Duke University Press Log

Call for Papers: Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Translation Issue

The Translation Issue

Guest Editors: David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta

Special Issue on Translating Transgender

Submissions of 4000-9000 words (in any language). Due March 1, 2015 for publication in Spring 2016

Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. Meanwhile, transgender, gender variant, and gender non-confirming people have often been exiles, translators, language mediators, and multilinguals in greater numbers and intensities historically than their cisgender counterparts have. This kind of positionality among languages has become a generative, yet often precarious aspect of trans* embodiment. Nonetheless, the discourses of transgender studies (as in the neighboring fields of LGBT / queer studies) continue to be more Anglophone, more monolingual, and less translated than they historically ought to be, given how the subjects that produced those discourses have often been prototypes of transnational and translingual border-crossing. This paradox continues to constrain disciplinary and conceptual agendas around sexuality and gender a great deal more than in other fields that have enjoyed consistent state and institutional support as well as access to international distribution pathways. This is an important problem for transgender studies in the coming decades because an Anglophone disciplinary and discursive disposition will continue to lead policy-makers, public intellectuals, and academics to fall back on ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks and resources. It perpetuates a hierarchical conceptual economy, with Anglophone and West European linguacultures at the top and trans and queer vernaculars in other languages either at the bottom of the epistemic order, or sequestered into localist, ethnicized, or neo-Orientalist fetish. If not profoundly transformed, how will this discursive hierarchization impact the multi-directional traffic in trans knowledge and ideas in years ahead? This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly calls for multilingual and translational critique. This may take the form of:

• Essays offering a metacriticism of the field, its terms, and its methodologies from a multilingual point of view
• Essays offering a theoretical problematization of national languages and transnational lingua francae as such from a trans perspective
• Essays exploring the idea of a trans* lingua franca beyond Anglocentricity
• Trans-oriented research that often gets elided precisely because of rhetorical Anglocentricity or methodological monolingualism
• Essays critiquing the relationship between travel and multilingualism in trans* contexts
• Ethnographic studies of multilingual transgender spaces and communities
• Ethnographic studies of medical, legal, penal, educational contexts in which transgender positionality or existence are negotiated translingually
• Reflections on the craft and practice of translation
• Studies on how Anglocentricity in transgender epistemology perpetuates itself—institutionally, methodologically, politically
• Essays exploring how language normativity intersects with racial, ethnic, civic, sexual, erotic, socio-economic normativity in transgender contexts
• Studies that model a “multilingual transgender studies” or a multilingual trans-futurity more broadly
• Case studies on how language frontiers shape the planetary landscape of transgender discourse
• Reflections on the process of translating texts dealing with transgender and gender variance
• Essays on what transgender methodology in translation theory or practice might look like
• Essays exploring what working interpreters and translators (literary, poetic, technical, diplomatic) may reveal about transgender epistemology
• Historical studies linking multilingual, code-switching, and translingual practice with transgender embodiment
• Historical studies linking the genealogy of monolingualism with various kinds of gender normativity

Initial submissions may be in any language and will be peer-reviewed accordingly. Duke University Press requires publication in English, and we will commission translations of accepted submissions in the latter process of review. Accepted submissions will be published in the original language on TSQ’s Web site. Please send a complete manuscript by March 1, 2015 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a short abstract and brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 4000 to 9000 words, and 1000 to 2000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed to dgl[at]email[dot]arizona[dot]edu.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, visit http://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/TSQ.

Q&A with the editors of French Historical Studies

The incoming editors of French Historical Studies (FHS), Kay Edwards and Carol Harrison, discuss the future of the journal under their joint editorship, including information about forthcoming special issues and what topics they would like to see submitted to the journal. See the most recent issue here, and subscribe to the journal here.

How would you like to shape French Historical Studies in the future?

