This panel brings together scholarship focused on the relationships between people and places, and the way places shape both individual and group identities. The first paper broadens discussions of Jewish indigenity by bringing the Textual Reasoning approach to Jewish thought into dialogue with particular strands of Native American thought about the nature and role of land, place, and the more-than-human relatives of human beings.
The second paper uses James Baldwin’s little-known letters from his trip to Israel to weave together reflections on Black American and Jewish experiences of political exclusion, taking scenes from his travels as points of departure for thinking about diaspora, homeland, and political liberation.
The third paper focuses on the way different 19th-century Europeans used the term “White Falasha” to reveal how religious identity was used as a tool of theological manipulation, challenging reductionist views of conversion and highlighting the intersection of race, authority, and religious persuasion.
This paper places the Textual Reasoning approach to Jewish thought into dialogue with particular strands of Native American thought about the nature and role of land, place, and the more-than-human relatives of human beings, including plants, animals, and the earth itself. Peter Ochs’ dialogues with teachers like Max Kadushin and David Weiss Halivni are shown to share logical patterns with Robert Warrior and Daniel Wildcat’s readings of John Joseph Mathews and Vine Deloria Jr. I argue that the latter demonstrate a “landed reasoning,” rooted in pragmatism in a similar way to Textual Reasoning. Dialogue between the two has the potential to break down unhelpful binaries in discourses about land, peoplehood, and sovereignty.
Drawing on a series of little-known letters James Baldwin wrote in 1961 during a visit to Israel, this paper argues that Baldwin’s time in Israel powerfully impacted his thinking about American racial politics and Black liberation. Baldwin’s letters weave together reflections on Black American and Jewish experiences of political exclusion, taking scenes from his travels as points of departure for thinking about diaspora, homeland, and political liberation. Attending to the ways Baldwin mediates his feelings about Black American identification with Africa through his experiences in Israel, this paper will show that Baldwin’s early rejection of Black separatism and thoroughgoing commitment to radical racial reconstruction in the US is both historically and conceptually tied to his assessment of Zionism.
This paper explores how Protestant missionary figure Henry Aaron Stern and French-Jewish Scholar Joseph Halevy both utilized their Jewish identities to leverage religious dominance amongst the Beta Israel community in 19th century Ethiopia. By analyzing both individuals’ use of the term “White Falasha” as a form of introduction and engagement with the larger Beta Israel community, I aim to show how their European Jewish identities were used as a form of theological manipulation in order to serve their respective religious agendas. Through a comparative analysis of their writings and by focusing on the term "White Falasha," the paper aims to reveal how religious identity was used as a tool of theological manipulation, challenging reductionist views of conversion and highlighting the intersection of race, authority, and religious persuasion.