“What’s the legal status of the kids down the road?” asked Linh Song. “The longer they stay, will there be foster parents who will contest for custody and adopt? It would be one thing if the kids are going as unaccompanied minors or teens. But if you have an infant with you, I bet there are parents who won’t want to give that child up.” She said, “What’s the likelihood of an indigenous Guatemalan mom fighting a family in western Michigan with access to law firms and large, conservative Christian megachurches? It’s really daunting.”

A young immigrant holds his belongings in a Homeland Security bag while waiting to enter the bus station after being processed and released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in McAllen, Texas, on June 22, 2018. Photo: David J. Phillip/AP

And keeping with the topical and dire, do make sure to read Patrick Blanchfield‘s deep cut on The John McCain Phenomenon by  for The Baffler.  

This narrative of abandoning self-seeking in favor of something greater taps deep wells, mythic and even theological, while also trading in popular narrative tropes of personal redemption. McCain the young man, conceited but daring and with a roguish charm, is made to suffer, but learns thereby the values of self-sacrifice and leadership. His youthful disrespect for the proper authorities is transmuted into defiance of abuse at the hands of improper authorities, and then into a nobility of proper authority in his own right—while preserving the added frisson of his old independent-minded iconoclasm. The reckless Hotshot becomes the Maverick, who happens to always vote the same way as the Company Man; Han Solo, but for Empire.

And Katrhyn Lofton‘s No God but Country: The Religion of John McCain Has Something Important to Tell Us, for Religion Dispatches, makes a  great religion-focused companion piece.

As I proceed here with a study of McCain’s religious words and religious acts, it is worth noting that there is no test, no catechism, and no shibboleth (as much as the voting public may, for whatever reason, desire one) that will prove religious identity or personal commitment to a specific God. People say and do a lot of things they don’t actually mean. Trying to know what people actually do believe, or what they actually do mean, requires psychic skill far beyond the purview of most refereed journals, most tenured academics, and certainly beyond the polygraph limits of the American media. Remember (yes, you, Senator McCain; you, Senator Obama; and you, voting Americans): words of faith are precisely that: words. To know a man’s religion as an observer (a voter, a journalist, a scholar, an outside believer) is to know, only and entirely, his language game. This is John McCain’s.

John McCain (Getty Images)

Lofton also Revisited: Sex abuse and the study of religionfor The Immanent Frame

Our goal was to explore the specifically Catholic cultural, theological, moral, even ontological, contexts within which this abuse took place, and then to consider the questions and issues this raises more broadly for the study of religion. To do this, we turned to an online archive developed by BishopAccountability.org, an organization that seeks to gather and preserve the archives emerging as a result of the sex abuse revelations in the Roman Catholic Church.

Which inspired us to revisit this terrific piece by The Revealer‘s publisher, Angela Zito, from 2010, Imagine this! Or Can a Church hierarchy become a Catholic community?

Human beings form communities imaginatively, by being able to make metaphors for action for themselves out of the strangely different, yet seductively engaging life-experiences of beloved Others.  Not just any others, but people with whom you live, work and struggle. Up close. Every day. We are always alone together. The Church has no women’s experiences enriching the daily life of administrative work or its workers, no openly gay people to challenge the imagination of its hierarchy. Whether women, gay or straight, get there by ordination, by marrying priests, or by coming out does not matter—I leave that to the theologians.

Which you should definitely read before you take on Christine Kenneally‘s long and painful Buzzfeed.News report, We Saw Nuns Kill Children: The Ghosts of St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage .

Outside the United States, the orphanage system and the wreckage it produced has undergone substantial official scrutiny over the last two decades. In Canada, the UK, Germany, Ireland, and Australia, multiple formal government inquiries have subpoenaed records, taken witness testimony, and found, time and again, that children consigned to orphanages — in many cases, Catholic orphanages — were victims of severe abuse. A 1998 UK government inquiry, citing “exceptional depravity” at four homes run by the Christian Brothers order in Australia, heard that a boy was the object of a competition between the brothers to see who could rape him 100 times. The inquiries focused primarily on sexual abuse, not physical abuse or murder, but taken together, the reports showed almost limitless harm that was the result not just of individual cruelty but of systemic abuse.

In the United States, however, no such reckoning has taken place. Even today the stories of the orphanages are rarely told and barely heard, let alone recognized in any formal way by the government, the public, or the courts. The few times that orphanage abuse cases have been litigated in the US, the courts have remained, with a few exceptions, generally indifferent. Private settlements could be as little as a few thousand dollars. Government bodies have rarely pursued the allegations.

So in a journey that lasted four years, I went around the country, and even around the world, in search of the truth about this vast, unnarrated chapter of American experience. Eventually I focused on St. Joseph’s, where the former residents’ lawsuits had briefly forced the dark history into public view.

Then you can read  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez On her Catholic faith and the urgency of a criminal justice reform in America Magazine.

Discussions of reforming our criminal justice system demand us to ask philosophical and moral questions. What should be the ultimate goal of sentencing and incarceration? Is it punishment? Rehabilitation? Forgiveness? For Catholics, these questions tie directly to the heart of our faith.

And  Anthea Butler writing From the church to the public stage, Aretha Franklin earned her respect for America Magazine. 

The pain of women in patriarchal spaces is real. The black church, much like the Catholic Church, was a space in which women filled the pews but men controlled their destinies. Aretha’s gift to us is not only her voice, but her legacy as a proud and successful artist: In the patriarchal spaces of the music world as well as the church world, she demanded respect for her talents and her work. In a time of men, Aretha Franklin stood out as a woman whose voice was a conduit for the Spirit of God and the longing for love that we all seek. Perhaps she was not ethereal, but her earthiness gave us something of the divine in her powerful voice. May she rest well, as a good and faithful servant of God.

Aretha Franklin performing at a benefit for her father, the Rev. C. L. Franklin, in Detroit in 1980. Credit: Leni Sinclair/Getty Images

You know who really loves Gospel? Headline writers. First up, The Gospel According to Kendrick Lamar by Lisa Robinson for Vanity Fair.

