What would a movement against mass incarceration be able to accomplish with the support of the country’s largest religious denomination?

Upon recognizing the depth of the problem that mass incarceration poses, it may be tempting for many whites, especially those used to positions of influence and authority, to leap into devising solutions. Reading Michelle Alexander’s book certainly brings to mind a litany of anathemas—for instance, discriminatory policing, the senseless drug war, wildly excessive sentencing laws, the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors, the perverse incentives of the private prison industry and chronic underinvestment in communities of color. But the authors of The Scandal of White Complicity do not venture far into policy proposals or political strategizing. Nor do they allude to the many biblical passages about freeing captives that might tempt one to play the liberator.

What they offer instead is a call to humility, to accountability to people of color, to solidarity. The task they set for white Americans is to organize themselves and each other as allies, and to follow the lead of their neighbors of color who are already fighting the battle against the new Jim Crow every day.

Read the rest at America.

The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

The urge for this first came from a frustration with the same old tactics that Natasha Singh had been feeling for a while. “The marches were pointless,” she says. Then, just after the incident in Oakland, her friend and artistic collaborator Amin Husain returned from a World Social Forum meeting in Brazil, where he learned about the Chilean student movement’s creative tactics. He wanted to bring some of that home. The two of them recruited others and settled on a name: “+ Brigades.” They scoured photographs of movements through history at the New York Public Library. The goal, says Husain, is “addition and supplement rather than negation, opposition and subtraction.” Thus their answer to all the worry about black blocs: create blocs of your own.

Husain, who with Singh was one of the earliest OWS organizers, took part in the first intifada as a teenager in the West Bank. But he identifies neither with principled nonviolence nor, for instance, anarchism. The movement’s problem, he and Singh thought, wasn’t a matter of violence or not; it was a lack of imagination. There was too small a repertoire.

“Don’t negate the things you don’t like,” said Austin Guest at that inaugural + Brigades meeting in the church basement. “Add the things you do, so we can get a real diversity of tactics.”

Read the rest of the article at The Nation.

In this interview, Butler stressed a theme that is actually the starting point for the discussion of nonviolence in her recent book Frames of War: the co-implication of violence and nonviolence, where neither can quite escape the other. I pushed back a bit, and so did she.

NS: Do these popular uprisings affect how we should think about power and sovereignty, as armed dictators are being coerced by nonviolent movements?

JB: I understand the desire to come up with theoretical generalizations. I spend a good deal of my time doing precisely that. But even though nonviolent practices have been important in some of these uprisings, we are also seeing new ways of interpreting nonviolence, and new ways of justifying violence when protestors are under attack from the military. The events in Libya are clearly violent, and so I think we are probably left with new quandaries about whether the line between violent and nonviolent resistance ever can be absolutely clear.

NS: Where in particular do you see that line blurring?

JB: We have to be careful to distinguish between nonviolence as a moral position that applies to all individuals and groups, and nonviolence as a political option that articulates a certain refusal to be intimidated or coerced. These are very different discourses, since most of the moral positions tend to eliminate all reference to power, and the political ones tend to affirm nonviolence as a mode of resistance but leave open the possibility that it might have to be exchanged for a more overtly aggressive one. I am not sure we can ever evacuate the political frame. Moreover, it is important to think about how one understands violence. If one puts one’s body on the line, in the way of a truck or a tank, is one not entering into a violent encounter? This is different from waging a unilateral attack or even starting a violent series, but I am not sure that it is outside the orbit of violence altogether.

NS: President Obama sometimes seems to be policing that distinction in his rhetoric about these uprisings: demanding that protesters and regimes both remain nonviolent, and then bringing U.S. military force to bear in Libya when the state turns to military force. But I would think the difference between how the movements in Egypt and Libya have progressed actually reaffirms that the line between violence and nonviolence is a useful one.

JB: Well, it is interesting that the U.S. affirms that the anti-government forces in Libya are resistance fighters and seeks to provide aerial bombing support to their forces on the ground. So it seems that even liberal public discourse makes room for justified armed resistance. What is most interesting is to figure out when certain forms of violence are considered part of an admirable struggle for freedom, and when, on the contrary, violence is understood as the terrorist activities of non-state actors.?Do you have an answer to that?

