Call for Applications: Jewish Studies Institute for Graduate Students

Lauren Turek

I recently came across this call for applications for an exciting looking summer school intended for graduate students working on Jewish history and cultural studies, broadly defined:

Out of This World
The Supernatural in Jewish History and Culture
Advanced Summer School for Graduate Students in Jewish Studies

June 24–28, 2018 in Philadelphia

Presented by the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in partnership with the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“Out of This World” is devoted to the magical, the miraculous, and the monstrous in Jewish history and culture. Its subjects include humans gifted with supernatural powers—miracle-workers, magicians, and messianic saviors—as well as superhuman beings like ghosts, golems, and God. The week will range across disciplines, including history, anthropology, literary study, and the study of religion, with the goal of modeling various ways to make sense of supernatural beings and otherworldly interactions as a part of Jewish experience, culture, or thought. The week will have a this-worldly focus as well, featuring sessions devoted to professional development and scholarly network building, and other group activities and excursions.

The Summer School brings graduate students together in a small group for an immersive experience in interdisciplinary Jewish studies, exposing them to innovative scholarship, broadening their intellectual perspectives, and allowing them to engage with internationally recognized scholars as well as their peers from around the world. Graduate students at any institution worldwide, in any subfield of Jewish studies, past or present, are eligible to apply. Admission is selective and preference will be given to students at an advanced stage of their graduate careers, and to earlier-stage students whose research interests align closely with the stated theme. The cost of tuition, lodging, excursions, and most meals is covered by the program. Fellowships to cover transportation are available for students who do not have applicable funding from their home institutions. See our FAQ for additional details.

Directors
Steven Weitzman, Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies & Elisheva Baumgarten, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Faculty Include
Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University
Maya Barzilai, University of Michigan
Julia Watts Belser, Georgetown University
Yoram Bilu, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Gideon Bohak, Tel Aviv University
Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University
Shai Held, Mechon Hadar
Martin Lund, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Justin McDaniel, University of Pennsylvania
Robert Orsi, Northwestern University
Annette Yoshiko Reed, New York University
David Shyovitz, Northwestern University
Elsie Stern, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
Hamza Zafer, University of Washington
Application Deadline: March 1, 2018

To apply, please visit: katzcenter.fluidreview.com

For additional information, please contact Anne Albert at aoalbert@sas.upenn.edu.

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5 Questions with Ronit Stahl

Lauren Turek

Ronit Y. Stahl, a historian of modern American religion, law, and politics, is currently a fellow in the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis from 2014-2016.

The following is a brief conversation we had about her excellent new book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America, which came out this month on Harvard University Press.




Q1. Can you tell our readers a little bit about your book? What is your core argument?

Enlisting Faith tells the story of how the federal government, through the military chaplaincy, struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism over the twentieth century. It traces how the United States shifted from a chaplaincy that consisted of only mainline (white and African American) Protestants and Catholics to one that counts Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Christian Scientists, Buddhists, Seventh-day Adventists, Hindus, and evangelicals and, as of spring 2017, recognizes over 200 different faith groups and denominations among military personnel. This evolution was uneven—neither accidental nor fully envisioned. Blurred religious and racial categories confounded a military that, for decades, remained invested in racial segregation and race has always complicated government oversight of religion. Nevertheless, changes in the chaplaincy emerged through a combination of incremental top-down decisions made by government officials and grassroots agitation from civilians.

My core argument is that despite the constitutional separation of church and state, the government managed religion in the military and religion has played a significant role in state administration. As a result, it’s important to think about religion-state influence as bidirectional: the state has shaped religion as much as religion has shaped the state.

Enlisting Faith also makes two related arguments about periodization and the institution of the military. First, I argue that the idea of “tri-faith America” emerged in World War I, not World War II or the Cold War, and the military initially cultivated religious pluralism for pragmatic, rather than ideological, reasons. By World War II, when consensus around “tri-faith America” achieved public prominence, it had already begun fracturing. More religious groups wanted recognition, some who fell outside the Protestant-Catholic-Jewish fold, like Buddhists, and some who rejected the pluralist ethos, like Protestant fundamentalists. This divide has grown, and it continues to challenge the military and American society writ large.


Second, and relatedly, the military became a major arena of inter- and intra-religious politics over the twentieth century because it is as much a social and cultural institution as it is a martial one. The military can be conservative and hierarchical and, simultaneously, progressive and innovative. In recognizing the value of diversity and enabling civil rights, it often led the way (imperfectly, to be sure) and hastened change. I show how the military has served as a laboratory for state policy and a bellwether of change in American society—and this holds for race, gender, and sexuality as much as it does for religion.

