Oh thank god! I was starting to think I was the only one with this opinion.

Also really bothersome, the accents on the "brown" characters. It just furthers the idea of non-White people not *really* being American.

Word of the Day: philobiblian

n. A book-lover

Image: “The Bookworm” by Carl Spitzweg. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Just out of curiosity, did you happen to flip through the book at all, or read the back cover? 

I did a quick google search, and I think the title is a bit misleading. It seems to just be a Christian annotated Tanakh. With an attempt to present the texts as Jesus and his contemporaries would have read and interpreted them. From this though, I cannot comment on how tone-deaf the rest of the book is (if at all), or if it’s just the title alone that’s awful. I’d be interested to know more, but I can’t find a preview online. 

Why does Jewish history need to be integrated into Christian faith?

I hope all who celebrate had a very Happy Hanukkah/Channukah/Hannukah/etc! 

Time. The advice about finding a supervisor who has time for you is so important! There is no point in having a supervisor who cannot / will not supervise.

Hello. I know you are a Phd student and I was wondering if you had tips for choosing an advisor in graduate school? I'm applying for an MA in history and I'm a bit worried. Thanks

Hello! Good question. 

Well, here’s for my personal tips on how to choose an advisor for a graduate program in history: 

Look for a professor whose interests are close to yours. It might happen that you do not find a professor whose interests are completely and fully aligned with yours, however, they should be close enough that this person can help you build a reading list and supervise your work as they are well-versed in the topic you are exploring. (Most history departments offer small biographies of their teaching personal, make sure to look at this to find out what your potential advisor is currently working on, what they have published and what are their general areas of expertise.)

Make sure the professor you pick to be your potential advisor is a full-time faculty member and professor. A visiting lecturer or graduate student giving a class are not good picks for a potential advisor. Find a full-time professor or associate professor.

Find a professor that actually has time for you. As much as being a graduate student implies that you will have to do a lot of work on your own, you need an advisor that will have time to give you proper guidance and feedback on your progress. While professors are busy with their own work, other students and life outside of academia, they should still be able to find the time to read your drafts and help give a certain structure to your work process. 

Meet your potential advisor at least once. While this might not be possible in all cases (especially if you are applying for a university overseas), I find that meeting your potential advisor is always important to establish a relationship. This a person you will have to be comfortable enough to show your work too and confident enough to ask questions too. The point is not to become best friends after the first meeting (or at any time during your graduate studies) but you should still seek to establish the foundations of a good working relationship. 

Look for more than one advisor. It may happen that you find the perfect advisor but they are going away for a maternity leave or they are not teaching on the semester or year you are planning on enrolling. It may also happen that your potential advisor simply has too many other students and cannot take up the extra charge. Looking for more than one potential advisor will help ensure that whatever happens, you will still find someone to work with you.

Well, that’s all I could think of at the present. Hope this helps!

How I wish somebody had done this for me! 

There is a difference between segregation being written into the law, and laws being applied unequally. If we call the racist (or racial) application of laws apartheid, than the US is an apartheid State. There are numerous statistics one can easily pull up that show the gross inequality / injustices brought upon people of color in the US based on the application of the law. 

Then there are laws that are clearly racist even if not explicitly so. For example, the minimum sentencing laws for possession of crack cocaine versus powdered cocaine in the US neatly target one group (inner-city black people) over another (wealthy whites), though the law does not explicitly state racist intent. 

There are two laws that get pointed to in Israel that are like this: property laws and the right to return. Neither are explicitly racist, but both have been reasonably argued to have resulted in gross inequality in a way that should have been / must have been understood at the outset. However, again, if we are going to call this apartheid, then that designation must also be applied to the US. And to every Muslim country that refuses citizenship to Christians. 

To echo @returnofthejudai, this assessment breaks down once the West Bank is brought into the discussion. But in Israel proper, I would argue that the term apartheid is misapplied and derails the conversation (one that must be had honestly because the racism is very real). Palestinians are allowed to vote, they can and do hold elected office. This is so very far from apartheid. 

Also, Bedouin are NOT required to serve in the IDF, though they do volunteer. 

would calling the state of israel an apartheid state be appropriate? my family believes it is (they are iranian/lebanese shi'ites) and that israeli policy should be a lot more welcoming to arabs and muslims. they feel that israel is a racist state. im not sure how to feel about this issue..