NS: I certainly can’t think of a consistent rule that would apply to all cases, and probably for good reason. The case of Israel-Palestine comes to mind.

JB: Indeed, it does.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

He brought back a sack full of Afghan scarves, and offered me my pick of them. The one I chose, the yellow one, is what I’m wearing now. What the picture doesn’t show, but which was the first thing I noticed when I put it on, is the smell. One scarf smells strongly; the smell of Eric’s sack of them is tremendous. He didn’t notice it when he was in Kabul, because everything smells this way there. With my scarf on, I’m carrying that city with me today, into the new year. I’m breathing the city that my country has occupied for nearly a decade now.

I can try to describe it, but I’ll never succeed. It’s a bit like the smell of a wood fire, but there’s much more too. There’s also the trace of burning trash, which people use to supplement their insufficient wood and coal, for heat and cooking. There’s smog in it too, from a city where people can’t afford anything but the lowest-grade gasoline in cars, and where the snow-capped mountains all around trap it in. There’s also dust, because the cars are driving over mostly unpaved roads. And there’s the hint of unnamable filth, from the scattered sewers that run along the roads, open to the air. This would be just unsanitary in a city of thousands. But Kabul has swelled to four million, thanks to impoverished refugees pouring in from the war-ravaged countryside, their ancestral land lost and trading good, clean air for what I’m smelling now.

In late 2001, I met a woman who worked at the Pentagon. When she learned I had been protesting the invasion, she argued with me. She said, as we parted, that someday I’d understand that this was right. I’d get over it. Well, I still don’t. I haven’t.

The year to come will only really be new if we make it that way. Let our mere prayers for peace be made acceptable by our actions, by our willingness to shed the pride and importunity that keeps us trying to have our way with drone strikes and night raids. They will fail. There is no victory from making widows and orphans. In a new year made truly new, we will no longer accept the waste and horror of war as the policy of normalcy. We will stop trying to take what isn’t ours. We will starve the bottomless hunger for revenge, and sit down with our enemies, and eat together.

Let God be the first to know, and Congress second: it’s a new year. War, the demon-mother of poverty, is no good in our sight, and we are the ones who can stop it. This year, may the four million human beings in Kabul breathe clean air again. Amen; let this be done.

If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a Christian mob marks more or less the end of Greek philosophy and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Now, for those of you who don’t know her, there’s a blockbuster historical epic movie about Hypatia (though it has scored only limited distribution in the U.S.). And, for those of you who don’t trust blockbuster historical epic movies, I’ve got a review of it on Religion Dispatches today:

Hearing about Agora’s success in Spain last year—the highest-grossing film of the year, sweeping up awards—couldn’t help but bring to my mind the empty insides of so many of that country’s churches, still charred after the various anti-clerical mobs of the last few centuries. I wasn’t the only one to make that association. With predictable ressentiment, an open letter came to Amenábar from the Religious Anti-Defamation Observatory, a Catholic watchdog in Spain, warning him: “Your film is going to awaken hatred against Christians in today’s society.”

American “Catholic evangelist” Fr. Robert Barron adds in his Catholic New World review, “I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenábar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians.” One can only hope that it’s not a good enough movie to drive people to the streets.

In an interview with the New York Times, though, Amenábar turned the tables on his pious critics. “Fundamentally, this is a very Christian film about the life of a martyr,” he explained. “Jesus would not have approved of what happened to Hypatia, which is why I say no good Christian should feel offended by this film.” In this respect, at least, his sentiments have historical basis.

Keep reading to find out why.

Ever since the Israeli strike on the Gaza Freedom Movement’s Freedom Flotilla on Monday, I and the rest of us at Waging Nonviolence have been exploring ways of understanding what happened. My first essay, “Nonviolence and the Gaza Freedom Movement,” simply raises some questions that we might be asking as new information about the incident slowly trickles out. “Were the activists really acting nonviolently?” “How are the mission’s success and failure being measured?” “Whose suffering is the media considering grievable?” “What laws were violated, and why?” —and more. I’ve been glad to see that piece gaining some traction around the web; it has been picked up at Common Dreams, In These Times, and Sojourners.

