In the News: Lots of bad and a bit of good

by Kali Handelman
Published on December 20, 2018

A roundup of recent religion writing

We realize the title of this month’s roundup could apply to pretty much any month we’ve published one of these collections, but please forgive us — it’s the end of a pretty rough year in Reading the Internet Everyday (and far worse thing) and, well, frankly, it’s totally accurate. So, let’s get started on this final roundup round of 2018, shall we?

First up this month, this utterly infuriating report from The GuardianEaster Island governor begs British Museum to return Moai: ‘You have our soul’

It was an emotional moment for the indigenous Rapa Nui visitors when they saw the basalt statue, which for them, contains the spirit of their people.

“I believe that my children and their children also deserve the opportunity to touch, see and learn from him,” Rapu said, with tears in his eyes.

“We are just a body. You, the British people, have our soul,” she added.

It is the first time that the British Museum, which holds cultural treasures from around the globe, has agreed to hold talks about the statue. But on Tuesday the museum was talking only of a loan, not the return, on the artefact.

“The museum is one of the world’s leading lenders and the trustees will always consider loan requests subject to usual conditions,” a spokeswoman said.

Next this really superb book reviewby Amir Khadem for the Los Angeles Review of Books, A Faux-Muslim Mission

But allegory is a one-trick pony. There is only so much a writer can do by winking rather than pointing. The years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan both eclipsed the literary attention to 9/11 and highlighted the further need to engage with Muslim histories, lives, and beliefs, as now it wasn’t anymore just their world that had ruptured ours. Beginning around 2011, novelists made a sincerer effort to imagine Muslims without trying to find a detour. Amy Waldman’s The Submission, about a Muslim architect whose design wins the contest for the Ground Zero memorial, and Elliot Ackerman’s Dark at the Crossing, about an Arab-American man trying to join the Syrian Civil War, are two representative examples. But none of the Anglophone post-9/11 novels have been as ingeniously involved with the question of conversion to Islam and with the determination to take one’s acquired belief into the realm of violence as John Wray’s new novel, Godsend.

After which, we suggest reading through Ian Johnson‘s comprehensive and helpful summary of The Uighurs and China’s Long History of Trouble with Islam for The New York Review of Books

In recent months, there are signs that the campaign has moved beyond Xinjiang to the Hui Muslims, the descendants of the first Muslims, who are centered in Ningxia province but also live scattered across China. In Ningxia, Islamic domes and signs in Arabic are being pulled down, while the call to prayer has been banned.

It would be tempting to say that all of this is just typical Communist excess, something in the party’s DNA that forces it to turn to repression and violence to solve problems. But the long history of Islam’s persecution points to older, deeper problems in the Chinese worldview. Most worrisome, it is these very traditions that the state is promoting as a way to bolster its legitimacy, instead of building a pluralistic society open to different faiths, beliefs, and convictions.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft has a beautiful reflection On Reading Jonathan Gold  for the Los Angeles Review of Books

To produce an array of culinary microclimates — one way to think about L.A. and food — takes the relative isolation of cultures just as much as intermixing. Diversity doesn’t necessarily mean togetherness. Gold’s dream of commensality begins to seem like an ideal he held out for himself and for his readers, rather than an observation of what was actually happening at street level in Los Angeles. … Just as Gold was the gastronomic beneficiary of post-1965 immigration to the United States, he also benefited from the fact that he came to prominence just as the restaurant took on a new centrality as a form of cultural expression in American life. People started to skip the movie and go directly to dinner, the restaurant experience supplying much of the sense of play and personality that we previously expected from light passing through celluloid. As restaurants rose, so did the trend to level value distinctions between different types of cuisines. Thus we enjoy the high-end taco, or a new restaurant in Koreatown that sells slightly polished versions of the stews already available down the block.

After which, you might also want to read this (even less religion-related, but still worth recommending) record of stories, The Last Curious Man: The enormous life of Anthony Bourdain, according to those who knew him by Drew Magary for GQ .

Martin Schoeller / AUGUST

Reading about Bourdain, sadly, made this recent, very religion-related, piece for Sacred MattersSuicide: The Last Taboo , by Gary Laderman quite relevant:

The numbers of young people killing themselves is astonishing and points to larger cultural and social problems that we all should be concerned about for America’s future. As a professor who tackles the topic of death in all of its fascinating, revealing dimensions, and loves to entertain and enlighten students, I am stumped and uncertain about this topic and how, or if, I should address it in class. It is clear from my meetings with students that for many—not all—a neutral, intellectually open and honest context for discussing suicide is sorely needed.