Since he says he was confident as a kid, and he’s confident now, why were there all those self-doubts he’s written about that came in between? “I never thought about it like that,” he says. “That’s a question I’m going to ask myself tonight. Maybe it’s that fear . . . a lot of artists have a fear of success, they can’t handle it; some people need drugs to escape. For me, I need the microphone—that’s how I release it. And just figuring out a new life. Maybe thinking that I’m doing something wrong, or that I’m a little bit different or gifted. It’s the same thing as not wanting to accept compliments. Just wanting to work harder.” As for what’s next: “I don’t know,” he says. “And that’s the most fun part, the most beautiful part.” I ask him if, as he sings in “ELEMENT,” he would “die for this shit,” and he says, without a second’s hesitation, “I would.”

Next, Gospels of Giving for the New Gilded Age by Elizabeth Kolbert for The New Yorker (okay, to be fair, the Gospel reference in this one  is topical, and not just headline bait.)

We live, it is often said, in a new Gilded Age—an era of extravagant wealth and almost as extravagant displays of generosity. In the past fifteen years, some thirty thousand private foundations have been created, and the number of donor-advised funds has roughly doubled. The Giving Pledge—signed by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Larry Ellison, and more than a hundred and seventy other gazillionaires who have promised to dedicate most of their wealth to philanthropy—is the “Gospel [of Wealth]” stripped down and updated.

And last, The Gospel of Elon Musk, According to his Flock by  Bijan Stephen for The Verge .

Gomez isn’t alone. She’s one member of a vast, global community of people who revere the 46-year-old entrepreneur with a passion better suited to a megachurch pastor than a tech mogul. With followers like her, Elon Musk — the South African-born multibillionaire known for high-profile, risky investments such as Tesla (electric cars), SpaceX (private space travel), the Boring Company (underground travel), and Neuralink (neurotechnology) — has reaped the benefits of a culture in which fandom dominates nearly everything. While his detractors see him as another out-of-touch, inexpert rich guy who either can’t or won’t acknowledge the damage he and his companies are doing, to his fans, Musk is a visionary out to save humanity from itself. They gravitate toward his charisma and his intoxicating brew of extreme wealth, a grand vision for society — articulated through his companies, which he has an odd habit of launching with tweets — and an internet-friendly playfulness that sets him apart from the stodgier members of his economic class. Among his more than 22 million followers, all of this inspires a level of righteous devotion rarely glimpsed outside of the replies to a Taylor Swift tweet.

Michael Peterniti wrote about a different kind of leader in Jimmy Carter for Higher Office for GQ  .

About 40 Sundays a year, Mr. Jimmy materializes from thin air, flickering before us at Maranatha to lead Bible study, to say, No, the world’s not going to end. Not just yet. Though he’s elfin with age, you’d still instantly recognize him as our 39th president: with those same hooded ice-blue eyes, the same rectangular head, the same famous 1,000-watt smile. But when he teaches like this, he transforms from whatever your vision of Jimmy Carter is into someone different, some kind of 93-year-old Yoda-like knower, who in his tenth decade on earth still possesses that rarest of airy commodities: hope.

And Black Perspectives  published a forum about the great James Cone which includes terrific work by Judith Weisenfeld, For His People: James H. Cone and Black Theology, and Xavier Pickett, Honoring the Sacred Fire of James Cone (below) among others.

While his rage against injustice emboldened him to speak into the present with an eye toward the past, it also enabled him to create a future where academic Black theology would exist. It is tempting to believe that his rage was incidental to his thinking, but I think rage was integral to his thinking. For Cone, as I understand him, rage is a form of thinking. Cone’s rage forced white theology into the furnace of Blackness, thereby forging a new theology with Black fire. This new theology made of fire became the conduit through which he unleashed the power of his mind.

Dr. Cone preaches in James Chapel in 1969 (Photo courtesy of Union Theological Seminary).

(Black Perspectives also published Alexis Pauline Gumbs great essay on the problem with the passive past tense which we highly recommend.)

For more from Weisenfeld you can listen to Hillary Kaell interview her about her book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, for the New Books Network.

A wave of religious leaders in black communities in the early twentieth-century insisted that so-called Negroes were, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or a raceless children of God. In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017), historian of religion Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay in how they rejected conventional American racial classifications and offered alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and a collective future.

And of course, there are stories about seekers: Amar’e Stoudemire Is on a Religious Quest writes Sam Kestenbaum for The New York Times

The American understanding of war as trauma came out of an older tradition of understanding war as revelation. That idea emerged in Europe with Romanticism. You can see it in novels like War in Peace and Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, and in poems by [the English poet and soldier] Wilfred Owen. In one of Owen’s poems, the narrator has a traumatic revelation when he sees his friend die in a gas attack. The moment opens his mind to a kind of “truth of existence” that civilians can never understand. Then there are novels like Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel, which is also about understanding war as this revelation of truth, but for him, war isn’t traumatic. It’s not about death; it’s about the future, and it’s beautiful. But these interpretations are two sides of the same coin. They both draw from this transcendental knowledge that war gives access to revelation.

If all of this leaves you wishing the weekend had been just a bit longer, well, give this a read: Benjamin Y. Fong on the religious origins of Inventing the Weekend for Jacobin

Reid concludes that “the eradication of Saint Monday did real harm to the actual and potential quality of working-class life. Half a day was given in exchange for a whole one; in submitting to the norms of industrial capitalism the notion of a proper balance between work and leisure was lost.” But remembrance of Saint Monday is more than just a lamentation for a bygone form of life, one where work made more sense, where we had more control over its rhythms, and where the “unpurposive passing of time” had not yet been funneled into structured play. It is also a reminder of what is to be gained once again.

And if you want something superb to watch this weekend, watch Hannah Gadsby‘s “Nanette” and then read Briallen Hopper‘s response, Hannah Gadsby Makes it Plain, for Killing the Buddha.

In divinity school they taught us to preach the sermon we needed to hear, because others would need to hear it too. That is what Hannah Gadsby has done.

Finally, well, you already know how we feel about witches; we’re also very into Naomi Fry, who wrote about The Many Faces of Women Who Identify as Witches in The New Yorker

The witch is often understood as a mishmash of sometimes contradictory clichés: sexually forthright but psychologically mysterious; threatening and haggish but irresistibly seductive; a kooky believer in cultish mumbo-jumbo and a canny she-devil; a sophisticated holder of arcane spiritual knowledge and a corporeal being who is no thought and all instinct. Even more recently, the witch has entered the Zeitgeist as a figure akin to the so-called nasty woman, who—in the face of a Presidential Administration that is quick to cast any criticism as a “witch hunt”—has reclaimed the term for the feminist resistance. (This latter-day witchiness has often been corralled to commercial ends: an Urban Outfitters shirt bearing the words “Boss Ass Witch,” say, or the women-only co-working space the Wing referring to itself as a “coven.”) The muddled stereotypes that surround witches nowadays are, in the end, not so very different from those used to define that perennial problem: woman.

