like the window, my mind was a bit blurred.

Before puberty, I loved going to church. As a kid growing up with leukemia, it was one of the few places I was allowed to visit outside of the hospital. And if you ask my Italian mother, it’s a toss-up as to which institution played a bigger role in saving my life.

When I was diagnosed with the illness at the age of four, it didn’t take long for the news to spread through our parish. People immediately started treating me differently. The seniors that loved pinching my cheeks now gave me a limp pat on the head. The nuns who scolded me for mixing up the words to the Our Father (I thought it was “Our Father who art in heaven, Halloween be your name”) now grinned at my mistakes.

I enjoyed being a part of a community, especially the prayer circles led by Father John, a soft-spoken priest in his mid-forties who always walked around barefoot. Yet hearing Father John say things like, “We pray, dear Lord, that you spare Mark’s life,” was unnerving. Though I was a young kid, his words made me understand the severity of my illness and the delicate balance between life and death. I was grateful to survive—until I became a teenager and found myself unexpectedly attracted to other boys.

In our congregation, people talked about homosexuality like it was worse than adultery or murder. It was as if “Thou Shalt Not Be Gay” was the unwritten 11^th commandment. The church ladies were the most outspokenly homophobic. I hated the way they gossiped about “men who acted like women” and wished they’d get the “gay cancer.” It was 1990 and the specter of AIDS was devastating. Nearly a million people were said to have the disease and I was terrified I’d get it too. At 13, I hadn’t even kissed anyone, but I was naïve and sheltered enough to believe I could contract AIDS just by thinking about having sex with other men.

I wanted to suppress my desires, but I struggled. Temptation was everywhere, from shirtless basketball players in gym class to the bronzed lifeguards in speedos at the beach. Desperate, I used my past illness as an excuse to get out of gym class and avoided the beach, pool parties, and other social activities that would spark impure thoughts. I mostly stayed home, praying to be “normal.”

Around the same time, my father had a near-death experience and decided to return to church. Since my siblings were older and had their own lives, I alone accompanied my parents to Mass. I was used to having this time with Mom, but I loved sharing it with my father. I’d always had trouble connecting with him. It didn’t help that he was a loud, stubborn, and sometimes scary construction worker, while I liked reading romance novels and couldn’t hit a baseball. Yet now we had something we could do together. When Father John asked me to do the weekly readings, Dad beamed. I’d never seen my father so proud.

As soon as I stood at the altar, though, I trembled with fear. I tried to keep my focus on the Gospel of Matthew or whatever Father John had chosen, but I envisioned everyone pointing at me, whispering at me. We know what you are. Your family should be ashamed. You will burn. Fumbling with my words, I turned to Mary and Jesus bathed in blue in the stained glass window and kept trying.

I got through the readings but, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t change my sexuality. At my Confirmation ceremony, I was more focused on what my male classmates looked like under their robes than accepting the Holy Spirit.

The next day, I went to confession and finally divulged what I was. I trusted Father John. This was a man who’d prayed to save my life, surely he’d want to help me save my soul.

“If you act on these feelings, you will get AIDS and suffer in Hell,” he said.

I froze, speechless and even more frightened. Father John was someone I trusted, who’d prayed for my life, so I believed him. The threat of going to Hell for being gay felt even more real.

“Is there anything else?” he asked, dismissively. I wished I hadn’t said anything. Though it was supposed to be confidential, I worried Father John would tell my parents. The fear that they’d disown me was as panic-inducing as the thought of eternal suffering. I was so desperate to spend time with my father and didn’t want to lose that. I forged on, Father John and I both pretending as if I’d never confessed, but the façade could only last so long.

Just after my 16th birthday, I went on a church-sponsored retreat at a campsite in upstate New York. We broke off into smaller groups of four—and then it was just me and another boy. Alone, we talked, dared, and eventually touched.

Though his hand caressed my leg before I’d made a move, he called me a faggot, then told everyone what I’d done. The rumblings spread through the camp, over the Adirondacks and to the church. Father John called a meeting with my parents, and he didn’t arrive alone. Seven concerned parishioners filled the room. My Judas stood behind them, along with his mother and father. His mother led the charge, her smoker’s voice crackling at me with disgust. They all agreed I was no longer welcome at church.