CAROL: In the future I think we’d like to continue some trends that we see in the field and that FHS is starting to reflect, publishing a lot about France and French history beyond the borders of metropolitan France. There will be more colonial material, which is where the field is going. We have exciting material on South East Asia and North Africa in the pipeline now that is being submitted.

KAY: We've also said that we've wanted to expand the chronological framework. FHS is open to anyone working in France or in these related fields over pretty much any chronology. But our submissions currently do tend to be much more modern. We want to get people who are doing medieval work or late antique work to think of us as well, since we definitely are a highly ranked scholarly publishing venue.

How do you see the journal developing over the next few years?

KAY: I would like to see us broadening the journal not just chronologically and in terms of international content, but also in terms of broadening it to more of an international academic audience. We currently are getting more and more submissions from German and Scandinavian lands, we've always gotten a few French, but we’d like to broaden our European, East Asian, African, Latin American base.

CAROL: I think we have a couple of ideas or projects on board now that are also about reminding the rest of the historical profession of how important French history is and how important French historians are to the rest of the profession. So I would say Michael Breen’s forum for instance. We have a group of articles by young French social historians that we’re arranging to translate into English to publish in the journal. I think this is important because social history is a much more lively tradition in France right now than it is in the Anglophone world. These are scholars who unless you work in French history and read French and keep up with things in France, you probably don’t know about. I think scholars outside of French history should read this forum to find out what’s going on in French history, and particularly in French social history. Similarly, we’ve got a special issue coming up in 2017 that we've just started planning on archives so we’re recruiting scholars who will be writing about archives not just as neutral repositories where the facts are, but as institutions that shape the way history is written, so as active participants in the writing of history. I think that’s the kind of special issue that will remind the rest of the profession that French historians are really crucial to shaping history.

Speaking of special issues, are there any other forthcoming special issues that you would like to talk about? How do you select special issues?

KAY: There is a French food special issue coming out that is primarily a project of the past editors. It is about food very broadly defined in French history. There is an article on coffee, another about WWII and food allocations and foraging, a wide variety of what defines food--not just a recipe book--particularly because France is so strongly associated with food culture.

CAROL: There will be articles on wonderful food, the introduction of coffee, there will be articles on lack of food, hunger, there’s an article on late 19th-century shop girls and their relationship to food, you know where they ate lunch and if they ate lunch. So that’s going to be a very exciting issue. And then further down the pipeline--this is more speculative--but 2018 is the 50th anniversary the events of May 1968. This is another one that I think will be important for FHS and I hope for non-French historians. Nineteen sixty-eight having obviously had a global reach, but the events in France were central. So that’s another one where we’d like to put together articles on France, on the Francophone world outside of France, and think about this anniversary. We would like FHS to lead the way a bit in talking about the German ‘68 and Mexico City ‘68 and Berkeley ‘68 and pull it together.

What would you like researchers to know about the submission process?

KAY: Don’t be afraid to send all different types of articles. Just because we’re FHS doesn't mean we only, as Carol said, do the metropol. There’s probably going to be a conception that we only do cultural stuff because that’s what France is. And the whole point is that we’re trying to get a wide variety of methodologies and subjects and approaches.

Who should be submitting to this journal that hasn't been?

KAY: A lot of early modernists and pre-modernists don’t think they should submit to FHS, in part because the name implies a very national framework that sometimes work and sometimes doesn't.

CAROL: They may be working on a territory that was not in fact called France. But if it’s Francophone, we’d like to see more early modern, medieval, and more French scholars! We do publish in French.

KAY: It does not have to be a translated work. In terms of material, I just want to see diversity. I really don’t want people to assume that because it’s French that it must be cultural or that it must have theoretical work. I have nothing against theoretical work, but I think there may potentially be stereotypes. I would like to see a reconstruction of environmental drainage, as long as this is something that hasn't been done.