“Kir (Brooklyn, NY)” photo by Frances F. Denny

Okay, that’s it for this month, we’ll see you again in October!

The post In the News: Mourning, Reckoning, and Looking Ahead appeared first on The Revealer.

I was stunned. And the words just flew out of my mouth. “Really? You’ve been one of my best friends forever. I can’t believe you didn’t know that stuff happens to me all the time.”

After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, he responded sheepishly. “I’m really sorry, man. I didn’t know. You never really talk about this stuff, so I figured it didn’t affect you.”

I accepted his explanation, got over my surprise, and we moved forward in our conversation, catching up on everything else in our lives. But after we hung up I couldn’t get his words out of my head. For two weeks, I thought about it obsessively, engaging anyone willing to discuss the topic. And every night before going to bed, I would stare at the question I had written at the top of an otherwise blank page: “Have I been doing a poor job of dealing with racism this whole time?” Underneath that, in small, crooked letters: “What is my responsibility here? How can I actually be helpful?”

I began doing the only thing I knew in situations like this. I reflected on my own experiences and read voraciously.

Through this reflection and reading, I gradually realized that my friend was right. I did have a tendency to downplay the racism I experienced. I felt guilty sharing stories about discrimination against me because they seemed trivial compared to what others have endured. I kept my experiences to myself for the most part, occasionally sharing them with my wife or siblings if I felt particularly threatened. But I never shared them with publicly, not even with my friends. I didn’t want anyone thinking that I was making everything about me, or that somehow I felt like what I was enduring was worse than what others endured. I felt like it would be selfish for me to say anything.

My new realization pushed me to read the work of luminaries. I wanted wisdom on how to improve my approach. I encountered a powerful line from a 1979 speech by Angela Davis, a black activist and philosopher whose work I admire deeply. “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.” Her words were a sharp slap in the face, leaving an imprint that has lasted for years. Here I was, trying to live quietly, a good guy who experienced racism but never dealt it out to anyone. But I was not doing anything to actually address it address it. I was shook.

Silence is complicity, I learned. And if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. I had never thought of it that way. But I knew she was right. And I knew I had to change course immediately.

Despite accepting her wisdom, I still struggled at figuring out what to do. My essential dilemma was this: in order to truly help people understand the pervasiveness of racism in our society, I would have to make myself vulnerable and begin sharing my own personal experiences. Describing this as new territory for me would be an epic understatement.  Expressing emotion publicly had not been part of my upbringing, and I worried about how sharing these stories might change the ways that other people viewed me. The Sikh faith teaches us to be resilient and to strive for optimism in all situations. I have never viewed myself as a victim, and I worried that people who heard my stories might see me as one. Our Sikh faith also places a great deal of value on humility, and it felt wrong to call attention to myself in order to educate others. I struggled and struggled and struggled. And then, two things happened that helped me break through.

First, I came across an insight in Conversations with James Baldwin that brought together the jumbled pieces of my puzzled mind. “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” I realized that I could share my own stories with the inspiration of love and with the intention to educate and advance justice — without it having to be about myself. This single sentence helped me break through months of struggle and shed light on what I had to do: If I truly loved the people around me, I would actually have to overcome my personal insecurities and open myself up to the world. I made a commitment to myself then and there: I would no longer hide the racism that I encountered. I would use the privilege that I enjoy in this world to help others learn about what people in my community — and other communities — endure in modern America. I resolved to publicly share every encounter with racism, from personal hate to structural discrimination, in order to do my part in opening the hearts and minds of people around me.

So I started sharing, primarily via online channels. I shared when the TSA racially profiled me at airports and subjected me to additional security screenings. I shared when a volunteer refused to serve me water during the New York City Marathon because I was a “filthy Muslim.” I also shared when a young man yelled racial slurs at me while I was commuting home.  Yet the more I shared, the more I realized that I couldn’t completely control the narratives once I presented them. For example, I could only do so much to prevent myself, or people in my community, from being presented as victims. A vast majority of news coverage on Sikh Americans comes in response to incidents of discrimination, hate, or violence. And a vast majority of those stories present Sikhs as helpless victims who deserve public sympathy. I struggle with representations like that, because although they are well intended, they fail to authentically capture or represent how we view ourselves. Even the most well-conceived and carefully nuanced pieces about the experiences of Sikhs in America incorporated hate as a central narrative, including W. Kamau Bell’s piece for his CNN program, United Shades of America, Hasan Minhaj’s segment for The Daily Show, and Arun Venugopal’s New York Times feature on Sikhs emerging in American political leadership.

I admit there was something reassuring about finally seeing Sikhs presented in traditional media outlets as protagonists, as sympathetic figures, as people deserving better than what they received. This was undoubtedly a mark of progress for us as a community, particularly because we had felt invisible and unnoticed for so many decades. Yet there was something deeply unsatisfying about reading articles that presented our community in a way that didn’t resonate with our experiences. Moreover, the constant framing of Sikhs as victims flattens our complexities and ultimately prevents others from seeing us as fully human. This dissatisfaction motivated me to work even harder to open up space in the world of traditional media. I continued to try, speaking to reporters and writing opinion pieces that reiterated the point that there was no such concept of victimhood in the Sikh vocabulary. I soon realized, though, that one can’t fully control how people receive information, let alone how they choose to connect with experiences of others that are not their own. I realized that I was treading a fine line between wanting to share incidents of discrimination affecting our community while also wanting to not be seen as victims. I tried to shape these stories to strike that balance and even talked reporters through the issue when I got the chance. And although it’s been difficult to get it quite right every time, I believe that being aware of and negotiating those two concerns has, at the very least, improved how Sikhs are covered and perceived within the American context.