Q2. Why did you decide to research and write this book about the military chaplaincy?

I’ve long been interested in the relationship between religion and the state, and I wanted to examine a space of extended interaction, rather than brief flashpoints of conflict. Similarly, I’m fascinated by the intersection of pragmatism and ideology in state administration and wanted to think about politics outside of elections and legislatures. Early on, I briefly considered a comparative study of chaplains in different spaces – the military, prisons, hospitals, and universities. However, I quickly realized that the military is such a rich and complex institution to explore (complete with incredible archival records) that it was better to focus. Moreover, it’s a space in which federal oversight of religion has been constant. Despite occasional efforts to civilianize the chaplaincy, the government continues to commission and pay clergy to serve as chaplains rather than contract out religious services.

Q3. How does your book fit in to other recent scholarship on religion and politics, religion and foreign relations, and religion and twentieth-century U.S. history?

There’s been a wonderful outpouring of scholarship on religion of late, and Enlisting Faith enters a number of these discussions in a number of ways. A lot of scholarship in religion and politics tends toward either religion and conservatism or religion and liberalism. Enlisting Faith braids these strands together by looking at a space where values collide and what counts as “conservative” and what counts as “liberal” is sometimes less obvious. It’s also part of the rich conversations—among scholars and in the public sphere—about religious freedom and religious liberty in the United States. Whereas Tisa Wenger’s new book, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal, unravels ideas and rhetoric, Enlisting Faith takes a social history approach and examines the practice(s) of religious freedom, tracking successes and failures on the ground over the twentieth century.

In terms of religion and foreign policy, my book makes two central contributions. First, it decenters the Cold War as the singular moment in which the American state discovers religion as an instrument of foreign policy. Like Anna Su’s Exporting Religious Freedom, it argues for a broader twentieth-century history of the engagement between American religion and global politics. Second, it documents how chaplains engage in soft diplomacy. In the aftermath of World War II, chaplains shift from working exclusively with American troops to serving Americans and participating in relief work and relationship-building abroad. In postwar Europe and Asia, chaplains acted as brokers, ethnographers, and translators between the military and foreign populations. These roles blended missionary work and State Department outreach efforts in pursuit of military objectives, so they’re conduits between military and civilian, public and private spheres.


Finally, Enlisting Faith makes an argument for taking religion seriously as part of twentieth-century American history and showing how integral religion has been to American politics and social change through a key institution of government and governance. We’ve come a long way since Jon Butler’s “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History” (2004) and Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey’s “Everywhere and Nowhere: Recent Trends in American Religious History and Historiography” (2010). Nevertheless, there’s still some foot dragging about the importance of religion outside of narratives about the rise of the right and Islamophobia, especially in histories of the American state.

Q4. I know you did extensive archival research for this project - what was your favorite archival discovery? What made this find so surprising or interesting?

It’s so hard to choose, so I’ll quickly note two:

1. The full set of transcripts for the World War II radio show, “Chaplain Jim.” Crafted through a public-private partnership, broadcast on NBC’s Blue Network, and intended for women on the homefront, the show brought the ecumenical and pluralist worldview of the chaplaincy into American domestic spaces during the war. What was particularly exciting was that the transcripts bear the red pencil corrections of Chief of Chaplains William Arnold, who worked assiduously to make Chaplain Jim “anonymous”—that is, not identifiably Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. The show is a soap opera filled with intentional messaging about religious pluralism as an American value, and thus offers a wonderfully rich artifact of popular culture in which religion and the state met. The show bridged military-civilian worlds and highlights how the chaplaincy’s gaze included women. The gender politics of the show are unsurprising for the time, but it’s a good reminder that women are not absent from all-male spaces.

2. A post-World War II petition requesting that the military add a “B” for Buddhist on dog tags. Religion was added to dog tags in World War II, but there were only three choices: P for Protestant, C for Catholic, or H for Hebrew. This meant that everyone who wasn’t Catholic or Jewish was labeled Protestant, which (very reasonably!) bothered many minority religions. After the war ended, Japanese-American Buddhists organized to lobby for change, and the signature sheets take up an entire unmarked box in the National Archives. What I mean by this is that that War Department used a decimal classification system to file and label records, and every other box in the Army chaplaincy record group bears a number indicating the topic of its content. Researchers can request, for example, all the records related to “marriage” or “photographs” or “meetings” by pulling boxes by decimal code. But this box had no decimal. This suggests that the chaplaincy had no idea how to label it. It also means the only way to find it is to pull every box in the record group. The petition is a really important document on its own: it gave me great material to think about the meaning of limited religious options for dog tags and how excluded Americans responded to the religious categories created by the state. It’s also a useful reminder that classification systems beget classification systems, and archives often replicate bureaucratic logic that needs to be analyzed.  

