Atalia Omer | University of Notre Dame (original) (raw)
Papers by Atalia Omer
Shofar, Dec 31, 2022
Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, ab... more Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, about Palestinians and sociopolitical realities in Palestine/Israel, where Zionist sovereignty defines the space in its entirety. This article traces sites of Jewish Israeli decolonial restorative justice potential and argues that some interventions that appear restorative, in effect, obscure and normalize historical injustices. Accordingly, a spectrum of Jewish critics posit Zionism as a form of Jewish "moral exile" or "moral transgression," and they seek Jewish authenticity to return "home" ethically. I argue that, to the degree that restorative justice practices are missing from ethical Jewish reflections on Zionism and Israelism, the sources of such Jewish critiques of Zionism remain diasporic. Focusing on the potentials of Jewish Israeli restorative justice, including those articulated by the feminist organization Zochrot and the petition of Jewish Israelis against Israeli apartheid propelled by the escalation of violence in May 2021, offers a pathway for unsettling and troubling the diasporic as the primary Jewish source of an ethical critique of Israelism as the idolatry of the Jewish State and as Zionism's imbrication in a settler colonial paradigm.
Palestine/Israel Review , 2024
This article examines a decolonial approach to teaching a course on Palestine/Israel involving ex... more This article examines a decolonial approach to teaching a course on Palestine/Israel involving experiential travel to the region. A decolonial syllabus studies absences, erasures, the multiple intersecting mechanisms and matrices of violence, and alternative futures as they inhabit subordinated pasts (histories) and the present in various activist spaces. We expand on other decolonial learning-in-context by underscoring the need for religious literacy. This is especially urgent because the land is a destination for apocalyptic, messianic, and birthright tourism designed to confirm and reinforce people’s redemptive scripts and fantasies about the land. The objective of the decolonial approach is not “metaphorical.” It is to dismantle the oppression of Palestinians, institute mechanisms for restorative justice, and draw ethical political maps. It is also hermeneutical, denoting the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness. This article centers on those dimensions of our work that engage with pathways for decolonial Jewish political ethics in Palestine.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2012
NOT EVERYTHING THAT Russell McCutcheon wrote about my article is inaccurate or simply false, but ... more NOT EVERYTHING THAT Russell McCutcheon wrote about my article is inaccurate or simply false, but much of it is. Bolstered by his misreading of broad swaths of the article, Professor McCutcheon has done little more than insist, "No, this is not what I meant at all!" Alas, as Michel Foucault (and so many others) has pointed out, an author is typically the last to dictate the meaning of his or her words. Despite what McCutcheon may think, however, my JAAR article (2011) was neither about carrying forward his tradition nor his authorial intent. Professor McCutcheon's caricature of my argument begins with the suggestion that I fail to recognize his positing of the critic and the caretaker as mutually exclusive. Yet I offer an account of this bifurcation, highlighting its (limited) deconstructive utility as well as its reductionist tendency. Indeed, my article exposes the effectiveness and limitations of critique concretely by offering a core sample of a project that I fully develop in my forthcoming book When Peace Is Not Enough: How the
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 41 no. 2, 2023, p. 154-185., 2023
Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, ab... more Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, about Palestinians and sociopolitical realities in Palestine/Israel, where Zionist sovereignty defines the space in its entirety. This article traces sites of Jewish Israeli decolonial restorative justice potential and argues that some interventions that appear restorative, in effect, obscure and normalize historical injustices. Accordingly, a spectrum of Jewish critics posit Zionism as a form of Jewish "moral exile" or "moral transgression," and they seek Jewish authenticity to return "home" ethically. I argue that, to the degree that restorative justice practices are missing from ethical Jewish reflections on Zionism and Israelism, the sources of such Jewish critiques of Zionism remain diasporic. Focusing on the potentials of Jewish Israeli restorative justice, including those articulated by the feminist organization Zochrot and the petition of Jewish Israelis against Israeli apartheid propelled by the escalation of violence in May 2021, offers a pathway for unsettling and troubling the diasporic as the primary Jewish source of an ethical critique of Israelism as the idolatry of the Jewish State and as Zionism's imbrication in a settler colonial paradigm.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2014
Probing the discourse of religious freedoms exposes the complex and multidimensional relations be... more Probing the discourse of religious freedoms exposes the complex and multidimensional relations between religion and social change. The critics of this discourse, especially as it is integrated into the articulation of American foreign policy, fittingly historicize and locate it in continuity with the broader discourses of orientalism, colonialism, and neoimperialism/neoliberalism as well as with the domestic antagonisms between religious and political institutional spheres. This kind of interrogation is born out of, or shares affinity with, what I term "the phenomenology of the secular," which is theoretically grounded, for the most part, in the work of anthropologist Talal Asad and his historicist and genealogical critique of "religion." I argue that the phenomenologists of the secular are implicated in power reductionism and thus risk an antirealist and reactionary position. This debilitates their capacity to theorize an alternative to the hegemonic discourse they critique.