The more I shared, the more I saw people rally around me and my community. When my father and I were accosted in the parking lot after a San Antonio Spurs game last year, I tweeted about it from the safety of our car. I opened up my phone when we arrived home to see an overwhelmingly positive response on my Twitter feed. A few reporters from the local media picked up the story, which caught the attention of people in our local community and even from the Spurs organization itself. A team official called me immediately to offer support and condolences and to ask how the organization could be helpful. This type of emergent solidarity confirmed my belief that people are ultimately good and they want to do the right thing. I realized that many people were moved to stand with us the moment they learned about our experiences. This helped affirm my faith in humanity and in the work of sharing my experiences. As my father used to always tell us, “Make sure to count your blessings. It’s the best way to remember that there is far more light in this world than darkness.”

The more I shared, the more I regretted my previous approach of downplaying the racism I encountered. I still understood why I had taken that approach, but I thought of all the lost opportunities. So many of my friends in high school still live in Texas where I grew up and have been privileged enough not to have first-hand experiences of racism and its pernicious effects. I wished that instead of telling them to “let it go,” I had allowed my teammates to back me up when opponents yelled slurs at me. It would have given them a chance to see experiences outside of their own, and to practice being good allies and standing up for others. I wished I had shared my stories with people younger than me to let them know that they were not alone in their struggles with discrimination. I still feel guilty for not speaking up when I could have — and should have — knowing now that doing so may have prevented others from perpetuating the cycle of hate. I wish I knew then what I know today: that racism is systemic and structural and pervasive and, and that the only way to deal with it is to confront it directly and intersectionally.

The more I shared, the more I also realized the immense power of telling one’s own stories. I felt that, for the first time ever, I was able to get people to pay attention to my life experiences. I felt validated. I felt whole. I felt powerful. And I felt like I was building power with my community. And I’m not alone in this work. For the first time since Sikhs began coming to America over 125 years ago, we are starting to tell our own stories in the media. We are receiving representation. We have a voice. And we can use that voice to lift up members of our community, for political advocacy, and to help lift up others who were marginalized.

Certainly we still have a long way to go, especially given how grossly underrepresented and mistreated Sikhs still are today. But we are heading in the right direction. And this progress continues to fuel my public work and online presence, in spite of the vulnerabilities and challenges that come with participating in that world. For me, the very act of being public is a political decision rooted in love, grounded as service, and directed as a commitment to help others see what they do not experience themselves.

***

Simran Jeet Singh a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media and a Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights organization based in New York City. He is a columnist for the Religion News Service, on the board for Religion News Association, and he serves as a consistent expert for reporters around the world. Simran is a chaplain at New York University and serves on Governor Cuomo’s Interfaith Advisory Council for the State of New York. He is also a fellow for the Truman National Security Project, a term-member for the Council on Foreign Relations, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Birmingham (UK). Simran holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University, and he is the author of Covering Sikhs, a guidebook to help journalists accurately report on the Sikh community.  He tweets at @SikhProf.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Why I Share My Story: Vulnerability, Representation & Empowerment appeared first on The Revealer.

The book’s particular subject is mesmerism, a precursor to hypnosis that was popular in the US from the 1830s to the 1850s. What interests me about mesmerism is that practitioners used disenchanted means to produce enchanted states. In the careful terms of bureaucratic rationality, mesmerists outlined how to perform mesmerizing gestures. Yet the trance states they induced were, by their own account, exactly the same as the ones priests and magicians had long elicited from their so-called credulous subjects, whether at Delphi, among Lapland shamans, or in Kentucky revivals. Mesmerists hoped that even magic could be tamed and re-deployed for use within a disenchanted framework. But magic exceeded its frame. The book demonstrates how mesmerism’s secular affects and projects both needed enchantment and came to resemble it.

Credulity traces mesmerism’s rise in America, from its introduction by a Guadeloupean slaveholder to its use as a means of personality analysis to its triumph as a mass spectacle.[1] Without dissolving the difference between enchanted and disenchanted attitudes, Credulity shows how much, through long adversarial conversation, they end up taking from each other. As the coda concludes, “there is no special reason why you would be freer from your idol when your idol is your freedom of choice than when it is your little wooden god.”

Excerpted below are the first few pages of the book’s introduction.

–Emily Ogden, introduction to Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism

***

Out on Credulity! ‘t would swallow whole

A rabbit belly’d elephant foal

– Laughton Osborn, The Vision of Rubeta (1838)[2]

J. Stanley Grimes, an American mesmerist, announced in 1845 that he had discovered the organ of the brain that accounted for enchantment. “Credenciveness” governed religious faith and overall gullibility; it accounted for why one might enter an apparently magical trance, believe in false gods, or fall for a confidence game (Fig. 1). Too much credenciveness meant “superstition, credulity.”[3] Grimes explained that “prophets and seers and soothsayers of ancient times” had possessed a secret technique for heightening the organ’s activity; their knowledge allowed them to propagate such lamentable errors as the Delphic oracles and the Shaker prophecies and gave them “unbounded sway over the minds of the ignorant masses.”[4] His next step was not, however, the one we tend to expect of Enlightenment’s heirs: he had no interest in stamping out either credenciveness or the techniques that had stimulated it. On the contrary, he wanted to perpetuate those techniques. He proposed first to explain the false priests’ chicanery and then to appropriate it, redirecting their occult gestures toward new rational ends. He proposed, in a word, to practice mesmerism.

Fig. 1. Bust showing the organ of Credenciveness. In J. Stanley Grimes, The Mysteries of the Head and Heart Explained (Chicago: W. B. Keen, Cooke, 1875), p. [1]. Credenciveness is marked “eRE’ and appears above the temple, toward the crown of the head. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Mesmerists, who were active in the United States between 1836 and the Civil War (1861–1865), offered an applied science of excessive belief, or credulity. Not all practitioners tied credulity to a phrenological organ, but most shared Grimes’s conviction that when they entranced their subjects with precisely choreographed gestures, thus inducing a suite of phenomena including delusion, thrall, and prophetic knowledge, they were updating false religion for modern use. Employed secretly, the mesmeric gestures abetted Delphic frauds. Employed openly and rationally, the same gestures served enlightened ends. Was the mesmerized subject fantastically obedient? Then mesmerism could help discipline workers. Was the subject clairvoyant? Then he could speedily communicate the price of cotton from north to south. Could the subject read minds? Her insight might aid in educating young people. All of these uses were proposed; the first and last were attempted. If one imagines that a person can be either a debunker or a practitioner of the occult, but not both at once, mesmerism poses a problem. Mesmerists did not believe in magic, but they did believe in the utility of others’ belief. They were not enchanted themselves, but they were eager to use the enchantment of others.