I could go on, but instead I’ll leave it to readers to discover tri-faith hymnals, records of courts-martial, and other fun sources in the book!

Q5. What do you plan to research for your next project?

I’m still thinking a lot about how religious freedom and religious pluralism operate in institutional spaces, but I’ve pivoted from the military to medicine. I’ve started a project researching the origins, creation, and impact of institutional and corporate conscience rights in health care. It’s a project that raises a lot of questions about what it means for an institution to be “non-sectarian,” how and when federal funds can flow to religious institutions, how religious freedom and discrimination intersect, and how individuals and institutions negotiate competing moral claims.  

Thank you so much for sharing these great details on your new book and future research, Ronit! I look forward to seeing further discussion unfold in the comments section and hope that everyone checks out Enlisting Faith!

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Reflections on SHAFR @ 50 Annual Meeting

Lauren Turek

This past weekend, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations celebrated its fiftieth anniversary (as well as the fortieth anniversary of the journal Diplomatic History) at its annual meeting in Arlington, VA. Just as I reported last year, the conference included a number of panels and roundtable discussions on the topic of religion in American history and foreign relations. There were, in fact, so many good panels on religion that I could not even attend all of them owing to my unfortunate inability to be in multiple places at once! As such, in addition to providing my own overview of the exciting work that scholars showcased at the SHAFR meeting this year, I have included some reflections from other attendees as well.

Most of the panels that I attended reflected in some way on missionaries and missionary work, though the listing of panels that I have included at the end of this post does make clear that there were many panels at the conference that examined religion and foreign relations beyond missionary work (and that there were papers on a diverse array of faith traditions, including Judaism and Islam).


The first religion-themed panel that I attended was a roundtable discussion about David Hollinger's forthcoming book Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, which is due out in October. Daniel Immerwahr organized the roundtable, with Hollinger offering an overview of the project, Melani McAlister, Madeline Hsu, and Andrew Preston providing commentary on the book, and David Engerman moderating. Hollinger outlined his argument that the mainline Protestant missionary project played a key role in "deprovincializing" America, fostering multiculturalism in American life and ecumenicism in American churches in the years between 1890 and the Vietnam war. He suggested that missionaries, the children of missionaries, and the organizations that supported missionary endeavors created what he termed "missionary cosmopolitanism," which contributed to a nascent embrace of other cultures and a strong critique of colonialism—a critique which spurred debates about the missionary project itself and a turn toward more humanitarian aid. Hollinger also revealed how the missionary project, and the cosmopolitanism it inspired among the groups he examined, led these missionaries to engage in debates over the role of the United States in the world in this period. He argued that the alliances some of these Protestants developed with colonized peoples through their missionary work pushed them to embrace an idealism about the potential for U.S. foreign policy to act as a force of morality in international relations, advancing humanitarian and anti-colonialist goals. Hollinger shared a number of wonderful, engaging anecdotes about missionaries such as Kenneth Landon, who ended up briefing Franklin D. Roosevelt and working for the OSS during World War II because he was one of the only experts on Thailand the State Department could find, and about the role some missionaries played in enforcing humane interrogations of POWs in the Pacific theater. Yet, as he concluded, the Vietnam war "shattered their idealism" about the "morality of American policy."


Melani McAlister (and indeed all of the panelists) praised Hollinger's book, and dove into a deeper discussion of the critique these particular Protestants leveled against the missionary project. She noted that Hollinger's argument about how the de-emphasis of proselytism and focus on humanitarian aid in the post-World War I era provided the "fuel" in the split between modernists and fundamentalists not only placed this split in a global context, but that it also contributed to decline in the mainline churches. Madeline Hsu discussed the power dynamics that existed between missionaries and those peoples that they evangelized, particularly in China, which Hollinger explores in the book. Andrew Preston closed out the commentary by describing how the Protestants Hollinger discusses challenged and complicated the typical image of "missionaries as the tip of the imperial spear," due to the critiques of imperialism they leveled. Preston also highlighted Hollinger's emphasis on the relationship between ecumenicism and internationalism. In his response, Hollinger picked up on the thread that McAlister and Preston raised about the significance of the ecumenical movement, arguing that even though he believes that much of the historiography on American Protestantism has sought to "diminish the gap between evangelicals or fundamentalists and ecumenicals," the divide grew extreme in the period he covers in his book and that divide emerged because of the missionary project itself. All in all, a very exciting glimpse at what promises to be a defining book.