Religions, 2021
Religion can be good and bad. For too long, the field of religion and peace has repeated this arg... more Religion can be good and bad. For too long, the field of religion and peace has repeated this argument, cogently articulated by R. Scott Appleby in his field shaping The Ambivalence of the Sacred. It is time to examine whether there are other arguments to be made. The field of religion and peace is multifaceted and has grown exponentially in recent decades, primarily by enhancing various sites of policy making to mobilize “good” religion more effectively for its utility while devising more complex mechanisms to contain “bad” religion. This is not a bad development in and of itself and many actors populating the religion and peace spaces of practice do a lot of good in the world. However, without also subjecting the field to critique of its basic operative categories of analysis, the field in its various nodes will remain just that: practice, without reflection to recall Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogical approach to transforming the world.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2011
This article argues that Russell McCutcheon's notion of the religion scholar as a critic is cruci... more This article argues that Russell McCutcheon's notion of the religion scholar as a critic is crucial for envisioning a distinct relevance to the academic study of religion in multidisciplinary conversations concerning questions of religion and conflict. However, McCutcheon's critical approach is insufficient for thinking about transforming conflicts and underlying structures of injustice. To actively conceptualize processes of conflict transformation, the religion scholar needs to assume the role of a caretaker and a critic and thus overcome McCutcheon's binary construal of these two approaches. The religion scholar as a critic and a caretaker may offer not only a second-order re-description of religion as a social construct but also a problem-oriented constructive engagement with histories, memories, and theological resources. The cultivation of a uniquely religious studies approach would depend on the ability of the religion scholar to become such a "critical caretaker." WILL A RELIGION SCHOLAR with training in religious studies be contacted to offer an analysis the next time religion captures the headlines? The academic study of religion has struggled to attain such public relevance. I suggest that a context-specific focus on conflict analysis and
Religions , 2021
Religion can be good and bad. For too long, the field of religion and peace has repeated this arg... more Religion can be good and bad. For too long, the field of religion and peace has repeated this argument, cogently articulated by R. Scott Appleby in his field-shaping The Ambivalence of the Sacred. It is time to examine whether there are other arguments to be made. The field of religion and peace is multifaceted and has grown exponentially in recent decades, primarily by enhancing various sites of policy making to mobilize “good” religion more effectively for its utility while devising more complex mechanisms to contain “bad” religion. This is not a bad development in and of itself and many actors populating the religion and peace spaces of practice do a lot of good in the world. However, without also subjecting the field to critique of its basic operative categories of analysis, the field in its various nodes will remain just that: practice, without reflection to recall Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogical approach to transforming the world.