“To enchant” has long been an ambivalent verb in English; it means to delight, and also to delude; to enrapture, and also to rape; to spellbind figuratively, and also to spellbind literally. When disenchantment was used to translate Entzauberung (literally, demagification) in Max Weber’s foundational account, “Science as a Vocation,” enchantment became the term for that state of the world before modernity when one is in awe but in error, like the propitiating savage. Enchantment became a periodizing word, that is: the world used to be enchanted, and now it is not. Whatever the shortcomings of this translation,[5] it does preserve Weber’s own ambivalence about the transition he described. The world is enchanted when “the savage,” deluded about reality, has “recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits.”[6] When the world is disenchanted, by contrast, everything is “in principle” manipulable through “technical means and calculations,” and one can live bravely, honestly, but a little sadly in the face of this knowledge.[7]

In recent years, and to some extent as an attempted correction of Weber, scholars have taken a celebratory attitude toward enchantment. States of awe, and even magical practices, can persist in modernity, despite the best efforts of skeptics and disillusionment artists, and we are lucky—from an ethical, aesthetic, or political standpoint—that they do persist. As philosophers have sought ethical sources in wonder;[8] as literary critics have looked to aesthetic transports for new (or old) ways of reading raptly;[9] and as historians have drawn our serious attention to the occult,[10] the tone has been distinctly optimistic.[11] The darker aspects of enchantment, which have belonged to that term for as long as it has been in use, appear not as its real features but as the paranoid overlay bequeathed to us by some combination of Weber and the Enlightenment. If we want to see enchantment accurately, on this view, we have to stop listening to the shrill warnings against it. Heeding these warnings will hinder us in our efforts; it will distort our understanding of what enchantment is.

Credulity: A Cultural History of Mesmerism by Emily Ogden (Chicago University Press, 2018)

I take a different view. Where recent work on enchantment has accentuated the positive, this book accentuates the negative. It recognizes that practitioners of modern enchantment may look like Grimes: contemptuous of the manipulated “masses,” yet more than willing to try a little manipulation themselves. The book’s tendency is not reactionary; the point is not to return to decrying enchantment. The point instead is to ask what those who decried enchantment were actually doing with it in practice. How were they using it? Like New York literatus Laughton Osborn, skeptics exclaimed, “Out on Credulity!”[12] Like David Reese, the author of Humbugs of New­York (1838), they deplored “such sublimated folly, such double distilled nonsense, as popular credulity is perpetually swallowing.”[13] But meanwhile many of them were busily seeking employment for the very thing they spurned, as Grimes was. This study shows that the skeptic of this period sought to manage enchantment, not to suppress it. To confine, explain, and redeploy primitive religious power: these were the quintessential aspirations not just of mesmerists in particular but also of antebellum secularism in general. Skeptics’ characterization of enchantment as the product of credulity cannot be ruled out of court as a secular prejudice, as recent scholarship has sometimes been inclined to do. Credulity is where critical thought about modern enchantment must begin.

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[1] If you think that sounds relevant to our present moment, you’re right: “Donald Trump, Mesmerist,” New York Times, August 4, 2018.

[2] Laughton Osborn, The Vision of Rubeta (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1838), 68.

[3] J. Stanley Grimes, Etherology; or, The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology (New

York: Saxton & Miles, 1845), 169.

[4] Ibid., 43.

[5] Jane Bennett, The Enchantment  of Modern Life: Attachments,  Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 57. On translation questions, see Michael Warner’s review of John Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum  America: “Was Antebellum America Secular?” The Immanent  Frame (blog), October 2, 2012, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/10/02/was-antebellum-america-secular/.

[6] Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Routledge, 1948), 139.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 3–4, 12–13, 131–58.

[9] Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Real­ ity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14, 57; Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 51–76.

[10] Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism  and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth­Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[11] On the cleansing of delusion from modern  enchantment, see David Walker, “The Humbug in American Religion: Ritual Theories of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism,” Re­ ligion and American Culture 23, no. 1 (2013): 30–74, esp. 57n6, and Tracy Fessenden, “The Problem of the Postsecular,” in “American Literatures/American Religions,” ed. Jonathan Ebel and Justine S. Murison, special issue, American Literary History 26, no. 1 (2014): 154.

[12] Osborn, Vision of Rubeta, 68.

[13] David Reese, Humbugs of New­York: Being a Remonstrance against Popular Delusion (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1838), 15.

***

Emily Ogden (@ENOgden) is assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago, 2018). She has written for The New York Times, Critical Inquiry, Lapham’s Quarterly Online, American Literature, J19, Public Books, and Early American Literature.  See www.emilyogden.net for most publications.

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Reprinted with permission from Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism by Emily Ogden, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

The post Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism appeared first on The Revealer.

Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas, Steven Broder, 1942.

 The library is burning. What do you save? It isn’t just a parlor game for classicists showing off their erudition (a game that has been played since the classics themselves, like Athenaeaus of Naucratis c. 200 C.E., who peppered his learned banquet-scenes with lost books from the Library of Alexandria).[1] It figures in ancient cultures’ founding myths. From Aeneas bearing Troy’s gods out of her burning ruins to the inflammable books of Irish saints,[2] the trial by fire purifies, elevates, sets us apart. What do you save? Tell me your answer, the myth murmurs, and I’ll tell you who you really are.

In Jewish culture, the question has a particularly resonant and painful ring. Jews have long been called a “people of the Book,” but one could just as easily say that Jewish books are people. Authors dissolve into their books: rabbis are often renamed after their best-known title, and Yiddish authors play with meta-pen-names like “Mendele the Book-Monger” or “A. Pen.”[3] Scrolls, like bodies, circulate in the symbolic system of purity.[4] So early rabbis weren’t playing a parlor game when they first posed our question around the same time as Athenaeaus’ banquet. “All sacred writings are to be saved from a fire,” they answered. But this raised new problems. What makes a book sacred? Is it the book’s language? Its contents, ink, pages? How it is used? How should we weigh sacred books against other things worth preserving (like studying Oral Torah or keeping the Sabbath)?[5] As the argument continued, it took on a more heated tone: whose books do we save? Books of Jewish heretics (later read as “gospels”)? Hell no, let them burn. But they contain names of God; aren’t they sacred too? Fine, cut out the names and leave the rest… Rather than a founding myth, the question started an argument about the canon and the limits of community. The library is burning. What do you save–or whom?