I was heartbroken that a community I’d loved deeply would disown me like this. Too wounded to fight back, I absorbed their venom. All of the compassion and kindness I’d experienced as a child faded away. At that moment, I knew their love would always be conditional. I’d spent years sacrificing my happiness and self-worth, but I was tired of suppressing my sexuality. I needed to accept that I was gay, not be condemned for it.

To my surprise, my parents took my side. Mom pulled no punches, lashing out at a “group of hypocrites” who’d been divorced or engaged in extramarital affairs. At home, there was no epic coming out speech or further talk of acceptance. We wouldn’t speak about my sexuality again for years. My parents still went to church, which made me feel betrayed. Regrettably, I never had the strength to ask them why.

As much as these experiences traumatized me, I missed being a part of the community. I tried to fill the void by experimenting with Buddhism and Judaism, but both felt forced and not something I could be committed to.

As the years went by and social attitudes changed, Dad encouraged me to go back to church with him. Father John was gone, the church ladies had died. I could light a candle or say a prayer without anyone knowing my identity. I fought him on it and leaned toward becoming an atheist, which Dad took worse than when I officially came out as gay.

“You’ve got more Christian goodness in you than anyone I know,” he’d persist. “You can’t just give up.” When I refused to listen, Dad emailed me Bible passages. His favorite was Jeremiah 29:11. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” I deleted it multiple times.

Now, at Dad’s funeral, he’d finally gotten his wish and brought me back to Sacred Heart. It made me laugh, if only for a second. The priest called me up to deliver Dad’s eulogy. “Keep it short,” he whispered. My instinct was to listen, to obey like always. But this time I wasn’t afraid to fight back and speak up for myself. I rambled about how my father and I learned to love each other for who we were. I spoke about how he openly celebrated my marriage to another man.

It was freeing to be so uncensored in a place where I’d spent so much time suppressing my identity. This moment was supposed to be about honoring my father, but it became his last gift to me. As I ended his eulogy, I looked toward my favorite stained glass window. For the first time, I saw beyond the blurred lines and found self-acceptance.

Mark Jason Williams is an award-winning playwright, essayist, and travel writer. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Out, Rachael Ray In Season, Good Housekeeping, Far & Wide, Denver Post and more. He has a BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently working on a memoir about surviving cancer and achieving his lifelong dream of visiting all seven continents.

The post Seeing Through Stained Glass: Gay, Catholic, and Conflicted appeared first on The Revealer.

Public demonstrations of gratitude toward healthcare workers are especially visible now. Rituals of giving thanks, largely organized on social media, are spreading across the globe. In France, Italy, and Spain, nonessential workers and people outside of the labor force, asked by their governments to remain indoors, stand on balconies cheering and applauding healthcare workers. Businesses ranging from local catering companies in the United States to international petroleum corporations offer discounts, free products, and services to healthcare workers and first responders battling on the “front lines.” On March 29, Google posted a video noting trending searches for how to help healthcare workers, advising people to do their part by staying home, and thanking healthcare workers: “to everyone sacrificing so much to save so many, thank you.”

As March blended into April, military metaphors became the primary way we imagined healthcare workers. Commentators in the media, government agencies, and the general public insist that doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff are soldiers stationed at the front lines. They wage war against the coronavirus. They are our first and perhaps only line of defense.

Wartime metaphors have also been used to emphasize the dire situation in hospitals. Medical doctor Laura Kolbe reports “from the frontlines” that corporate and political responses seem less worried than hospital staff are with “the situation on the ground,” remarking: “If you have enough infantry, you can countenance a good deal of loss. Operations can continue even if many are out sick.” The imagery and her insights are chilling. In the war against the novel coronavirus, we are throwing as many bodies of healthcare workers as we can marshal against this pandemic.

Equating healthcare workers with soldiers through the metaphorical language of war obscures the complexity of our current moment, suggesting that a particularly virtuous group of heroic individuals can save us from destruction—and that many may have to sacrifice themselves to keep the rest of us alive. But demanding that healthcare workers embody an ideal form of courage, determination, and self-sacrifice reduces the complicated choices healthcare workers face to a simple story of suffering, sacrifice, and national salvation.