This book tackles the assumptions behind common understandings of religious nationalism, explorin... more This book tackles the assumptions behind common understandings of religious nationalism, exploring the complex connections between religion, nationalism, conflict, and conflict transformation. * Speeches of political and religious leaders * Chronologies of conflicts in such places as Israel-Palestine, Sri Lanka, and the former Yugoslavia
In this article, I contend that exploring the divergences between "homeland" and "... more In this article, I contend that exploring the divergences between "homeland" and "diasporas" could facilitate the proliferation of loci of analysis and foci of peacebuilding efforts which are yet underexplored both in Peace Studies and specific scholarship on diasporas and conflict. I therefore suggest that imagining, identifying, cultivating, and mobilizing alternative conceptions of a national identity could (1) serve to enrich the scope of diplomacy (especially as it relates to the engagement of religious, cultural, and national communities as highlighted in the Task Force on the role of religion in world affairs), (2) expand the scope of peacebuilding, and (3) connect the study of immigration and multiculturalism to international relations.
Journal of Religious and Political Practice
Abstract The article interrogates the assumptions and arguments proposed by Elizabeth Shakman Hur... more Abstract The article interrogates the assumptions and arguments proposed by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd in Beyond Religious Freedom and her contribution in the present issue of the JRPP. Hurd destabilizes and historicizes the universal claims of the discourse of religious freedom, rendering it an instrument of domination and manipulation. The article critiques this approach for its power reductionism toward religion as a category. Engaging Hurd’s heuristic formulations of ‘governed’, ‘expert’ and ‘lived’ religion, as well as Hurd’s ‘two faces of faith’ framework, the article offers counter-arguments developed from the perspective of religious peacebuilding and broader constructive approaches to change processes and conflict transformation. It is argued that Hurd’s analysis of the instrumentalization of religion in ‘expert’ and ‘governed’ policy domains lacks a recognition of the hermeneutical contestation extant in religious traditions and motivations, and the internal pluralities of religion that this contestation involves. Hurd’s critique offers a prism through which to elucidate our examination of some discursive traps underpinning the language of the promotion of religious freedom. However, the practices, actors, and meanings understood in the praxis of interfaith peacebuilding stand as tangible examples of constructive religious agency that challenge the assumptions underpinning Hurd’s project as a whole.
Journal of Religious Ethics
Critical Sociology
Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializ... more Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializing and de-orientalizing sociopolitical theory and practice in Israel/Palestine. Hitmazrehut (literally ‘becoming of the East’) is understood as the transformation of relations between space, identity, and narrative through an intersectionality framework of social movement activism and intellectual counter-discourse. Exposing the intersections among sites of marginality as well as cultivating localized interpretations of identity (delinked from the orientalist positing of Israel in the ‘West’) would contribute to the possibility of the formation of transformative coalition building across national boundaries. Hitmazrehut is both an outcome and a necessary process for enabling geopolitical reframing. The article begins with the ahistorical and orientalist biases of sociological inquiry into the region. It continues with an analysis of efforts to localize and re-orient Jewish identity as w...
International Studies Perspectives, 2016
This collection of articles contributes to the growing body of research on how technology is affe... more This collection of articles contributes to the growing body of research on how technology is affecting peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, and research methodologies in the field. Assumptions about the use of technology for peace are interrogated, such as the purported deepening of inclusivity and widening of participation that technology provides to peacebuilders and communities. It frames the discussion from a peace-focused perspective, providing a response to the work done by others who have focused on the ways technology makes violence more likely. This supports a holistic discussion of the ways that technology can have an impact on contentious social and political processes. By expanding the base of knowledge about how technology can be used for peace and violence, we hope this collection increases the understanding of the circumstances under which technology amplifies peace.
Review of Middle East Studies, 2015
The Review of Politics, 2015
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2015
Shofar, Dec 31, 2022
Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, ab... more Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, about Palestinians and sociopolitical realities in Palestine/Israel, where Zionist sovereignty defines the space in its entirety. This article traces sites of Jewish Israeli decolonial restorative justice potential and argues that some interventions that appear restorative, in effect, obscure and normalize historical injustices. Accordingly, a spectrum of Jewish critics posit Zionism as a form of Jewish "moral exile" or "moral transgression," and they seek Jewish authenticity to return "home" ethically. I argue that, to the degree that restorative justice practices are missing from ethical Jewish reflections on Zionism and Israelism, the sources of such Jewish critiques of Zionism remain diasporic. Focusing on the potentials of Jewish Israeli restorative justice, including those articulated by the feminist organization Zochrot and the petition of Jewish Israelis against Israeli apartheid propelled by the escalation of violence in May 2021, offers a pathway for unsettling and troubling the diasporic as the primary Jewish source of an ethical critique of Israelism as the idolatry of the Jewish State and as Zionism's imbrication in a settler colonial paradigm.
