Perspective
Places of Refuge from Hate
The Friends (Quaker) Meeting House in New Bedford, MA, photographed by Jean Schnell as part of her project, “Framing the Light: Quaker Meetinghouses in Space and Spirit.” She explains, “As a Quaker, Light is a metaphor for the Divine. . . . As I made these photographs, I reflected upon my own spirituality and also upon the universal need for sanctuary.” © Jean Schnell
By Wendy McDowell
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”—George Orwell1
Over the past year, I’ve read more than 100 articles about antisemitism, Islamophobia, racist, anti-immigrant, and homophobic bias, white supremacist ideologies, and how all of this relates to incidents of violence (also known as “hate crimes”). I embarked on this self-education project after growing increasingly alarmed by the uptick in hate crimes in the United States since 2014, including a steady rise in antisemitic incidents. It worried me that more people didn’t seem worried about this reality, since, in my view, it is a crisis and signals a decidedly unhealthy society.3
Cover illustration by Mehdi Saeedi. Cover design by Point Five Design.
According to a CNN article that provides a good summary of the trends, “between 2021-2022, the number of antisemitic hate crimes increased by 36% to a total of 1,124–the highest ever recorded by the FBI.”3 We might think that anti-Muslim sentiment was at its worst in the years after 9/11, but “FBI records show a rise in anti-Muslim incidents starting in 2015, with more bias-driven assaults against Muslims in 2016 than in 2001.” There has also been an increase in anti-trans violence, when already the groups most likely to experience the kind of hate crime that involves injurious physical violence were gay men and transgender people.
I discovered more than statistics and trends in my reading. I learned that social media algorithms actually favor derogatory, hateful speech.4 I read a study whose findings suggest that harming “out-group” members is linked to elevated activity in the brain’s reward circuitry.5 Other studies show that our political identities have become more closely grafted onto these “in-group” and “out-group” identities, and that “support for Trump [in particular] is characterized more by out-group hatred than by in-group affection.”6
It bears repeating that Jews are targeted in disproportionate numbers to their share in the U.S. population. Also, if there’s one thing I’ve come to understand after my many months of reading, it’s that “hate” and bigotry are blunt instruments. They may rise in response to national or world events or to the rhetoric of political leaders,7 but perpetrators of hate crimes usually have more than one group of scapegoats in their crosshairs. Moreover, the evidence supports that, in the United States, white supremacy has long been (and continues to be) the primary driver of both antisemitism and anti-black racism, as well as of other biases.8 Knowing this, it is not surprising that both antisemitism and Islamophobia have surged in the U.S. during the now months-long war in Gaza.
What can we do about these disturbing trends? Of course we must condemn any violence based on religion, race, ethnicity, or sexuality, but we can also double down on sharing the important work HDS faculty, students, and alums are doing. Scholars pay careful attention to language and how it intersects with power, a skill that is dearly needed in a “post-truth” climate.
Scholars pay careful attention to language and how it intersects with power, a skill that is dearly needed in a “post-truth” climate.
Joshua Krug’s “How to Teach about Antisemitism” makes a clear case for the importance of teaching about antisemitism to all groups at all times, and he calls for interreligious dialogue, “even when we disagree and our hearts are broken (sometimes by one another).” The Robert Israel and Melinda Mandelbaum Stein dialogue essays and Kevin Madigan’s Q&A with author Courtney Sender are shining examples of the kind of teaching and learning Krug exhorts us to do (and, it should be noted, three of these four pieces were submitted to the Bulletin before October 7, 2023).
Stein and Sender look at the Holocaust in new and illuminating ways. Sender explains that saying the Holocaust was about “hate” is a simplification: “It was about a long and multigenerational history of the conspiracy theory that is antisemitism, which grew and spread over millennia of Christianity.” Israel shows us how Jewish institutions are trying to keep their congregants safe while continuing to make a difference in their communities and focusing on “fixing our broken world.”
Other authors deepen our understanding of classic texts and contemporary rhetoric. Munjed M. Murad draws our attention to how Rumi “problematizes axioms of ordinary human perception of both love and the nonhuman other.” Zahra Moballegh uncovers narrative strategies unique to Qur’anic stories that point to “inclusive feminine theologies.” Charles M. Stang identifies a “reductionism” in the humanities that “shoehorns” diverse people and their experiences in a way that strikes him “as an act of contemporary colonialism.” And Nicholas E. Low’s study of the rhetoric used in two reactionary movements (the e/acc movement and BAPism) helps him realize they are “respond[ing] to a deeper sense of alienation: both speak to a form of nihilism that predates contemporary political questions by centuries.”
This issue also emphasizes how important places of refuge are for nurturing spiritual life. Jordan L. Borgman gives us beautiful descriptions of monastic “para-homes” (the beyuls of the Himalaya sought by Buddhist monks and the Irish Christian monastery on Skellig Michael). Authors provide vivid personal testimonies about where they’ve found refuge (Moballegh’s basement with her mother and sister, Mark Jordan’s escape into science fiction, and our Repose image photographer’s discovery of “the light and the Light” in Quaker meetinghouses).
Through poetic language, we can create a place of refuge for ourselves and for others. Amit Majmudar’s “Hymn to Skanda,” does exactly this and couldn’t be more timely. Sender’s writing, Moballegh’s retellings, and Jordan’s selecting of texts that “show the power of language to record and to elicit queer lives” do as well. In Jordan’s words, “After the failure of so many Christendoms, the only safe way to write theology is sideways—tentatively, surreptitiously, through unexpected language.”
We are all responsible for our collective culture and for the language we use. We are all students and we are all teachers. In what is a fearful time for so many people, we can share, create, and become safe places of refuge for one another.
Notes:
- From Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” originally published in the April 1946 issue of the journal Horizon (vol. 13, no. 76), 262.
- This wasn’t merely an academic exercise. Transgender and LGBTQ family members have been telling me they simply won’t travel to certain states anymore. Jewish friends have been sharing that they feel more scared than they’ve ever felt before in this country. A Muslim friend who wears hijab says she routinely has to endure insults hurled at her by strangers. My son’s friend, whose family have been U.S. citizens for three generations now, told us that they don’t let their Chinese-speaking grandfather go out alone in the community anymore; their family keeps a schedule so a younger, stronger person is always with him.
- Tori Morales Pinales, “How reports of hate crimes in the US were already at record highs, in 4 charts,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023. As the article notes, these numbers are always an undercount. Not all agencies report their data to the FBI, and less than half of hate crimes are reported to police.
- Multiple studies and articles make this point. Two that effectively note why this is alarming are an August 17, 2023 USA Today article by Jessica Guynn and Will Carless, and a June 24, 2021 Psychology Today blog post by Steve Rathje.
- A summary of the study led by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University can be found at news.vcu.edu and the full article is available at osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/fj5ht.
- See Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski, John V. Kane, “Trump Support Is Not Normal Partisanship,” newamerica.org, an essay in the December 2019 report “Political Parties: What Are They Good For?”
- In multiple sources, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) held President Trump and his anti-Muslim rhetoric responsible for the new spike in Islamophobia.
- This is why those who attempt to blame diversity and inclusion initiatives for increasing antisemitism should be seen as engaging in Orwellian doublespeak. Any efforts committed to understanding and addressing an institution’s history of racism will inevitably uncover its history of antisemitism, and vice versa. See the PBS NewsHour weekend discussion, “Exploring hate: How antisemitism fuels white nationalism,” October 24, 2021.
Wendy McDowell is editor in chief of the Bulletin.
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