Today, I added a further discussion of that first question and its consequences: “Gaza, the Mavi Marmara, and the Prospects of Fighting Back.” There, though the facts of the case are still far from clear, I address the reasons and ramifications of activists attempting to fight back against Israeli soldiers—particularly for the fledgling nonviolence movement in the Palestinian territories.

See also our initial post about the events, a wrap-up of early news coverage, and a report about a solidarity march in New York.

The future of the cause for justice in Palestine-Israel is very much riding on how the story of what happened that night in the Mediterranean is told. If there is to be a future, really, it means thinking through the problems in ways that get beyond the familiar intransigence.

What will it take to prevent the next war? Can’t say I know exactly, but, like how many others in the same boat, I keep writing about it anyway.

I just received in the mail the elegant new second issue of The Point magazine, out of Chicago, which includes my essay “The War at Home.” It’s available only in print currently, so you’ll have to buy the issue, which includes work by Martha Nussbaum, Robert Pippin, and many others. Here’s some of the stuff in my piece:

For the moment, my parents’ lessons and example had caught up with the martial fantasies. The kid who loved his toy rifle gave way to the one who’d channeled Buddha on the playground. I began turning back to the spiritual traditions they had exposed me to as a kid, in the course of their own explorations, and I wandered into some new ones of my own. I read the books of mystics and philosophers. I found friends who would sit around forever and talk about ideas? and in those good, late nights the prospect of peace could overwhelm the allure of war. I became enchanted with the notion of truth I found in Gandhi’s writings, a substance of absolute sacredness borne by friend and enemy alike. Reading them offered me new way of seeing the world: a living firmament of people, each with their righteous claims on truth and justice. Destroying any of them is, or should be, tantamount to defeat.

There is no sense pretending, though, that this turning point would last me for life. Such moments of decision repeat themselves perpetually. The transformative logic of weapons and the banality of violence always offer to reinvent the game, to insist that, this time, to kill and be killed is not murder. No: it is defense, it is honor, it is duty, it is right. Gandhi, for one, lived a life of obsessive vigilance against these creeping temptations. In diet, family life, community, and politics, his writings reveal a constant anxiety that violence might weasel its way through. Reading Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth, one can grow exhausted with the endless efforts at self-purgation. His ascetic impulses sometimes do little more than replace harming others with harming himself. But if the answer to violence were simply a feat of deprivation, it would be as much a denial of life as killing. I cannot simply cut off these militant organs, for I’d probably die in the process.

When we reason about justice, whether it is the justice of war or of reconciliation, we’re providing a set of moral standards. We know that they’re going to be violated. But I still think it is important to articulate them. For instance, in courts of law, if we’re trying to decide whether something is a war crime, we need some standards to know what that means. Even if moral standards aren’t always respected, people need to be able to make moral claims against violators. The ethic of reconciliation and just war theory provide a proscription for what just action ought to look like. Military academies in the United States take just war theory very seriously. This is what they teach their soldiers: no, you can’t kill civilians; no, you can’t wage aggressive war. The standards are really tough, and people are expected to conduct themselves in that way. It’s also ensconced in international law. My dream is that the ethic of reconciliation will have a similar status, providing a cookbook for how to approach certain problems, even if, at times, it is going to wind up being compromised.

I read your blog on Anselm; quite interesting.
Your name sounds Jewish, and although you said you are Catholic, do you have Jewish ancestry?
What do you know about Rashi, the great rabbi that lived in northern France at the same time as Anselm?

We went on to have a friendly exchange in which he invited me to visit him in Israel and, further, suggested that Anselm might have learned his concept of God from Rashi, the 11th-century Jewish commentator Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki. I was of course suspicious—it reminded me a bit of when my grandfather came home from a class at the synagogue thinking that Kant was a Jew—but it really wouldn’t hurt me to be less ignorant of the history of Jewish thought. Despite a year of Hebrew and a few classes in college, I know painfully little about the intricacies of the faith of my father’s fathers.