CAROL: One thing our predecessors started that I think we want to continue is publishing more editorial pieces. Instead of very closely researched monographs, single author traditional research articles, FHS has been publishing these editorial pieces that are often reflections on the profession. We've published a recent one by David Bell that’s thinking about global history and reflections on the profession generally, on French history, and its role in the globalizing historical profession. I think there is room for developing that kind of editorial piece. We invite people to submit not just the research articles, but editorial articles that reflect the state of the field and the kind of the research that’s being done.

Call for Papers: The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence

The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies invites feminist scholars working in any discipline or interdisciplinary area in the interpretive social sciences and humanities to submit area-specific manuscripts on any topic related to the theme of "The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence."

Manuscripts may address any historical period related to any part of the region. Manuscripts are expected to substantiate a thesis based on original scholarship grounded in primary sources (literary, visual, archival, textual, ethnographic, artistic, legal, and so on) and to engage with relevant transnational gender and sexuality scholarship. The highest quality manuscripts will be published as articles in a JMEWS themed issue within approximately a year of submission. Submission guidelines may be found at www.jmews.org 

Manuscripts are due on or before 15 June 2015 to our online submission system here.

Questions may be directed to jmews[at]dukeupress[dot]edu.

Priscilla Wald on the Outbreak Narrative

The news that the first case of ebola in the United States has been diagnosed has the media in a frenzy and some people in Dallas panicking: taking their children out of school, calling for border closures and general quarantines. Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University, is not surprised by the reaction, which follows a narrative very similar to past epidemics, and she counsels in this Canada.com story that it is important to try to quell people's fears. In light of the epidemic, and the predictable reactions to it, we offer an excerpt from Wald's 2008 book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative in which she explains her concept of "the outbreak narrative."

 

Contagion is more than an epidemiological fact. It is also a foundational concept in the study of religion and of society, with a long history of explaining how beliefs circulate in social interactions. The concept of contagion evolved throughout the twentieth century through the commingling of theories about microbes and attitudes about social change. Communicable disease compels attention—for scientists and the lay public alike—not only because of the devastation it can cause but also because the circulation of microbes materializes the transmission of ideas. The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact.

The outbreak narrative—in its scientific, journalistic, and fictional incarnations—follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment. As epidemiologists trace the routes of the microbes, they catalog the spaces and interactions of global modernity. Microbes, spaces, and interactions blend together as they animate the landscape and motivate the plot of the outbreak narrative: a contradictory but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection and cooperation, scientific authority and the evolutionary advantages of the microbe, ecological balance and impending disaster.

The conventions of the paradigmatic story about newly emerging infections have evolved out of earlier accounts of epidemiological efforts to address widespread threats of communicable disease. While I use "the outbreak narrative" to refer to that paradigmatic story, which followed the identification of HIV, I use "outbreak narratives" broadly to designate those epidemiological stories. I return to the early years of bacteriology and public health in the United States to trace the impact of the discovery of the microbe on attitudes toward social interactions and collective identity that characterize the outbreak narrative of disease emergence.

Outbreak narratives and the outbreak narrative have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, locales (regional and global), behaviors, and lifestyles, and they change economies. They also influence how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how they imagine the threat, and why they react so fearfully to some disease outbreaks and not others at least as dangerous and pressing. It is therefore important to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative and to consider how it shapes accounts of disease emergence across genres and media.

Read the entire introduction here. 

Copyright Duke University Press, 2008.

Call for Papers: French Historical Studies issue on Archives

The editors of French Historical Studies seek articles for a special issue on the theme of archives and archival practice in French history to appear in the spring 2017. Recent transnational scholarship on archives has alerted us to the ways in which archives are not neutral sites but ones where knowledge is constructed and negotiated. Discussions about whether or not cultural history has lured historians away from the archives have missed an underlying reality: historians of France and the French empire now use a wider range of public and private holdings beyond national, departmental, defense, and colonial archives. These archives often require different strategies for entry and use. To note only the most obvious differences: finding aids have not always been compiled by trained archivists and classificatory schemes vary considerably depending on organizations’ needs. Access to outsiders and the communication of documents may be limited or restricted. Technology is also transforming both the archive itself and access to the archive.

