The Protest Issue SPRING 2021 2 ART CONTRIBUTOR: ANDI ARNOVITZ
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The Protest Issue SPRING 2021 2 ART CONTRIBUTOR: ANDI ARNOVITZ Coat of the Agunot, 2010. Digital scans of antique ketubot, threads. 60.2 x 59.4 in. Read AJS Perspectives online at Photo by Avshlom Avital. Permission for use of the ketubot courtesy of the National Library of Israel. © 2010 Andi Arnovitz. Courtesy of the artist. associationforjewishstudies.org 2 | AJS PERSPECTIVES | SPRING 2021 The Protest Issue SPRING 2021 From the Editors 6 Urgent Witness: Spaces of Belonging 57 in Jewish Argentina Essay Contributors 8 Natasha Zaretsky Art Contributors 9 From Israel’s Black Panthers’ Protest to 60 a Transnational MENA Jewish Solidarity The Jewish Hercules: How Sports Created 17 Aviad Moreno Space for Hellenic Judaism in Salonica Makena Mezistrano Jewish Symbols in German Gangsta Rap: 64 A Subtle Form of Protest Prophetic Protest in the Hebrew Bible 19 Max Tretter Marian Kelsey The Ordeal of Scottsboro 66 A Color-Blind Protest of Jewish 25 Stephen J. Whitfield Exceptionalism and Jim Crow Wendy F. Soltz Reading Prophetic Protest without 69 Anti-Judaism White People’s Work, or What Jessica Krug 28 Ethan Schwartz Teaches Us about White Jewish Antiracism Naomi S. Taub Violence Justified: Resistance among 71 the Hasmoneans and Hong Kongers Alternative Rituals as Protest 30 Dr. V Lindsey Jackson The Profession Early Rabbinic Reluctance to Protest 34 Matthew Goldstone The Invisible Meḥiẓah 74 Jodi Eichler-Levine The 1943 Jewish March on Washington, 36 through the Eyes of Its Critics A Protest Novel That Went Unheeded 78 Rafael Medoff Josh Lambert A Golem for Protest: Julie Weitz’s My Golem 42 When Your Book Is Protested: 82 Melissa Melpignano Lessons in Communal Knowing Claire Sufrin Uprising against Butchers! 46 Julia Fermentto-Tzaisler A Protest against the JCC Conception 85 of Jewish Studies This Is Brazil: Jewish Protests under 48 Benjamin Schreier Democracy and Dictatorship Michael Rom After the Pittsburgh Shooting: 88 A Scholar Cries for Justice Allyship and Holding One’s Own Accountable: 54 Rachel Kranson The New Jewish Labor Movement Susan R. Breitzer AJS PERSPECTIVES | SPRING 2021 | 3 AJS Perspectives: Editors President The Magazine Chaya Halberstam Jeffrey Shoulson King’s University College University of Connecticut of the Association Mira Sucharov for Jewish Studies Carleton University Vice President / Membership and Outreach Please direct correspondence to: Sarah Bunin Benor Association for Jewish Studies Art Editor HUC-JIR 15 West 16th Street Samantha Baskind New York, NY 10011 Cleveland State University T: 917.606.8249 Vice President / Program F: 917.606.8222 Robin Judd Roundtable Editor [email protected] The Ohio State University Jason Schulman associationforjewishstudies.org New York University Vice President / Publications AJS Perspectives is published Laura Leibman bi-annually by the Association Editorial Board for Jewish Studies. Reed College Samantha Baskind © 2021 Association for Cleveland State University Jewish Studies ISSN 1529-6423 Secretary / Treasurer Zachary Braiterman Kenneth Koltun-Fromm AJS Perspectives reserves the right to Syracuse University Haverford College reject advertisements or other items not consonant with the goals and purposes Ophir Münz-Manor of the organization. Copy may be con- Open University of Israel Past President densed or rejected because of length Christine Hayes or style. AJS Perspectives disclaims Devin Naar responsibility for statements made by University of Washington Yale University advertisers and contributors. Joshua Schreier AJS Staff Vassar College Warren Hoffman Christopher Silver Executive Director McGill University Michelle Katz Jacqueline Vayntrub Director of Membership and Yale University Conference Content Daniela R.P. Weiner Karin Kugel Stanford University AJS Perspectives Managing Editor; Melissa Weininger Website Manager Rice University Amy Ronek Yael Zerubavel Director of Marketing and Rutgers University Communications Heather Turk Managing Editor Director of Events and Operations 1 COVER ARTIST Karin Kugel CONTRIBUTION: Amy Weiss SIONA BENJAMIN Grants and Professional Detail from Finding Home #75 (Fereshteh) Graphic Designers Development Manager “Lilith,” 2005. 30 x 26 in. Gouache on wood Carrie Chatterson Studio panel. © 2005 Siona Benjamin. Courtesy of the artist. Amanda Morante Wolin 27 BACK COVER ARTIST CONTRIBUTION: ARCHIE RAND Cain and Abel, from The Nineteen Diaspora Paintings, 2002. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 64 in. © 2002 Archie Rand. Courtesy of the artist. 