I don’t say “no” to the “apartheid” label the way I do the “genocide” label because if one were to view the West Bank as part of Israel the Palestinians there definitely live under a very different set of rights than the settlers. So from that point of view I don’t really object because it’s a legitimate parallel. 

If you view Israel as NOT including the West Bank, then I think the comparison falls apart pretty easily. Non-Jewish Israelis don’t suffer anywhere NEAR the kinds of repression as Black people in South Africa. Is there racism in Israel proper? Absolutely, but not to that degree. And if you say Israel calling itself the “Jewish State” is inherently racist, it’s no more racist than calling Ireland “Irish” or Japan “Japanese.” 

There is a great deal of scholarship on the depiction of Jews / Judaism as being of “the East”. 

The history of Western Christian representations of Judaism is rich with Orientalism. Jesus is presented as familiar and occidental, while the Jewish elite, the Temple priesthood and those with whom Jesus came into conflict are distinctly “othered”. (I recommend Ivan Davidson Kalmar as a great academic to start with if you are interested in this issue.) 

In fact, until fairly recently (20th century-ish), Jews were considered visually, culturally, and linguistically in the same grouping with Muslims. 

This view of Jews as “foreign” and “distant” played a significant role in their oppression in Europe. They didn’t belong to the West -- they were outsiders.

Yes the modern state of Israel is considered part of the political West, but that does not mean that Jews, Judaism, or Israel have been subsumed entirely into the West. There is an enormous amount of conflict surrounding the cultural placement of the Jewish people, even when only Jews of European heritage are being thought of, and how they are thought of by the rest of the Western world. 

The West is most definitely conceived of in terms of Rome, and since the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, Jews were excluded from that construct. By the time Islam entered the picture these lines were fairly firmly drawn.

RE: Why don't we consider Beirut part of the West? My guess: Phoenicia.

Well, “the West” is culturally defined; so it could be redefined. But I think when people say “the West” is rooted in Athens/Jerusalem, I think they really mean Rome. Why? Because most of our political traditions come from Rome, not Athens. And when they think about Judeo-Christian tradition, they really mean the Roman tradition. Because when they think “Christianity” they think Roman Catholic Church and its Protestant derivatives (they don’t think Coptic Egypt, the Assyrian Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox, or even the Greek Orthodox traditions). And then whey think “Judaism” they mostly imagine a European Yiddish type of Judaism, rather than the Judaism that thrived in Baghdad, Persia, Ethiopia, and elsewhere.

But certainly the Mediterranean world (which would include Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, the Levant, and Turkey) could be considered the “cradle” of “Western” civilization. If we want to speak about a Judeo-Christian heritage, we should go ahead and include all the Abrahamic faiths. That would include Islam, of course, which (partly) emerged out of both Christian and Jewish traditions swirling around in the Middle East in the 6th century AD. After all, it was the Islamic world that preserved for us the Greek philosophers, introduced algebra, and preserved (and expanded upon) the science that was lost to Europe during the Dark Ages, which eventually made possible the Renaissance.

In fact, some might argue that “the West” would be impossible without the Islamic world. Not only because of the deeper historical connections, but because the conflict between Christendom and the Islamic world (the Crusades, the Reconquest of Spain, etc.) defined much of the political and cultural reality of modern Europe. It was even a desire to expand in order to defeat the Islamic world that drove the Spanish court to sponsor Columbus’ voyage to the New World.  

First of all, ‘apartheid’ by definition has nothing to do with ‘indigenous people’. If you’re going to make claims about the State of Israel, at least understand the words you are using. Apartheid is a system of segregation based on race. Segregation in the US pre-Civil Rights Era would constitute ‘apartheid’. 

Secondly, if you are going to make an argument based on harm brought to indigenous peoples, then aside from what @returnofthejudai wrote above, one must wonder why people are not protesting the United States, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and a host of other countries that brought significant harm (and continue to do so in systematic ways) to their indigenous populations. 

Finally, let’s say for the minute that the original ask understood what apartheid actually is and applied it, as many do, to Israel. Well, it would simply be a false charge. Yes there are social injustices and some laws that are unfairly and unequally applied in Israel (as there are in other places), and yes, the settlements in the West Bank are a HUGE issue and highly problematic! But, that doesn’t make it apartheid. 