***

Jonathan Ebel, a scholar of religion and a U.S. Navy veteran, persuasively traced the interconnectedness between religion and the images (and actual lives) of soldiers in his book G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion. In this book, Ebel studies soldiering as a civil religious practice, the “things soldiers do, are asked to do, expected to do, and are portrayed doing to embody devotion to the nation.” Ebel argues that American civil religion—a network of symbols, ceremonies, political speech, and national myths—is shaped by Christian incarnation theology, particularly evident when the bodies of American soldiers become “the word of the nation made flesh” through suffering and self-sacrifice. Christianity provides the nation with the symbols, stories, and language to acknowledge the service of soldiers, celebrate their lives, and mourn their deaths. The soldier-savior trope is persuasive and emotionally forceful because soldiers have literally served the nation, suffered profoundly, and often sacrificed their lives. Yet, Ebel continually reminds his reader that soldiers are people who often struggle with the “burdens of civil religious incarnation” because of “what the nation has asked them to do and because of the ideal that they and others imagine themselves to embody.” He points out that “symbolizing processes” have “no interest in tensions or complexity within the symbolized.” This means that the U.S. soldier, as a symbol, represents for us the virtues of courage, strength, and devotion to the country, while erasing the particularities and personalities of real people.

Medical professionals, not unlike soldiers, are also called upon to embody an ideal. My wife works in healthcare, which means I have personally observed and admired the commitment it requires to wake up early in the morning and work long, arduous hours in a high-stress, life and death environment. She and her colleagues, our friends, often spend their holidays away from loved ones. They have their sleep interrupted by pager alerts and phone calls. They restart stopped hearts. They show whatever kindness they can to grieving families who have lost a parent, sibling, or child. It is little wonder that medicine is often described as a “vocation,” an originally religious term that implies one has been “called,” indeed created, for a particular task.

Healthcare workers, like soldiers, are a complicated and diverse group of people. Soldiers enlist for many reasons—a sense of duty, a path to college, a steady job. Soldiers’ experiences in the military vary greatly. Some feel that their service was meaningful, others deal with post-traumatic stress or feelings of betrayal. Similarly, healthcare workers do not all become doctors or nurses or techs because they want to work in critical, life or death cases, to practice emergency medicine. Some nurses see caring for those in need as a higher purpose where others see a career with reasonable healthcare and retirement benefits.

While people all over the world thank medical professionals for their necessary work during this pandemic, it is crucial to remember that many providers feel ambivalent about putting their own lives and the lives of their patients at risk by working without adequate protection. Some hospital staff are angry that administrators are not doing enough to support them. Administrators at Detroit Mercy Center Sinai-Grace asked a group of emergency care workers to leave the hospital after they protested working conditions. Staff at Sinai-Grace are caring for up to twenty patients at a time and expected to wear the same personal protective equipment for twenty-four hours. Under normal conditions, intensive care workers provide one-to-one care for seriously ill patients, not twenty-to-one. Under normal conditions, protective equipment is disposed of after each interaction to prevent cross-contamination between patients and to protect healthcare workers.

The hospital’s response is telling: “We are disappointed that last night a very small number of nurses at Sinai-Grace Hospital staged a work stoppage in the hospital refusing to care for patients. Despite this, our patients continued to receive the care they needed as other dedicated nurses stepped in to provide care.” Rather than acknowledging the hazardous working conditions and shortages that nurses and other hospital staff face, the hospital administration singles out this group of care workers as disappointing and contrasts them to the more dedicated and devoted staff. One group embodies the ideal, demonstrating their devotion through suffering and sacrifice. Outspoken employees do not.

It is safe to assume that many healthcare workers around the country are wrestling with concerns resembling those expressed by the Sinai-Grace staff. In a time when hospitals are actively silencing their staff and terminating physicians and nurses who post on social media or give interviews to news networks about conditions at hospitals, those people who continue to provide care despite inadequate resources or relief must be asking themselves: do I speak out and risk losing my job? What if I get sick and bring the virus home to my family? Is this all worth dying for? If I am gone, or ill, who will care for my children or elderly parents? Can I care for my patients and my family?