Later, I attended a panel entitled "Faith and Foreign Affairs: Religion, Non-State Actors, and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century," which featured three exciting papers. Kelly Shannon shared research from a brand new project on U.S. relations with Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project is to be about a range of non-state actors, not just religious actors, but for this panel she gave a fascinating paper that explored the crucial role American Presbyterian missionaries played in developing official diplomatic relations between the two states. She also shared the wonderful story of Howard Baskerville, a Presbyterian missionary who resigned his post to join in the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1909, as part of a larger exploration of how missionaries shaped perceptions that the American public developed about Iranians and that Iranians developed about Americans. Jonathan Chilcote gave a paper on the efforts that American missionaries in Bombay engaged in to spur contributions to help those suffering from the Spanish influenza in India in 1918-1920. In this compelling piece, Chilcote suggested that these missionaries "saw the flu as an opportunity to remake India in America's image." Denise Jenison rounded out the panel with a presentation of research from her dissertation, giving a paper on Arab-American efforts to influence official U.S. policy towards Palestine in the aftermath of World War II. Her excellent paper delved into the creation of the Institute of Arab-American Affairs, which sought to win support for Palestine by convincing American Christians of the link between Christian missionary work and Arab nationalism, as well as by stressing the close relationship that Palestinian Christians and Muslims shared.

I was also really excited for the "Foreign Religions and Foreign Relations: U.S. Engagements with the World in the Nineteenth Century" panel, in part because SHAFR does not feature nearly enough panels on pre-twentieth century foreign relations. The three papers on this panel, which Tisa Wenger chaired, were exceptional. Kathryn Gin Lum started out with a paper on mapping and geographic imaginings of the "heathen world" as lands that were "wild and overgrown because of the sin/heathenism of their inhabitants." She linked this tendency to view the regions of the world populated by non-Christians as undifferentiated and wild to the development and propagation of racist ideologies, including scientific racism, and to the belief that Westerners should intervene in these regions in particular ways. Emily Conroy-Krutz also examined maps in her fascinating paper on what she termed "missionary intelligence," or the information that missionaries shared about the countries they evangelized. She noted that the maps and information that missionaries discussed at monthly prayer concerts "contributed to the creation of a mental map of the world" for nineteenth century Americans, acting as a "source of knowledge production" about the wider world. Kate Moran turned her focus to late nineteenth century Protestant travelogues to examined the changing depictions of the Pope and Catholic authority in Rome during a period of bewildering social change in the United States and upheaval in Italy. She compared the positive descriptions of Pope Pius IX to the negative depictions of earlier Popes and the virulent anti-Catholicism of antebellum travelogues, making a riveting argument that in recasting their views of the pope in light of the Risorgimento, "Catholic power became a way [for Protestants] to understand their own concerns about social order in [their] present." This panel spurred excellent discussion of the role of religion in society and of the interrelationship of race and religion.

Dan Hummel also attended SHAFR (he presented on a fantastic new open source online U.S. foreign relations primary source reader, Voices & Visions, that he helped develop), and sent in the following report on one of the panels he attended, "American Zionism and U.S.-Israel Relations from the 1950s to the 1990s.":

"This excellent panel explored numerous facets of the U.S. relationship to Israel and the development of Jewish Zionism. Salim Yaqub aptly summarized that the panelists overlapped precisely in their study of the changing relationship between American Jews and Israel. Doug Rossinow traced the origins of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC, originally American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs) to a crisis in Israel’s public image after the IDF’s massacre of civilians in the village of Qibya in October 1953. He examined how AIPAC’s founder, I.L. Kenan, sought to unite American Zionists and Jewish non-Zionists. Rossinow concluded that the staunch support of the Israel lobby since 1953 is unsurprising given its origins in defending Israel’s largely indefensible actions at Qibya. Sara Hirschorn spoke about American Jews who have become leaders in the settlement movement in the West Bank. As her recently-published book, City on a Hilltop (Harvard Press, 2017), expounds upon, American Jews make up a large and ideologically potent segment of the current settler movement and hold more diverse religious, political, and economic motivations than we normally assume. Seth Anziska recounted the history of the opening of dialogue between the U.S. and the PLO in December 1988 and emphasized the role of American Jewish actors breaking with organized American Jewish attitudes toward the PLO. While the Reagan administration opened dialogue with the PLO, its intent was not necessarily to pave the way for independent Palestinia statehood. The differing agendas of American Jews, Israelis, the U.S. government, and the PLO poin to the ways that the U.S. government and PLO were pursuing incommensurate policy goals, even as they began to talk to one another."