If canon and community are defined by what we preserve, not only by what we create, then we should give more credit to the role of the collector: keeping chaos at bay, reigning in entropy, digging the wells of collective memory. For the most part, their genius lingers in the halls of museums and libraries, absorbed in labors—gray, meticulous, detailed—known only to their peers. As custodians of the past, sweeping away their own fingerprints is part of the job. In a crisis, however, the ancient question weighs heavily on their shoulders. What, whom do we save? And for whom? The latter is the question at the center of two recent histories of Jewish collectors of the Holocaust era. Like early rabbis, these collectors ended up arguing not about the flames, but about the ashes; they asked not whether to save the past, but which Jewish community should rise, Phoenix-like, from its remains.

***

At first, that question did not preoccupy the “paper brigade,” heroes and heroines of David E. Fishman’s new book on cultural preservation in the Vilna ghetto (The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis). They were well aware that they might not survive, so they decided to save as many Jewish items as possible, at any risk and many costs (like smuggling less food for themselves and their families). In sensitive and thrilling detail, Fishman describes how they stopped the Nazis from looting all of their community’s heritage: distracting a guard by giving him free tutoring, or schmoozing their way through the ghetto gate arm-in-arm with an oversize Talmud folio. Under a regime that sought to reduce Jewish people to bodies, Fishman shows how effectively ghetto collectors turned the book into a symbol of their people’s spiritual survival.

There is nothing obvious about this. Yes, Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” was a bookish city, one of the most culturally important Jewish centers in the world. Yes, many peoples have struggled for their literary heritage in extreme conditions (The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu under ISIS, for example). But it is one thing to value books and quite another to make them a measure of human value: to say, as one member of the paper brigade to another, that the better poet should keep the gun. Nor were books given such value only by the Jewish elite. The prewar efforts of Jewish historians and ethnographers had already produced the figure of the zamler (“collector”), a scholar or person of any education level who gathered raw materials for Jewish research. Zamlers kept up their work during the Shoah, with no tangible incentives, helping to build Vilna’s great institutions like the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO). Why? If a 1929 YIVO handbook for zamlers is any indication, they couldn’t quite say.[6] “What is the point of all this foolishness?” the zamlers ask, even as they bend down to pick up another book.

Such is often the case with any culture’s totems, its most intensely compressed symbols. If you ask someone in the culture why they are so important, they shrug: “Because it’s what we do.” Yet this just-so sense of things is usually the first victim of a crisis. For Vilna’s collectors, then, books became a way to preserve not only the past but also the everyday order of the universe. Like the sign on the ghetto library wall (Books are our greatest comfort in the ghetto!); like the ghetto militia awaiting their last stand and reading aloud from a novel of the Armenian genocide; like the Jewish library worker to whom a Haggadah’s illustrations of slavery so powerfully echoed the Nazi project that he tried to destroy it; and like the father who hid his daughter’s body underground until he could bury her among Torah scrolls, we come to see the book as a symbol that points beyond itself: into a future where continuity with the past, and thus a vital Jewish community, will return. Sutzkever, a great Yiddish poet and a member of the paper brigade, captured this vision in an image from his beloved natural world, the “seed of wheat”:

And as the primordial seed
Outstripped its hull, became an ear
So shall they nourish and endure
Forever in the people’s feet
The words, immortal words, are ours

Yet no vision of community is natural. In the ghetto, books became a source of resolve, dignity, or escape: an “oasis of freedom” in the words of anthropologist Daniel Feinshtein (who did research on books in the ghetto as a real-time participant-observer and lectured in its library). Already, however, cracks were starting to appear in and around the paper brigade. They agreed on what or whom to save: as much Jewish material, as quickly as possible, especially unique artifacts or papers like Theodor Herzl’s diary. But for whom? Whose Jewish community?

Fishman shows the very different responses of four figures: the prophet, the academician, the Zionist, and the communist. Kalmanovitch, the “prophet of the ghetto,” put his faith in the future. The Nazis were bound to lose the war, so it was just a matter of time until the books were returned. Meanwhile, the safest place for them was Germany. This view led him to waver in his support for smuggling and drew criticism from others in the paper brigade. Kalmanovitch turned out to be right (although the Nazis destroyed upwards of 70% of the materials), but he was no pragmatist. He simply held onto his faith that the apocalyptic “War of Gog and Magog” would pass, and fueled resistance by creating a symbolic outside to the ghetto: a better time, a better place (“I have a son in the Land of Israel”), and a sense of hope (“sadness is the nullification of existence”).

The academician, Max Weinreich, lived another story. First of all, he lived; in New York, where he relocated YIVO and the fallen sparks of its Vilna collection after the war. But rather than prophetic faith, Weinreich responded with historicist fervor. He kept hunting for the rest of YIVO’s looted collection. As he did so, he wrote a landmark book where he broke with his native German language and its scholarly tradition (Wissenschaft).[7] Weinreich emphasized how many German academics had been co-opted by the Nazi regime. But Fishman, without further ado, expands Weinreich’s claim into a claim about the essence of modern German scholarship (“Wissenschaft had betrayed him”). Many German Jewish scholars and their non-Jewish colleagues drew just the opposite conclusion. For them, the Nazis had soiled the bathwater, but the baby of Wissenschaft was alive and kicking.[8] By throwing both out together, Weinreich was not only rescuing Jewish books from German scholarship; he was building a new community around a new kind of Yiddish scholarship.

Zionists fought alongside socialists and Communists in the Vilna ghetto. The leader of the partisan militia, Aba Kovner, collaborated with the paper brigade to get a bomb-building manual. But after the war, Kovner had his own idea about who deserved the books that they had saved. He lifted materials for Israel, eyes set on the crown jewel of Vilna’s book collectors: Herzl’s diary. When fellow partisan Shmerke Kaczerginski found out, he told the occupying Soviet authorities. Kovner narrowly escaped arrest without the diary, which ended up in New York (where it proved too un-Zionist for the Forverts editor to publish). Fishman moves quickly to absolve Kaczerginski, but this ugly chapter should give us pause. To see men fighting together for Jewish books and lives, only to apparently threaten each other’s lives over books, points to deep divisions between them—and their communities—that war had merely papered over. Whose books are they, really?

