This session, planned in cooperation with the Religion and Social Conflicts Unit, will look at various responses to violence as interpreted by Jewish proponents of non-violence, Christian Zionists in South Korea, and Christian and Qur’anic theologians
Jewish thought has long been animated by two symbolic poles: the book and the sword, representing the ethical traditions that sustain Jewish life on one hand and military power on the other. This paper examines the tensions between these two poles in the contemporary moment, when Jewish identity is often conflated with Zionism and Israeli state violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper analyzes three contemporary expressions of Jewish nonviolence: (1) Israeli conscientious objectors; (2) “safety through solidarity” initiatives in American Jewish communities seeking alternatives to armed security; and (3) Jewish activists engaged in protective presence and co-resistance in the West Bank. Framed through the dual legacy of the Warsaw Ghetto represented by the Ghetto uprising and the Oneg Shabbos archives, the paper argues that Jewish nonviolence is both a necessary strategy and an urgent ethical response to the political crises of our time rooted in Jewish traditions.
In May 2025, the Korea-Israel Bible Institute, one of the oldest Christian Zionist groups in South Korea, inaugurated the Holocaust Museum in Paju, a border city next to North Korea. The city is marked by Korea’s collective trauma from Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and the division of North and South Korea. This paper investigates the theo-political objectives of South Korea's Holocaust Museum—the first such museum opened in Asia outside Israel: to commemorate Jewish suffering as exemplified by the Nazi genocide of six million Jews; to combat antisemitism globally; and to honor the Jewish sacrifices made for South Koreans during the Korean War. This analysis shows how the Holocaust Museum of Korea serves to localize Christian Zionism and disseminate its theo-political visions for the future, reflecting a complex interplay of religious and political narratives with historical remembrance.
Taking its cue from Edward Said’s essay, “Permission to Narrate,” this paper seeks to understand how the power of narrative, and the power to narrate, have impacted Palestinians in Gaza. It situates the violence in Gaza within an international security paradigm, demonstrating how the construction of the “terrorist” as an enemy-Other enables discursive and narrative strategies that reinforce binaries and serve as moral cover for political violence. Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac’s 2023 sermon “Christ in the Rubble” and the critical responses it elicited provide a valuable case study for deconstructing the innocent versus guilty binary by examining Jesus the (innocent) Christ child and Jesus the (guilty) insurrectionist. Read alongside the work of James H. Cone and Richard A. Horsley, I argue that decolonial and liberation theologies offer resources to deconstruct and resist these authoritarian doctrines of international security.
This paper highlights the intersection between Israeli forces’ sexual torture of Palestinian men and queer politics of sexuality. While violence against Palestinian women is frequently reported in the Gaza Genocide, a hallmark of this genocide is an inversion of the womanist framework of sexual shame: rights agencies have cited that Palestinian men were overwhelmingly subjected to sexual abuse through “specific persecutory acts” by Israeli forces, including forced undressing, battery on genitals, sexualized religious slurs, and rape during detention. The use of sexuality as torture modality by empire, aimed at emasculation through flouting of religious values and personal conscience of Muslim victims has precedence in Iraq, Syria, and former Yugoslavia. Feminist and de-colonial readings of wartime sexual torture against Muslim men speak of it as a physical culmination of Orientalist sex tropes of peacetime: Muslim men as homophobic, and thus immune to imperial tenets of emancipatory sexuality. This paper highlights the fluctuating moral emphasis of queer politics by Israeli forces – the dangerous and repressive deployment of queer acts against Palestinian men – and the overall problematization of the savage-civilized binary as thrown into relief by such a discourse.