Apartheid is disenfranchisement based on race. Apartheid is separate schools based on race. Apartheid is separate restaurants, drinking fountains, parks, etc. Apartheid is two legal systems: one for the oppressor, one for the oppressed. 

Let’s take the US and drug policy as an example. There are only one set of drug laws (varying state by state). The law does not state explicitly that Black Americans found in possession of marijuana should receive harsher sentencing. And yet, despite using at the same rates, Blacks are nearly 4X more likely to be convicted and incarcerated than Whites. That is inequality and racism in the application of the law, not in the law itself. This is an important distinction! And it is something that must be understood when addressing inequality in Israel. 

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But when the state comes at the expense of am indigenous group that is apartheid, then that state should not exist. Period.

I’m so sick of this “indigenous” argument. Jews are denied indigineity by everyone. Before Israel we were told to go back to Palestine. Now that it exists we are told to go back to the countries that exiled, ghettoized and murdered us. Tell me, where do Jews have a right to live? We actually share genetic markers with Palestinians and Druze. Our expulsion is recorded in Roman records, not just our own. Like it or not, that strip of land is the one place where Jews have a common history. But apparently indigineity has an expiration date.So again, I ask you, where do Jews have a right to live? The United States? I have no blood ties or long family history here. This is stolen land. So let me ask you a question, do Jews have a right to live on that land, whether it’s labelled as Israel or something else? Or do we not have a right to live anywhere? 

This whole post is excellent, but the final metaphor...brilliant. 

I’m seeing a lot of people mentioning the St. Louis and the dozens and dozens of countries that blocked entrance to Jewish Refugees before and during the Holocaust. Honestly, I’m in favor of absorbing Syrian refugees for exactly that reason. My family had nowhere to escape to when the Holocaust happened and, as a result, my grandmother and grandfather were the only survivors of their families outside of a recently discovered second cousin on my grandmother’s side. They were finally admitted to the United States in 1949.

My point here is that if you are going to use the historical treatment of Jewish Refugees as a parellel, you are obligated to understand what happened to them. They didn’t all die. A great many of them fled to British Mandate Palestine between 1933 and 1939, more than doubling the Jewish Population in less than a decade. Some welcomed the refugees, others rioted. To keep the peace, the British created the White Paper of 1939 which effectively blocked all Jewish immigration to Palestine. 

At the same time Jews were blocked from entering virtually every other Nazi-free country in the world, with few exceptions. We revere the names of those who helped Jews escape, Wallenberg, Sugihara, Winton, Roncalli. But they were rare exceptions. History remembers the Six Million who could not escape. The survivors found themselves homeless, their money, property and businesses stolen. Many who attempted to return faced pogroms by their former neighbors who were hoping that the Jews were gone for good. And so they lived in Displaced Persons camps for years, petitioning for opportunities to simply make new lives for themselves along with whoever remained. Some, like my grandparents, had distant relatives in countries like the United States and could successfully petition to bring them there. But even then the numbers of immigrants allowed was limited. Ultimately, many of these displaced survivors ended up in Palestine and what would eventually become the State of Israel.

My point is this. So much rhetoric around Israel comes by comparing it to imperialist powers like Britain, Spain and Belgium. But those were countries sending their people out into other parts of the world to exploit them and expand the power and influence of the home country to whom they remained loyal. Jews who fled to British Mandate Palestine had nowhere else to go. 

The reality is that a majority of Israeli Jews are refugees and their descendants. Refugees from Europe, Africa, the MIddle East and the Soviet Union. They were fleeing persecution to go to the one place on Earth that promised to never turn them away when, historically, so many places had. So if you are moved to sympathy by the plight of the Syrians I share your feelings. But if you are going to use Jewish refugees as a basis for comparison, you need to recognize that in the absence of countries willing to take them in, Jewish Refugees really had only one choice to make. I’m not asking you not to criticize the Israeli Government. I do it all the time. I’m asking you to recognize the humanity of the Jewish People, both Israeli and diasporic. I’m asking you to acknowledge that conflating Imperial Power Grabs with a need for a place to simply survive is disingenuous at best and is ultimately anti-semitic. You can question the circumstances of Israel’s founding. You can fight for justice for the Palestinians. I don’t care if you support a one-state or a two-state solution. All I want you to do is acknowledge that Jews have a right to live somewhere and that it’s rank cruelty to displace us as if we had a safe mother country to go back to. I read a metaphor, I forget where, that said that Jewish Immigration to Israel was similar to a situation where a man flees a burning house and has no choice but to jump off a roof and land on another person, breaking their arms and legs. We need to acknowledge the harm Israel’s creation and actions have done. At the same time, we also need to recognize that too many Israel critics believe that the Jews should’ve burned. 