As a communist, Kaczerginski was in for his own rude awakening. He stayed in Vilna and started a museum to rebuild Jewish culture, despite constant Soviet and Lithuanian harassment. But when tons of Jewish books and documents that he had saved were sent off to the paper mill, and his desperate rescue efforts were chided by a bureaucrat for not following proper procedure, his communist spirit broke. Re-traumatized by what he called a second “crematorium,” he chose to move the surviving materials to YIVO in New York. He succeeded–Fishman’s book, full of unforgettable images, has a photo of YIVO scholars unpacking the crates in a Manischewitz Matzo warehouse–but Jewish communists saw him and Sutzkever as traitors. They accused Sutzkever of being “a thief, not a rescuer”; at his Paris apartment, he feared break-ins, while at YIVO in New York, Weinreich worried about demands to extradite the materials. Even Nazis had agreed that some Jewish books were worth saving; the fight, as ever, was about who deserved to be their readers.

***

A thief and a rescuer are also the main characters of another recent book on Jewish collecting in this period, by Lisa Moses Leff (The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust). The trouble is, they’re the same person. By focusing on the Janus-faced figure of Zosa Szajkowski, a man who was equally prolific at saving, cataloguing, and then redistributing the sources of French Jewish history, Leff tells a less unambiguously heroic story than Fishman’s about the same fundamental question.

The question is not why Szajkowski stole so much from European archives after the war and sold his contraband to U.S. libraries. It boosted his fragile ego; besides, he needed the money. Force of habit also played a part: after earning kudos from famous historians like Elias Tcherikower and Weinreich as a wartime zamler, Szajkowski had a hard time getting out of character. Storming Berlin in U.S. uniform, he fell into a collector’s bloodlust; sending letters in Yiddish on Hitler’s stationery, pilfering antlers from Goering’s hunting lodge, and keeping a mummified woman’s head for himself. This, too, makes weird psychological sense. Never really part of the Jewish scholarly elite, full of rage at what was taken from him, Szajkowski became a sympathetic thief, but a thief all the same, who drowned himself in a hotel bathtub when the shame of exposure proved too much to bear.

As a historian, Leff deftly turns her own biographical answers into an open question. Who really owns the Jewish past? For whom is it worth saving? Like Fishman, she studies the line between thief and rescuer, looter and zamler, as it was smudged and redrawn in this chaotic era. In the process, everyone staked a claim to the kind of community that the Jews should become. Yet those claims shook out differently in Szajkowski’s context, that is, the Jews of modern France. In France, more than in Eastern Europe, a secular national vision of Jewish community continued to compete with others (Zionism, Marxist internationalisms, and diaspora nationalism). Even as they stared Vichy collaboration and anti-Semitism in the face, a generation of French Jews stayed in limbo. Did they belong to France, to Israel, to the workers of the world, or to Jewish culture?

This oversimplified form of the question brings out the major argument in Leff’s narrative. Despite all the chaos and entropy behind the scenes, the French national archive, with its “façade of completeness and order,” has a powerful grip on other ways of defining Jewish community. In this postwar context, Szajkowski becomes a canary in the mine of secular nationalism, a tragic symptom of its dominant order who shows the limits of the kind of Jewish history that it supports. The book smugglers are to Nazi dehumanization as the archive thief is to French assimilation.

Leff’s antihero exposes a hole behind the archival façade: the very idea of a secular nation relies on the fiction of historical continuity with fellow citizens and a shared past. Yet in order to enforce this continuity, the state cuts the ties that bind minority groups. For French Jews, struggling to document their persecution and rebuild their institutions after the war, that cut could be brutal. Between 1944 and 1947, French state agencies were ordered to destroy all records identifying citizens by race. Officially, this was in order to roll back the unpatriotic effects of wartime racial laws on the nation. But in the name of protecting Jews from more persecution, the state used archives to cover its tracks. Many documents of French Jewish history were destroyed–documents that could have been used to punish collaborators, seek reparations, and offer evidence for Jews’ own internal courts. Similarly, France and other Allies chose not to label former concentration camp inmates as Jews. Due to this “race-blind” intake policy in occupied Germany, Holocaust survivors were denied recognition that might have saved them from dire conditions. The insight of Tcherikower (Szajkowski’s mentor) about Jews in post-revolutionary France still held true in the post-Holocaust era: so-called emancipation mainly benefited the secular state, at the cost of Jews’ ability to claim rights as a community. Ironically, the state’s fiction of continuity made it easier for Szajkowski to pillage its archives. For decades, archivists hardly took stock of what had been lost. Nor were they able to notice his theft. Blinded by nationalist codes of classification, they were unable to see any pattern among the papers that he plucked out one by one: a (Jewish) debt record here, a decree on (Jewish) usury there… No wonder that when he was finally convicted, a French court portrayed him as a “wandering Jew”; this archive thief embodied the return of everything that the secular nation had repressed.

But what did Szajkowski stand for? For whom, other than himself, did he save or steal so much French Jewish history? A relentless eccentric autodidact born poor in Poland, who served in both the French and the U.S. armies, who never held an academic position for long, who was not a religious man, he seemed to love only a few women, teachers and colleagues, and his books. Again, Leff rightly goes beyond his biography to consider the implicit ideals of Jewish community guiding his decisions. Her arguments, however, lead in two contradictory directions. The stronger direction is diaspora. In diaspora, defined as a positive identity rather than merely as a temporary exile, Jewish community does not need the state. Jews are bound together by being Jews; a moral community that is as hard to pin down as the Yiddish word yidishkeyt (“Jewishness”) is to translate. Historically, its privileged form has been the book, or what Heinrich Heine called a “portable homeland.”[9] In the book, unlike the state archive, a diaspora community arranges and rearranges its own past. Leff sees this diaspora ideal in Szajkowski, who himself compared Tcherikower’s notes for the massive documentary project Jews in France to the Mishnah that early rabbis took from the Land of Israel to Babylonia.[10] By this logic, the books and documents that Szajkowski collected were also a portable homeland: a “weapon of the weak” to preserve Jewish history where the archives saw only French subjects.