Clearly, the religious turn in U.S. foreign relations history over the past decade has led to a proliferation of exciting work in this area. SHAFR is an incredibly welcoming place for scholars of religion (scholars of a wide variety of historical subfields, actually, as U.S. foreign relations history intersects with many aspects of domestic and international history as well as a number of methodological approaches) and the presentations are always of the highest quality. I am very much looking forward to next year's annual meeting, which will be held in Philadelphia in June 2018. Happy 50th Anniversary to SHAFR and here is to the next 50!

Below, I have listed all of the panels and individual papers that reflected in some way on religion and American diplomatic history, broadly defined. A link to the full program is available here.


Panel 12: Roundtable: Wilson and World War I: New Perspectives

Paper of Particular Interest:
Beyond Belief: Religion in Woodrow Wilson's Internationalism

Cara Burnidge, University of Northern Iowa



Panel 18: Christian Mission, U.S. Power, and Domestic and Foreign Publics from
the Early Republic to the Cold War

Chair:
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University

Papers:
Protestant Mission, American Empire, and the Uses of History in Hawaii and the
Philippines, 1880-1920
Tom Smith, University of Cambridge

Foreign Missionaries and the “Spirit of Benevolence” in the Early Republic
Ashley Moreshead, University of Central Florida

Contending Christianities: U.S. Catholic and Protestant Missions in Central America
and Political Advocacy at Home during Henry Luce’s American Century, 1941-1960
Charles T. Strauss, Mount St. Mary’s University

Comment:
Emily Conroy-Krutz



Panel 37: Black Internationalism and Black Freedom Struggles

Paper of particular interest:
Bishop Ralph Dodge: Africa’s Unwanted Missionary
Luke Shief, University of Missouri



Panel 40: Roundtable: David Hollinger’s Protestants Abroad

Panelists:
Daniel Immerwahr, Northwestern University
Melani McAlister, George Washington University
Madeline Hsu, University of Texas, Austin
Andrew Preston, Clare College, University of Cambridge
David Engerman, Brandeis University
David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley



Panel 52: Faith and Foreign Affairs: Religion, Non-State Actors, and U.S. Foreign
Relations in the Early Twentieth Century

Chair:
Cara Burnidge, University of Northern Iowa

Papers:
“I am Persia’s”: Howard Baskerville, American Presbyterian Missionaries, and U.S.-
Iranian Relations during the First Iranian Revolution
Kelly Shannon, Florida Atlantic University

The Principles of Relief: American Missionaries and the Remaking of Indian Lives after
the Spanish Influenza Pandemic
Jonathan Chilcote, Florida College

Arab-American Efforts to Influence U.S. Policy on Palestine, 1944-1948
Denise Laszewski Jenison, Kent State University

Comment:
Cara Burnidge



Panel 73: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, a Retrospective:

Promoting Democracy in the Cold War

Paper of particular interest:
“A Human Rights Policy Means Trouble”: Ecumenical Activism, Civil Religion, and the
Forging of Ronald Reagan’s Human Rights Policy
Shannon Nix, University of Virginia



Panel 76: Beyond State Power: Non-State Actors, Aid, and Development Programs
and the U.S. in the World in the Twentieth Century

Paper of particular interest:
A “Little Cuba” in the Jungle: Priests in Ixcán, Guatemala, 1965-1976
Sarah Foss, Indiana University



Panel 80: Foreign Religions and Foreign Relations: U.S. Engagements with the
World in the Nineteenth Century

Chair:
Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Papers:
Heathen Geographies in the Nineteenth Century
Kathryn Gin Lum, Stanford University

Foreign Missions and Foreign Information in the Early Republic
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University

Reimagining Catholic Power in the Wake of the Risorgimento
Katherine Moran, St. Louis University

Comment:
Tisa Wenger



Panel 85: American Zionism and U.S.-Israel Relations from the 1950s to the
1990s

Chair:
Peter Hahn, Ohio State University

Papers:
The Origins of America’s Israel Lobby, 1951-1956
Doug Rossinow, University of Oslo

City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement since 1967
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, Oxford University

American Jews and Arafat: Citizen Diplomacy and the PLO Recognition of Israel
Seth Anziska, University College London

Comment:
Salim Yaqub, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panel 88: Missionaries, Technicians, and Tourists: Cold War Public and Cultural

Diplomacy in Action 

Paper of particular interest:

Mormons in the Lion City: Religious Cultural Exchanges, 1968-1990

Keshia Lai, Ohio State University

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