I’ve seen this meme in a few different forms since the Paris attacks, but as clever as it seems, it is a false equivalent. 

The KKK, in its three incarnations, is primarily about “White Supremacy”. Founded during Reconstruction out of anger over the results of the Civil War, the actions of the KKK were focused on intimidating the Black population--to prevent free Black people from enjoying the liberties granted to them. The group eventually faded only to emerge again in the early 20th century as immigration to the US swelled. This time Jews and Catholics (many from the poorer parts of Europe) were the target of their racism. As immigration slowed, so to did the influence of the KKK. They emerged for the third time in response to the Civil Rights movement. They pushed to maintain segregation; once again hoping to keep Black Americans from achieving equality.  

For the KKK Christianity has always been subservient to racial ideology. They were not founded as a Christian group. They were/are a Nationalist movement focused on “preserving White rule” and protecting “the White race”. Christianity is read and understood in support of that basic premise. This is an important distinction to understand. 

ISIS on the other hand, as difficult as it is to state without backlash, is primarily about Islam. Their every motivation is rooted in their theology. While the KKK’s actions were dictated by racialism, ISIS’s actions are dictated by their reading of Islam. As Graeme Wood explains,

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.

Please understand, I am not saying that simply because ISIS is Islamic, that all Muslims are terrorists. I am most definitely not! 

What we have is a very difficult academic query: Would ISIS exist without Islam? Some say ‘yes’--their situation is such that Islam just happens to be the ideology they are using. If Islam didn’t exist they would use a different ideology. Others argue ‘no’. Either way, they are simply not comparable to the KKK. The KKK could most definitely exist without Christianity. They wouldn’t have to use a different ideology, because they are not rooted in Christianity. This comparison obscures what the KKK is really about. 

What would a fair comparison be? Perhaps the Westboro Baptist Church, perhaps Bodu Bala Sena, perhaps individuals such as Yigal Amir or Shelley Shannon. Religious extremism underpins these groups and individuals. They are motivated by their deeply-held religious beliefs. 

#EditorialCartoon by @claytoonz

As Governors seek to block refugees from entering their states, I’d like to remind them of the St. Louis which sailed in 1939 from Germany with 937 passengers – mostly Jewish refugees. Cuba only accepted 28 passengers and the United States denied entry to all of the remaining passenger by ignoring cables sent to President Roosevelt. The U.S. had decided not to take extraordinary measures to help refugees enter the country, despite the fact that the people were so close to Florida. The passengers returned to Europe. 254 of those passengers died during the Holocaust.

A useful map …

Obama pushes back on some of the anti-Muslim rhetoric. 

guys as someone who technically “works” in the “field” of “journalism” please please please i would like you to remember that by the time you see a news item on tumblr it is likely to be hours old (at least).

for example i’m still seeing a lot of posts saying “pray for the people killed in the Japan tsunami and the Mexico earthquake”. as i write this there are no immediate reports of damage or injury in japan. and the same is true of mexico. Reuters even say re japan: “the Pacific Tsunami Center said there was no threat of tsunami from the quake”.

(to be clear: this post dates from 11.35 am UK time on 14/11/2015.)

the eiffel tower turns its lights off every night and donald trump’s gross tweet about gun control dates from the charlie hebdo attack. (the bbc have a good article debunking some of the widely-shared social media things from last night: “#Paris: the power, the horror, the distortions”.) the gif of the eiffel tower going out dates from january: i.e. also in memoriam for the charlie hebdo attack. (think about the chronology on this: last night’s attack would literally still have been going on when the light man at the eiffel made the decision to turn it off, which would be absurd.) The latest is that IS has claimed responsibility but ppl are working to confirm the authenticity of the statement (because that’s how journalism works).

if you want to be sure what is going on in “news” please just EXIT TUMBLR and go to a trusted news site: either an agency like the AP or Reuters, or something which is being frequently updated in real time: the BBC, the Guardian (link goes to today’s liveblog, not last night’s).

“This is an attack on all of humanity, and the universal values we share.” - President Obama