In the other direction, Leff occasionally lets the logic of modern nationalism obscure the idea of diaspora, as if she does not quite believe that Jewish history can be written without the state. Of Jewish historians in the 1930s–like Tcherikower, and Kalmanovitch of the paper brigade—she claims that their “commitment to study as a way to solve Jews’ present problems had led them to a deeply problematic stance.”[11] For Leff, the problem is that they were too traditional to adopt modern political ideals, yet too modern to return to the traditional life that they studied. Having imposed this dichotomy on the sources, she reads their credo (Return to the ghetto!) as a “tragedy” due to “nostalgia” for the “enchanted worldview” of Jews in the traditional past, one that they lost “in spite of themselves” out of their modern commitment to “reasoned debate [,] scholarly inquiry [and] the power of the individual.”[12] Yet Jews valued all those things long before modernity. Nor has the ghetto been only a negative space of Jewish exclusion from modernity.[13] The choice that these scholars faced was not between modern nationalism and a self-defeating individualism. They chose a portable homeland and a space outside the state—a cultural diaspora.

Like his angel of history gazing down at the rubble of civilization, Walter Benjamin’s spirit hovers over Leff’s story of the archive thief and this larger story of Jewish collectors in the Shoah. She ends by alluding to Benjamin’s vision of history, not as a well-ordered archive, but as a “salvage heap.” This is a valuable corrective to the violent fiction of continuity that sustains modern nationalism, reminding us that forms of the Jewish nation are constantly made and unmade without the state.

But, Leff knows, there is more to Benjamin than this. She begins her story with his essay “Unpacking My Library,” where each title opens onto a vast storehouse of jumbled memory. “Books have their fates,”[14] Benjamin remarks, in a carefully fractured allusion to The Anatomy of Melancholy (“Books, according to their readers’ capacities, have their fates”). Whose fate: the book’s or the reader’s? The essay works to negate any distinction: it ends with his collector vanishing into the last half-empty shelf. Books are political but, Benjamin seems to be saying, they are people too, and their meaning is personal or it is nothing. Perhaps this is why it shines brightest at dusk, at a historical moment when the truly personal collector is replaced by the engines and fires of the state. “Only in extinction can a collector be comprehended,” he concludes, not long before the books begin to burn.

Is collecting, under these conditions, a tragic and nostalgic form of modern Jewish culture; a merely personal assertion of “meaning” in a world that no longer knows or cares what it means? Or is it a political project, forcing order on chaos to trumpet one definitive vision for the nation? It’s hard to hold a space between the future and the past, but that’s what the Vilna ghetto library, like Benjamin’s library, became: spaces where personal and political drives were ever present, yet restrained by a hushed concentration that borders on the sacred.

Although he crossed them out and they would not appear in the second German printing or subsequent translations, Benjamin evoked this more directly in the final lines of his manuscript to “Unpacking My Library”:

O bliss of a collector, bliss of being left alone! Is that not the consolation which governs all memories? In our memories, to be left alone with existence, still and silent, watching over us. To know of everyone who surfaces here that they, too, will accept this crisp and reliable silence. A collector puts his fate on hold…[15]

The silence is worth keeping too.

Walter Benjamin in Paris, 1937. Image © Gisèle Freund

***

[1] See Lucien X. Polastron, “A Short History of the Census of Lost Books,” in his Books on Fire, trans. Jon E. Graham. Vermont, 2007: 316-21. For Jewish books lost during the Holocaust, see Joy E. Kingsolver and Andrew B. Wertheimer, “Jewish Print Culture and the Holocaust: A Bibliographic Survey,” in Jonathan Rose ed., The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation. Amherst, 2001: 295-310. I thank Brad Sabin Hill for the latter reference.

[2] Sources at Tom Peete Cross, Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature. Bloomington, 1952: 335.

[3] S.J. Abramovich (d. 1917) and Joseph Opatoshu (d. 1954), respectively. For research tools on Hebrew and Yiddish pen names, see Zachary Baker.

[4] See Florence Heymann and Danielle Storper Perez, eds., Le corps du texte: pour une anthropologie des textes de la tradition juive. Paris, 1997.

[5] See Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud, trans. Llewellyn Brown. Princeton, 1995 [1986] and this study by Shamma Friedman. (All translations mine).

[6] See Naftoli Vaynig and Khayim Khayes, “What is Jewish Ethnography? (Handbook for Fieldworkers),” trans. Jordan Finkin. In Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran eds., Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography. Bloomington, 2016: 349-80.

[7] In Weinreich’s footsteps, Fishman writes several German words as if they were Yiddish: the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung becomes “Reichstelle fun Sipenforschung” (p. 108), Deutschland über alles becomes “Deutschland uber Ales” (p. 28) and is characterized by Fishman as a “Nazi song,” though it dates back to Weimar and is still the national anthem.

[8] Weinreich, as Fishman notes, earned a doctorate at Marburg; in 1923, two years before Jewish literary scholar Leo Spitzer joined the faculty. Yet for Spitzer and other Jews at Marburg, especially Erich Auerbach, wartime persecution only intensified their faith in the Wissenschaft ideal. Non-Jews at Marburg rose to its defense as well: E.R. Curtius published anti-Nazi polemic, Traugott Fuchs supported Spitzer and had to go to Turkey, Werner Krauss was sentenced to death for treason. Another good contrast to Weinreich is Victor Klemperer, who barely survived the war and, like him, wrote a searing critique of language in the Third Reich—in German.

[9] Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora. Philadelphia, 2015.

[10] Leff, Archive Thief, 55: ” ‘Our dear friends left France by foot, with a small package in their arms–a few draft pages of our planned Paris YIVO writings. This is how our forefathers left for Galut [exile].’ ” By this analogy, New York is not “Yavneh” as Leff says (the city where rabbis regrouped in the Land of Israel), but rather Sura, in Babylonia.

[11] Leff, Archive Thief, 43.

[12] Leff, Archive Thief, 45.

[13] Daniel B. Schwartz is completing a history of the term “ghetto”; for now, see his talk here. For a classic study of its complex social role see Louis Wirth, The Ghetto, Chicago 1928.

[14] Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften IV (2 vols. in 1), ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 389.

[15] Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 998.

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James Adam Redfield is Assistant Professor of Biblical and Talmudic Literatures in the Department of Theological Studies at St. Louis University. His research focuses on ethnography in rabbinic literature, including the study of ancient rabbis as collectors. He teaches graduate/undergraduate courses on premodern ethnography and travel; the Hebrew Bible; and comparative courses on premodern Judaism and Christianity. James has also published several translations from German, French, and Yiddish. He is currently translating a volume from Yiddish by Micah Josef Berdyczewski (to be entitled Letters from a Distant Relation and supported by the Yiddish Book Center).

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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