In Bourdain’s memory, have a look: Parts Unknown’s perfect day in Jerusalem, photographed by Tanya Habjouqa, who was also the photographer for Amnesty International’s Nakba: Seventy Years of Suffocation report

Seventy years on from their expulsion, the suffering and displacement of Palestinian refugees are ongoing realities. Amnesty International recognizes that the responsibility for this suffering goes beyond that of the host states and is rooted in the Palestinian exodus of 1948 and Israel’s denial of their right to return. However, host states must protect and fulfil the rights of Palestinian refugees within their jurisdiction. These states must repeal or revise all laws and policies that discriminate against Palestinian refugees and immediately take steps to improve conditions in the Palestinian refugee camps and informal “gatherings”.

Now that we’re on the topic of Israel and Palestine, do read Katherine Franke ‘s report from the frontline of The Pro-Israel Push to Purge US Campus Critics  for The New York Review of Books

All of these incidents are part of a larger effort by both the US and Israeli governments and their supporters to undermine the university’s civic role as a crucial forum of democratic engagement. The First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech as well as fundamental principles of academic freedom are violated when governments that profess to be democratic declare certain topics off-limits. The capacity to critically evaluate the way in which state power is exercised—in the US, in Israel, and in other places around the world where human rights are under threat—is vital to responsible citizenship and is central to our mission as educators. The American and Israeli governments alike should stand up for, rather than stand in the way of, open and vibrant academic debate on Israel–Palestine, just as they should for debate about any contentious subject essential to democracy.

There are a multitude of reasons to read all of  Eclipse of the Sun by Elizabeth Schambelan for Artforum, but this part is particularly relevant to our present subject: 

It’s not that anti-Semitism is any worse than any other form of hate. It’s more just the dreamlike surreality of watching the Jewish conspiracy become central to the rhetoric of one of America’s two major parties. To find this old fiction, the Jewish cabal, looming over our political landscape is like the shot in season two of Stranger Things when you first see the giant spider-monster. It’s an important milestone, not just because it’s another huge step toward the GOP no longer pretending not to be a bunch of Nazis, but also because it’s the scaffolding of a truly totalitarian epistemology, one that dispenses altogether with truth-value, but that does offer some kind of coherent theory of the world—perhaps crazy, but unified, the way Melania Trump’s head-to-toe Nazi-archaeologist look was crazy but unified.

Gritty, mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers, Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, October 9, 2018. Photo: Len Redkoles/NHLI/Getty Images.

As is, though in a very different register, Reconsidering the Jewish American Princess by Jamie Lauren Keiles for Vox

JAP is rarely used outside the Jewish world — only by goyimin very Jewish cities, and usually playfully so. A second-degree ethnic slur, it is far too acute to be useful in places where people don’t know many actual Jews. On those milk-and-meat main streets, Jews don’t have midlevel designer handbags or custom window treatments; they have horns. There, the top-level pejorative is “Jew.”

Still, to endeavor to write about the JAP feels, in some way, like a risky proposition — a boon to the rising class of anti-Semites and their claims about “globalist Jews” and Jewish money. Why pick now to salt an old wound? But the JAP, as a figure, is a paragon of nuance, as complex as the Jewishness and womanhood she draws from.

At worst, she is the dybbuk of the upwardly mobile, the ever-haunting spirit of the Jewish nouveau riche as it tries to find its place in the American class system. At best, she performs her own kind of Jewish drag, reclaiming the anti-Semitic tropes of yore as a positive ideal of Jewish womanhood. I see her as a queen of multitudinous existence.

And, on the lightest possible note, this very marginally related bit of holiday cheer: He Is Jewish, But Being Santa Is His Calling by Kelly Moffitt and Cameron Jenkins for NPR

Lastly, and even more lightly, two Internet artifacts that made us laugh/groan this month.

And with that, we’re signing off for 2018. Thanks so much for reading with us this past year — it’s been… eventful, and we’re grateful for all that we get to read and everyone who reads with us. 

We’ll see you next year! In the meantime, let’s: 

From the amazing “Gods Taking Selfies” project at Smarter than a Waffle

 

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