Not everyone can live up to the heroic ideals of service, suffering, and self-sacrifice that our nation demands. Jonathan Ebel reminds us how the public reacts when a soldier does not adhere to the savior model by recounting the military career of Francis Gary Powers. Powers was a U.S. pilot taken prisoner by the Soviet Union in 1960 during a spying mission on behalf of the CIA. In the aftermath of Powers’ trial in Russia, an editorial ran in the Los Angeles Times condemning Powers for failing to put his nation before his own life: “He was at no time a man to choose death before dishonor.” Critics of Powers targeted his conduct—getting shot down, failing to destroy the spy plane and equipment, failing to destroy himself—and argued that these demonstrated the “flaws in his true nature and confusion in his true loyalties.” We’ve already seen an example of this same logic in healthcare, where the loyalty of nurses and doctors to their vocation, their hospitals, or those under their care is called into question. “Dedicated” or “devoted” staff are distinguished from those who presumably have questionable character because they fail to perform their duties no matter the conditions, demonstrate concern for their own well-being, or refuse to look past the breakdowns in hospital administration and national healthcare infrastructures.

***

Military metaphors have long been a part of healthcare in the United States, especially prominent after American battlefield victories in World War II. We draw associations between illness and war. Patients fight off viral infections. People and their physicians battle cancer. HIV assaults our bodies’ defenses. HIV researchers even borrowed George Bush’s famous phrase “shock and awe” to frame HIV cure strategies as “shock and kill.” Metaphors are an important feature of language because they shape how we understand our world and ourselves.

Returning to the mural in San Jose, its quote, and its tribute to healthcare workers might demonstrate the kind of comfort that war metaphors can bring to the people that use and encounter them. Wars can be won, and treaties can be negotiated. We would do well to remember that Churchill’s speech, delivered to the House of Commons on August 20^th, 1940, addressed a nation gripped in the existential threat of total war. The expanded lines from his speech read: “The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen, who undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The abridged version of the quote on the mural omits the field of human conflict, the battlefield, the warzone, the nation mobilized for war. Churchill identifies heroic characteristics of the British airmen, suggesting that their devotion, skill, and courage are “turning the tide” of the war.

How might we expect healthcare workers caring for patients with coronavirus to “turn this tide”? What victory can hospital staff achieve? Will individual heroism save us? Is there any alternative to thinking about working during the pandemic other than fighting, suffering, and sacrificing? What do we risk by making heroes out of healthcare workers? Benjamin Morrison, a resident physician in New York, wrote in a letter to the editor of the New York Times that “medical staff are being forced to work in extremely unsafe conditions.” He reminds us that the “burden of care often falls on the lowest ranked workers,” and reflects, “We will be called ‘heroes’ to hide the truth: we were killed on dangerous job sites.” By resisting the urge to frame work in a hospital as battle on the front lines, Morrison redirects our attention to the precarity so many American workers face even in the best of times. This framing reminds us that risk is never shared evenly by all citizens. The grave situation facing healthcare workers is difficult to quantify at present, but estimates suggest up to 20% of Covid-19 infections in the U.S. are among hospital staff. Some of us are always more vulnerable than others, whether by choice or circumstance. Imagining a hospital as a dangerous workplace also makes it possible to imagine that it could be less dangerous if staff received the proper protective equipment, training, support, and life-saving supplies. Wartime rhetoric makes the cause of injury or death for workers a foreign enemy on a distant battlefield, rather than an indication of the failures of management, markets, or government policies.

It is impossible to predict what Covid-19 will cost the United States. It is highly likely that those costs will be steep and that the sacrificial emphasis we place on the heroism of individuals who are doing remarkable work will inevitably obscure our view of the full costs of this crisis. Military metaphors fail to capture the gravity of the choices facing essential workers, not just healthcare professionals, because we conceive of our soldiers as volunteers. We have a voluntary, professional military. This is why, when a soldier dies abroad, we often say “they signed up for it.” Equating essential workers with soldiers carries over this “voluntary” attitude toward soldiering in the United States. Healthcare workers, post office workers, and grocery clerks all “signed up” for their jobs. As those of us fortunate enough to work from home adjust to new schedules and choreographies in our daily lives, many are facing tough choices. The tough choices are epitomized by the words of a 63-year-old fitting-room attendant at Walmart: “How can I afford to live?” She is high-risk. Her family has begged her to quit her job for her own health. She cannot. For so many in the United States, the only answer to that question is to continue working in dangerous conditions. As our nation turns to wartime rhetoric, our focus should shift from sacrifice to the social infrastructures, government policies, and business decision-making that leave so many in such a precarious position that the question “how can I afford to live” is even conceivable.

