Going Up to the Mountain of the Lord: A Call for Intersectional Interreligious Justice
by Heather Miller Rubens
Dabru Emet closes with an ethical imperative: “Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace.” By ending Dabru Emet with this call to collaborative justice work, the authors suggest that the Jewish–Christian relationship has something particular to add to justice and peacebuilding initiatives. What might that be? The world remains marred by religious and racial hatreds, and pursuing justice demands a recognition (1) that hatreds overlap in complex ways, (2) that religious animus and racial animus cannot be dismantled in isolation, and (3) that working for justice is never finished. For those peace-builders and justice-seekers who want to confront religious and racial animus in the United States today, the work of dismantling antisemitism is intimately linked to dismantling Anti-Black racism, Anti-Brown racism, and Islamophobia. These hatreds should not be seen as competing, but as interdependent forms of animus. Jews and Christians interested in following Dabru Emet’s call to action can play a critical part in envisioning and pursuing an intersectional interreligious justice.
Central to the work of Jewish–Christian relations is dismantling the destructive forces of antisemitism, engaging both religious and racial dimensions of this particular animus. This piece briefly explores instances of connection between antisemitism, Anti-Black racism, Anti-Brown racism, and Islamophobia. While I am not arguing that these connections were foregrounded within Dabru Emet twenty years ago, I am arguing that these linkages are vital to take up today. To do justice work through a Jewish–Christian lens in 2021 requires engaging the complexities of interwoven and interdependent hatreds, particularly those rooted in racial and religious bigotries.
Jewish–Christian Justice and Anti-Black and Anti-Brown Racism: Racial Animus
Antisemitism from the nineteenth century onward has been understood through the lenses and logics of racism. And, certainly, the antisemitism present within the contemporary Jewish–Christian conversation lies in the shadow of the Shoah, involving a necessary reckoning with the racism of Nazism.
This racial reckoning is not exclusively a European project, but also a distinctly American one, and the connection is not limited to analogy. As scholars have long shown, and more recent publications by Susan Neiman and Isabel Wilkerson have popularized, the anti-Black racism of Jim Crow America informed Nazi policies and actions. And, as J. Kameron Carter and Willie James Jennings have posited, Christian anti-Judaism and the theologies of supersessionism laid the theological and conceptual foundations of anti-Black/anti-Brown racism that made the transatlantic slave trade and the killing of indigenous peoples in the Americas possible.
Unfortunately, we also have recent examples of hate intimately linking antisemitism with anti-Black and anti-Brown racism. In August 2017, at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, various so-called alt-Right groups defended Confederate statues while chanting “Jews will not replace us!” In October 2018, the shooter in the horrific Tree of Life Synagogue murders in Pittsburgh posted on social media that he was stopping the Jewish community from bringing “invaders” into the country via HIAS (formerly, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). Who were these so-called invaders? At the time, there were caravans of immigrants coming up through Central America and Mexico, and the conservative media was stoking xenophobia and anti-Brown immigrant feelings.
The connection between antisemitism and anti-Black and Brown racism is deep, and it is not going anywhere. Indeed, there are many xenophobic White nationalists who see Jews as co-conspirators with Black and Brown communities aiming to take down White dominance in the United States, where claims of “White genocide” and the “Great Replacement” are flourishing.
Jewish–Christian Justice & Islamophobia: Religious Animus
When ICJS hosted the authors of Dabru Emet in the late 1990s, our organization (known then as the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies) focused on Jewish–Christian relations and dismantling anti-Judaism and antisemitism. In 2013, the ICJS board and staff agreed to expand the organizational mission to include Islam and, in 2016, to change our organizational name to reflect this expansion. Keeping the acronym ICJS, our name is now the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. With the inclusion of Muslim communities and the study of Islam, ICJS is engaged in confronting not only anti-Judaism and antisemitism, but also anti-Muslim and Islamophobic bias and bigotry. In our experience, these religious hatreds need to be studied and understood as both independent and interdependent forms of religious animus in the US context.
In thinking about antisemitism and Islamophobia as overlapping hatreds, one must take up the role and place of Christianity in the culture and politics of the United States. The framings of the “Jewish Question” and the “Muslim Question” require us to consider the role Christians and Christian traditions have played in cultivating a particular culture of religious and racial animus. There are rising numbers of xenophobic White nationalists who see Jews and Muslims as co-conspirators aiming to take down Christian dominance in the West. When antisemitism and Islamophobia are combined in that toxic stew, there is common cause in confronting those religious hatreds together.
Working for Justice in 2021: Dismantling Antisemitism, Anti-Black racism, Anti-Brown racism, and Islamophobia
In dismantling these hatreds (antisemitism, anti-Black racism, anti-Brown racism, and Islamophobia) we see that all are wrapped up with contested and contesting ideas of what it means to be an American, both racially and religiously. The United States is a country historically defined in the imagination of its majority cultures as White and Christian. If the demographic, cultural, and political power shifts continue to displace White Christian Americans from positions of power, presumably these intersecting hatreds will continue to overlap in complex and nefarious ways as the future racial and religious character of the United States evolves and is renegotiated.
Dabru Emet cites Isaiah to close the overall project but also suggests that this particular scripture (Isaiah 2:2-3) can serve as a guide to those seeking justice and peace through the lens of Jewish-Christian relations. With the words of Isaiah, Dabru Emet invited readers twenty years ago to envision peoples flowing up the mountain to the House of the Lord. The Jewish and Christian audiences imagined by the authors of Dabru Emet, I think, have a unique obligation today to pursue a justice that is multiracial and multireligious and seek an intersectional interreligious justice.
Heather Miller Rubens, Ph.D., is the Executive Director and Roman Catholic Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS). Connect on LinkedIn.