The editors invite articles that situate these issues in the context of French history and historiography. More than just tales from the archives, articles will reflect authors’ experiences in archives that illuminate both archival practice and ways of doing French history. Among the various types of non- traditional archives, we invite authors to consider church and missionary archives, corporate archives, associations’ archives, mayors’ offices and communal records, hospital archives and medical records, private papers, and colonial archives outside Aix. We also welcome articles on non-traditional ways of using traditional archives, on the impact of digitization and other technologies on archival practice, and on the encounter between historians and archivists.

Queries about submission and other matters regarding this special issue should be addressed to the guest editors, Sarah Curtis (scurtis[at]sfsu[dot]edu) and Stephen Harp (sharp[at]uakron[dot]edu).

To submit an article, please visit www.editorialmanager.com/fhs. After registering, follow the submission instructions under “Instructions for Authors” on the website. Articles may be either in English or in French but must conform to French Historical Studies style (for details, see www.dukepress.edu/fhs) and must be accompanied by titles and 150-word abstracts in both languages. Manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words excluding notes and no longer than 10,000 words including notes. For the inclusion of illustrations, written permission must be obtained from the relevant persons or institutions for both print and online publication. The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2015.

Tikkun Wins 2014 Magazine of the Year Award

Tikkun Managing Editor Alana Price accepts the RNA 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award. Credit: Dawn Cherie Araujo.

Congratulations to Tikkun, winner of the prestigious 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award from the Religion Newswriters Association! The Religion Newswriters Association's awards recognize journalism excellence by measuring a magazine's grasp on a diversity of religion issues.

Tikkun, published quarterly, offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives. By bringing together voices from many disparate religious and secular humanist communities to talk about social transformation, political change, and the evolution of our religious traditions, Tikkun creates space for the emergence of a religious Left to respond to the influence of the religious Right and the distortions of global capitalism, while simultaneously critiquing reductionist views that sometimes prevail in liberal and progressive circles.

The most recent issue of Tikkun is available online here. To subscribe to Tikkun, visit www.tikkun.org.

To learn more about the award, please visit www.tikkun.org/rna.

 

The Little Veins of Central America by Deborah T. Levenson

Today's guest post is by Deborah T. Levenson, Professor of History at Boston College, author of Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death and co-editor of The Guatemala Reader. She calls for us to listen to the stories of the undocumented Central American children appearing on the U.S. border.

That tens of thousands of children cross the border from Mexico to the United States without documents presents immediate challenges to all of us. They are coming primarily from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries in which not only is unemployment high, and employment very poorly paid, but mere survival—much less a life beyond mere survival—is at stake.  In the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, 70% of the population under age 5 is so malnourished as to stunt growth, and in all these countries violence from gangs and adult mafias is lethal, everyday.

Many of us might agree that nations should take care of "their own"—let’s not hold our breath—and that US bears much of the responsibility for crisis. Its policies have undermined local peasant agriculture and national industry, contributed to the sharp decrease in social programs, and supported military regimes that have modeled the behavior prevalent in gangs. These are vital questions.

However, given the sharp polemics over what to do with these children right now, I want instead to give some face to who “they” are.  I have spent years of researching and writing about youth in Guatemala, and with reference to Central American youth in general, and I want to suggest how the young fit into this schema of high levels of poverty and violence that generates flight, a noun that fails to capture children’s motives and identities.  