Dale Spicer is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. His current research and writing explore interconnections between religion, law, and medicine.

The post Sacrificing Healthcare Workers: War Rhetoric and the Coronavirus Pandemic appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Last week, with much trepidation, I read the news for the first time after a fourteen-day hiatus. I stopped consuming the news because I could no longer read about the daily deaths of my fellow New Yorkers, the overwhelmed hospitals, the inadequacies of the U.S. healthcare system, the mistreatment of millions of workers, or the lies spewing out of the White House without feeling overrun by panic. To continue functioning, to mitigate my hypochondria, to choose life over anxiety, I had to cut the news out of my daily routine. In truth, I did not miss it. I read two novels and took pleasure in escaping to fictional worlds. But occasional guilt and worry set in—guilt that I had the luxury to recuse myself from the daily horrors, and worry that I had missed new discoveries about how Covid-19 attacks the body. I also believed that to edit this publication properly, my sabbatical from journalism should not continue indefinitely. But in those two weeks I learned that I only need to read about the pandemic once a day, and that I must read articles that have nothing to do with the coronavirus. That combination allowed me to end my hiatus and face the news with a sense of possibility.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

This issue of the Revealer is an attempt to strike a balance between providing insightful commentary about the pandemic alongside articles that contain no mention of the coronavirus. If you’re looking for astute observations about Covid-19 and religion, we have that. If you’re looking for essays that have nothing to do with the pandemic, we have that too.

Most of the articles in this issue contain powerful personal reflections. The issue opens with Dale Spicer’s “Sacrificing Healthcare Workers: War Rhetoric and the Coronavirus Pandemic,” where he considers how we fail to improve the country’s healthcare system when we valorize nurses and doctors with wartime rhetoric about “heroes fighting on the front lines.” Next, in a beautiful article not about the pandemic, award-winning playwright Mark Williams offers a gripping personal essay about growing up gay and Catholic in “Seeing through Stained Glass: Gay, Catholic, and Conflicted.” Following that, in “Freeing Workers: Labor and Plague in the Islamic World” Shireen Hamza reflects on histories of slavery and religion alongside the current treatment of “essential workers” during the pandemic.

Many of this issue’s articles are also explicitly political. In “The Trump Era’s Tribalism Discourse: Reflections on a ‘Weird Euphemism,’” Charles McCrary considers why so many politicians and pundits have described today’s political climate as one defined by the splintering of Americans into “tribes.” In her book review of Lis Harris’s In Jerusalem: Three Generations of an Israeli Family and a Palestinian Family, Rebecca Alpert reflects on her own struggles with the conflict in Israel and how she found hope in Harris’s writing. In an excerpt from his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond, L. Benjamin Rolsky recounts a tense political exchange between President Ronald Reagan and progressive television writer Norman Lear. And, in a conversation between our Contributing Editor Kali Handelman and Anjuli Raza Kolb, Handelman asks Raza Kolb how her research on the ways colonizers linked terrorism with epidemics relates to the political rhetoric taking place today.

I am also happy to share the second episode of the Revealer podcast: “Yoga and Emotional Wellbeing.” In the episode, Shreena Gandhi joins us to discuss why yoga has been so popular among white women, new yoga trends, how yoga can help with anxiety and trauma, and how to practice yoga during a pandemic. You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

As the articles in this issue attest, even as the novel coronavirus consumes our lives, countless other issues continue to matter and need our attention. I hope these articles and our podcast offer you insight, new perspectives, and as much or as little about the current state of the world as you can handle to maintain your own sense of possibility.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Personal Reflections, Politics, and a Pandemic appeared first on The Revealer.