4 | AJS PERSPECTIVES | SPRING 2021 Distinguished Lectureship Program SMART, ENGAGING Speakers provide compelling and intellectually stimulating public lectures on virtually any SPEAKERS FOR YOUR Jewish topic: PUBLIC PROGRAMMING Jewish-Muslim Relations Virtual and live events available— Jews & Comics +300 for live events, we’ll cover up to Jewish Supreme Court Justices more! $750 in travel expenses! Holy Land Archaeology Schedule a speaker now: associationforjewishstudies.org/lectures Adventures in Jewish Studies Podcast Entertaining. Intellectual. Engaging. The official podcast series of the Catch up on the first three seasons now, Association for Jewish Studies takes including: listeners on exciting journeys that • Rethinking Black-Jewish Relations explore a wide range of topics • The Origins of the Jews featuring the expertise and scholarship • Why Most American Jews Are Democrats • Are Jews White? of AJS members. LISTEN NOW associationforjewishstudies.org/podcast AJS PERSPECTIVES | SPRING 2021 | 5 From the Editors If 2020 was the year of the pandemic, it was also American Jewish protest: participation in the labor the year of protest. In some cases, as with Israeli movement, movements for racial justice, marches on protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu, or with Washington, and action over Jewish ritual. Beyond the protests against the lockdowns in certain US states, United States, other essays in this issue tackle Jewish Covid-19 was a direct or precipitating factor for the political protest in Brazil; art, music, and sport as frustration and unrest. Other times, in city streets resistance in Argentina, Germany, and Greece; and global across America in the wake of the killing of George solidarity among MENA Jews. The authors, at times, Floyd by Minneapolis police, the issue was as old themselves take part in these stories, writing in first as America itself: racial injustice. People around the person about the aftermath of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life world protested the excesses of capitalism, the synagogue shooting and the protests in Hong Kong. death of democracy, and climate inaction. And Others direct their gaze farther back into history, casting then, just as 2020 gave way to 2021, the US Capitol new light on biblical and rabbinic modes of protest. was the site of what the participants themselves In our section on the profession, two essays form an might have felt was legitimate protest but what intriguing point and counterpoint, one recounting the most observers saw as just the opposite: namely, unpleasantness and frustration of being on the receiving unadulterated, antidemocratic insurrection. end of protest from close colleagues, and the other an In a Jewish Studies context, protest stretches back impassioned plea for more unvarnished commentary to the biblical prophets who fruitlessly railed within the academy. Two other essays explore unwelcome against social injustice, false piety, and God. And intrusions into academic spaces and the compulsion to while most public protest these days is against push against them; both explore cases that call for more groups or governments, rather than against the protest where there was little to be found. divine, and some protest deploys violence against property or people, other protest speaks loudly by For whatever reason, our call for papers for this issue doing nothing more than being visibly Jewish in yielded no submissions on pedagogy. We both have risky spaces. Protest can be meticulously premedi- personal experiences, however, of the way protest tated or completely unintentional. It can be a emerges from and shapes our teaching that we’ll share lifelong vocation or a flash of energy. A protester briefly here: may be driven by righteous anger, while those Mira Sucharov: In my Israeli-Palestinian relations courses, protested against can feel the sting of betrayal. protest has proved a fruitful topic to teach. But protest has In this issue of AJS Perspectives, we explore protest also manifested right in the classroom in uncomfortable from the Hasmoneans to Hong Kong, from books ways. A few years ago, I was taken by surprise as my to Black Lives Matter, from meat prices to the students pushed back against a particular type of framing meḥiẓah. A majority of the essays look at the that I had offered to assess the applicability of the term contours of Jewish protest, or protest within the “apartheid” to analyze Israel. Unprepared for the intensity Jewish tradition. They investigate forms of of the students’ reaction, and reacting to the charged 6 | AJS PERSPECTIVES | SPRING 2021 Mira Sucharov & Chaya Halberstam classroom atmosphere, I turned brittle where I I thought I had lost. My evaluation scores have should have been more agile. Much inward search- stayed exactly the same. ing later, I revised my teaching approach, and Mira adds: With a growing awareness of these developed a book to help myself and others tackle systemic problems, and after years of consultation, the most sensitive issues on the subject (Social my own