For generations, poor people of Central America—as in other places—have depended on the pooling of incomes of family members to guarantee one pot large enough for all.  Central American children have long been part of this familial wage. They have worked in peasant agriculture and as seasonal harvesters. The worse the economic crisis gets, and the less subsistence that is available in their regions, and the farther they go: from the countryside to the city; from country to country; from Central America to Mexico to the USA. For the most part, the Central American youth I have met in Massachusetts are here to remain vital to that traditional family wage economy and to retain a place that gives them esteem and meaning.  A 14 year old from Honduras lives in a crowded apartment in Chelsea and shovels snow in the winter and cleans yards in the spring to send money home for his mother’s expensive heart medicine.  A teenager delivers newspapers in Salem to provide for her siblings in Guatemala.  Many youth—of course not all—leave home to protect home. This is one of the oldest immigrant stories, in US history, a heroic and true one. Befriend a Central American youth and you might hear one.

 You might hear another true story, one about gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha  (MS-13). Most reports indicate that the current increase in immigration of unaccompanied minors is a reaction to the growth of gang violence. Yes, youth are running from gang violence, and, it need be underscored that by leaving, they are also resisting forced conversion into being violent themselves. MS-13 operates in a simple and seemingly airtight manner in which extreme violence plays a pivot role. You join the gangs and get shoved into a life that relies on hurting other people to earn money and prestige; one acquires points for murdering and thus moves up in the ranks. If you are rebuff the gang, you face punishment by death or, if that not, an impossible dilemma.  At 13 years of age, a Guatemalan named Edgar Chocoy refused to join MS-13, which “transmuted” his death sentence into the payment of  “tax” so exorbitant that he would have had to resort to serious crime to pay. He refused to do that as well, and he left the country, fast.  He made it to Los Angeles where he was picked up and deported back to Guatemala after a judge denied his plea that MS-13 would kill him on his return. Edgar’s stance against the gangs was essentially a moral one and he paid a high price for it. Two weeks after he was deported, MS-13 murdered him.

Policy toward unaccompanied children, many of whom have challenged the fatal dynamics of gang control, as Edgar did, or who have “resolved” (personally and successfully responded to) their home nation’s health care crisis in their small way by buying medicines that otherwise would not be supplied, need be based on respecting these youth, who stand for life and against despondency. 

NYU Scandal Casts Light on Treatment of Workers in United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates has a long tradition of bringing in workers from other countries, particularly for construction jobs. Many come from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, among other countries. Some stay only until their job is done and send most of their wages back to their families in their home countries. Others bring their families with them and remain for generations. None of these immigrants, regardless of the length of their stay, are able to attain citizenship in the UAE, even though they now make up 85% of the population.

 

Workers' dormitory in Dubai. Photo by Neha Vora.

Recently, the New York Times investigated the treatment of those workers in the construction of NYU’s new campus in Abu Dhabi, and found that they live and work in shockingly poor conditions. Despite the labor protections set forth by NYU to their contractors in Abu Dhabi, many of these workers work 11 hours a day, 6 days a week, and can live with up to 14 other men in a room.  

 

The UAE’s disregard for the rights of its non-citizens is not new. In Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai’s Indian-dominated downtown to explore the lives of these “temporary guest workers”, who have flooded into the UAE since the 1970s. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, these workers are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. Vora notes, “Certain expatriates are welcomed into the UAE and governed through technologies and rhetorics of a free and open market that purportedly allows anyone to succeed if they perform neoliberal self-enterprising subjectivities, while others are deemed insignificant and invisible to the fabric of the city-state. ...Those who constitute exceptions to citizenship, like Indians in Dubai, are, by virtue of their exclusion, necessary to defining the parameters of citizenship and the legitimacy of the state. That is to say, their everyday practices, performances, and rhetorics actually prop up the citizen-noncitizen divide and the authoritarian patrimonial governance system through which they are regulated as outsiders.”

Interested in learning more? Impossible Citizens provides great information about the history of guest workers in the UAE. Check out the introduction here.

Will Indian Elections Lead to Change in Culture of Corruption and Red Tape?

Although the votes are still being counted, India's long-ruling Congress party has conceded the national elections to the BJP. Many voters gave frustration with corruption as their reason for voting for the clean sweep. Young Indians in particular are looking to new leadership to develop their economy.