Providentially, I caught word that Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Night, has a new little book called, precisely, Rashi. So I found myself a review copy and, in the last few days, got around to reading it.

From the first, I let myself fall happily into Wiesel’s nostalgic mood. He remembers the companionship of Rashi’s text in his childhood (read: before the Holocaust), his ancestor, who it seemed to him then “had been sent to earth primarily to help Jewish children overcome loneliness.” There is nothing sweeter to a scholar’s heart than the thought of little Jewish boys pouring over their ancient books, searching for meaning and a place in life through the scribbles of the sages. As I read, I began jotting notes for a future essay on the meaning of ancestry.

We then descend into a sequence of Rashi’s interpretations, from creation to Joseph. Wiesel shows, line by line, how Rashi pulls open the biblical text, expands it, and exposes it. The tendency of modern interpreters (and those in the thrall of Greek rationalism, from Origen to Hegel), when they don’t quite know what to do with a passage of scripture, is to abstract it, to look outside, and understand it in terms of a foreign logic. (For instance, how one might use evolutionary theory to claim that the six days of creation really each represented millions of years.) But, for someone like Rashi, the interpretation of a text lies in the text itself, to be found between the lines, to be summoned in imagination. One of many examples:

“So Esau returned that day on his way unto Seir.” [That’s the biblical passage.] Rashi wonders why the verb is in the singular. Because he [Esau] was alone. One after the other, the four hundred men who had been with him, deserted him.

It is a wonderful process to follow, and Wiesel delights to guide us through.

As the book goes on, however, it grows darker. Like Wiesel, Rashi lived through a tragic period for European Jews, one full of brutality and suffering at the hands of Christians. And crusades. Rashi, therefore, has reason to be unapologetic in his disdain for the goyim:

A general rule: whenever he can, Rashi chooses passages in the Midrash that can be interpreted as arguments against “the other nations.”

When interpreting biblical stories, he protects the sanctity and holiness of the Israelites whenever possible, even blaming the manufacture of the Golden Calf at Sinai on foreigners among them. Wiesel attempts to qualify:

Rashi believes, following all the Midrashic literature, that the people of Israel live and act at the center of the history of men and of nations. A feeling of superiority? No, of singularity.

He even ends by claiming Rashi for cosmopolitanism:

Furthermore, Rashi taught his disciples to engage in open discussions including polemics with the Christian world.

But of such universalism he offers scant evidence. For the horrors inflicted on Jews—and indeed on Wiesel himself—the outcome is certain knowledge of the community’s righteousness: this, I can’t help but think, is as much a delusion as that which motivated the violence that, in the first place, inspired it.

For my own part, as paternal half-Jew and accidental apostate, I cannot possibly accept the singularity, justified by suffering, of the Jewish people on whose impossible margin my bloodline lies. (Notwithstanding, “If you’re Jewish enough for Hitler,” a childhood friend used to say, “you’re Jewish enough for me.”) It is a lineage I would like to inhabit and claim for my own, but only on the terms of my marginality, even my apostasy, which implies the denial of its basic categories. Despite Wiesel’s qualification, I shudder at his acceptance of Rashi’s formula: the chosen people, rightful denizens of the Holy Land, the bearers of humanity’s divine burden. The warmth, the imagination, the scholarship, yes. But, thanks to the horrible logic of history, it is all a package deal.

Just as Rashi has only good things to say about the people Israel, Wiesel can bring himself to say nothing ungenerous about Rashi. One must admire the gesture of respect for the teacher, for the elder:

it is incumbent on a student to respect his Teacher. To avoid embarrassing him, the student should withhold questions that the Teacher might not be able to answer, and then seek a new Teacher.

That being the case, out of respect for both author and subject, I wish Nextbook and Schocken had, when publishing this slim hardcover and charging $22 for it, bothered to assemble with something more resilient than glue and perfect binding. Sewn signatures, please. When my children’s children discover the book in some dusty attic of the future, and pages fall out like autumn leaves, I can only hope they’re the ones that divide us along uninhabitable lines.