Akhil Gupta opens his recent book Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India with this question: "Why has a state whose proclaimed motive is to foster development failed to help the large number of people who still live in dire poverty? Why do regimes whose legitimacy depends upon bettering the lives of the poor continue to allow anywhere from 250 million to 427 million to live below the poverty line?" He argues that red tape and corruption are a form of violence against the poor, causing millions of deaths. 

Although the poor in India may not wield economic power, they have long been considered an important group for politicians to court. But this year's elections brought a larger turnout from urban voters than in the past. To many, the young urban Indian working in a tech company is the sign of the future, but Gupta counsels against forgetting about the importance of agriculture to the Indian economy: "Agriculture has recorded the slowest growth rates of teh secotrs in the Indian economy. Agriculture is the only place where the vast majority of the unemployed and underemployed population can find employment in the short and medium term, but that will not happen if there is slow growth in this sector." Gupta also cautions against rising inequality: "It is not just the widening economic distance created by the conjunction of class and sectoral differences that is of concern. Equally important is the fact that the lives and experiences of many people who are part of the new global economy are increasingly cut off from those the urban, and especially, rural poor. For most of the urban middle-class there is no possibility of understanding, let along sympathinzing, with the struggles faced by poor people."

The new government under Narendra Modi must adopt policies that aid all Indians, or they may find themselves out of office in a few years. Unlike in the U.S., Indians on average vote half their politicians out of office at each election. 

Read more of Red Tape for great background to today's election news. Check out the introduction here. 

Jews in America: Our Conflicted Heritage

May is Jewish American Heritage Month. Please enjoy this guest post by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine. Named after the Jewish concept of mending and transforming a fragmented world, Tikkun offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives.

In addition to editing Tikkun, Rabbi Lerner is chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and the author of eleven books, including Jewish Renewal, The Politics of Meaning, Spirit Matters, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, and Embracing Israel/Palestine. He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley and San Francisco, California.

 

On the one hand, Jews are deeply grateful that America provided us with a safe haven when so many other Christianity-dominated cultures had represented us as demon Christ-killers and created the preconditions for the rise of both secular and religious anti-Semitism. American Jews rejoiced in the promise of freedom and equality before the law, and played a major role in organizing, shaping, and leading social movements that could extend that promise to all of America’s citizens. The role of the United States in defeating Nazism at the expense of so many American lives remains an enduring source of pride even for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those who fought in World War II, and an enduring source of appreciation for this amazing country. And the generosity of the American people toward Jews has made it possible for us to thrive and feel the kind of safety we haven’t felt for two thousand years of exile and diaspora.

On the other hand, Jewish well-being in America came not because this society didn’t seek scapegoats, but rather because it already had a scapegoat long before most Jews arrived on these shores—African Americans, Native Americans, and other targets (most recently, feminists, homosexuals, and “illegal” immigrants). While other immigrant groups from Europe found their safety in part by identifying with the dominant culture and becoming “white” (a social construct for all light-skinned people who bought into the existing systems of privilege and power), a significant section of the Jewish people in the past 150 years of presence in the United States chose instead to identify with the oppressed—most significantly with African Americans, but also with the poor (of which we were a significant part in the years 1880-1940), the oppressed, the homeless, and the hungry.

Was this simply a matter of self-interest from a new immigrant group seeking to find a way to integrate into the society? If so, why wasn’t it chosen with equal energy by the Irish, the Polish, the Italians, etc.? In my view, Jews chose this path because of two radical messages in the Torah:

1. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, that you were “the Other” (ha’ger), so when you come into your own power, do not oppress the stranger, but instead, Love the Other.

2. Do not accept reality as it is currently constructed—there is a force in the universe that makes possible the transformation from “that which is” (reality as given) to “that which ought to be” (the utopian possibilities of a world based on love, generosity, social justice, peace and joyous celebration of the universe). We called it YHVH—mistranslated as Jehovah, but actually a concept rather than a name, calling our attention to the reality that the world could be fully transformed and that we humans were created in the image of that force and with the responsibility to do tikkun (the healing and transformation of the world). It was this heritage that seeped into the collective unconscious of the Jewish people and that made us flock to social change movements in numbers not only out of proportion to our percentage of the population, but also more frequently than many other immigrant groups.

Unfortunately, the allure of fitting in and becoming like everyone else had a particularly strong effect on the distinctively American kind of Judaism that emerged in the temples and synagogues of American life. Seeking to imitate the decorum and respectability that WASPS had shaped for themselves, Jews in America created a Judaism that became increasingly like the other conformist religions of American society, embracing capitalist values and embracing patriotism even when it led to supporting American imperialist assumptions about the rest of the world. This new American Juadism sought to empty itself of its connection to the awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the universe that had been central to the Judaism of the past. Who can blame those in the post-Holocaust American Jewry who wanted safety and security? Yet the Judaism they tried to pass on to their children lacked the spiritual depth and political radicalism that had been at the heart of Judaism’s appeal.

The result? An increasing disaffection with Judaism in post-1950s America, and with it a decline in the ability of subsequent generations to find within Judaism its spiritual depth or its challenge to the materialism and selfishness that increasingly have come to dominate both public and private life in the early twenty-first century. But if Judaism was merely Americanism, our children asked, then why should they have to bother with all the distinctive religious practices meant to keep Jews a distinct religion, and why bother with a God that urged us to challenge the status quo when that status quo seemed so welcoming and its material benefits so enticing?

So this is the conflict that remains the enduring heritage of American Jews: an internal tension over whether to adopt mainstream values and a celebration of “that which is,” thereby fitting in with the cultural assumptions of the world’s largest imperial power, or to challenge those values, a challenge which not only leads to “speaking truth to power” in the larger society but also to challenging the Jewish community’s blind loyalty to an Israeli state that itself is committed to being “a nation like all other nations,” with its blindness to the suffering of the Palestinian people and its arrogance and hypocrisy as it attempts to turn Judaism into a cheerleader for immoral policies.

The good news is that even as many young Jews reject Judaism, they nevertheless have inherited a memory of the values that Judaism sought to inspire, and so many have joined in a wide variety of prophetic enterprises to reclaim Jewish spirituality and/or rebuild a Jewish social justice consciousness. This social justice consciousness goes far beyond the paltry platitudes of the Democratic Party and proclaims the need for a radical reconstruction of our world to save it from the environmental destruction that our Torah taught us would be the inevitable consequence of failing to build a society based on justice, love, generosity, and environmental sensitivity. We at Tikkun magazine, which is published by Duke University Press, are in the vanguard of this movement, on the one hand building a Jewish renewal spiritually and politically, and on the other hand recognizing that the global changes that are needed require an overcoming of all forms of national chauvinism and embracing a new ethos: the caring society—caring for each other and caring for the earth.

In this way, the particularism of American Judaism is morphing into a universalism. To help that happen, we have created the Network of Spiritual Progressives, an interfaith group that is welcoming to secular humanists of every stripe as well. The Network of Spiritual Progressives calls for a New Bottom Line in the United States and around the world, based on our understanding that our well-being as Jews and as Americans depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the well-being of the planet itself.

Perhaps the Network of Spiritual Progressives, with its call for a Global Marshall Plan and an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which would require public funding of all national and state elections, banning all other monies in elections from any private or corporate or political source and requiring the larger corporations to prove a satisfactory history of social and environmental responsibility every five years to a jury of ordinary Americans) may be the fullest realization of the American Jewish Heritage. And it is in supporting, nay insisting, that the only practical and realistic way to save the planet from environmental destruction and/or some new form of elitist plutocratic fascism is to be prophetic, unrealistic, and utopian that Jews in America may still have an important role to play.