Palestine/Israel Review , 2024
This article examines a decolonial approach to teaching a course on Palestine/Israel involving ex... more This article examines a decolonial approach to teaching a course on Palestine/Israel involving experiential travel to the region. A decolonial syllabus studies absences, erasures, the multiple intersecting mechanisms and matrices of violence, and alternative futures as they inhabit subordinated pasts (histories) and the present in various activist spaces. We expand on other decolonial learning-in-context by underscoring the need for religious literacy. This is especially urgent because the land is a destination for apocalyptic, messianic, and birthright tourism designed to confirm and reinforce people’s redemptive scripts and fantasies about the land. The objective of the decolonial approach is not “metaphorical.” It is to dismantle the oppression of Palestinians, institute mechanisms for restorative justice, and draw ethical political maps. It is also hermeneutical, denoting the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness. This article centers on those dimensions of our work that engage with pathways for decolonial Jewish political ethics in Palestine.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2012
NOT EVERYTHING THAT Russell McCutcheon wrote about my article is inaccurate or simply false, but ... more NOT EVERYTHING THAT Russell McCutcheon wrote about my article is inaccurate or simply false, but much of it is. Bolstered by his misreading of broad swaths of the article, Professor McCutcheon has done little more than insist, "No, this is not what I meant at all!" Alas, as Michel Foucault (and so many others) has pointed out, an author is typically the last to dictate the meaning of his or her words. Despite what McCutcheon may think, however, my JAAR article (2011) was neither about carrying forward his tradition nor his authorial intent. Professor McCutcheon's caricature of my argument begins with the suggestion that I fail to recognize his positing of the critic and the caretaker as mutually exclusive. Yet I offer an account of this bifurcation, highlighting its (limited) deconstructive utility as well as its reductionist tendency. Indeed, my article exposes the effectiveness and limitations of critique concretely by offering a core sample of a project that I fully develop in my forthcoming book When Peace Is Not Enough: How the
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 41 no. 2, 2023, p. 154-185., 2023
Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, ab... more Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, about Palestinians and sociopolitical realities in Palestine/Israel, where Zionist sovereignty defines the space in its entirety. This article traces sites of Jewish Israeli decolonial restorative justice potential and argues that some interventions that appear restorative, in effect, obscure and normalize historical injustices. Accordingly, a spectrum of Jewish critics posit Zionism as a form of Jewish "moral exile" or "moral transgression," and they seek Jewish authenticity to return "home" ethically. I argue that, to the degree that restorative justice practices are missing from ethical Jewish reflections on Zionism and Israelism, the sources of such Jewish critiques of Zionism remain diasporic. Focusing on the potentials of Jewish Israeli restorative justice, including those articulated by the feminist organization Zochrot and the petition of Jewish Israelis against Israeli apartheid propelled by the escalation of violence in May 2021, offers a pathway for unsettling and troubling the diasporic as the primary Jewish source of an ethical critique of Israelism as the idolatry of the Jewish State and as Zionism's imbrication in a settler colonial paradigm.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2014
Probing the discourse of religious freedoms exposes the complex and multidimensional relations be... more Probing the discourse of religious freedoms exposes the complex and multidimensional relations between religion and social change. The critics of this discourse, especially as it is integrated into the articulation of American foreign policy, fittingly historicize and locate it in continuity with the broader discourses of orientalism, colonialism, and neoimperialism/neoliberalism as well as with the domestic antagonisms between religious and political institutional spheres. This kind of interrogation is born out of, or shares affinity with, what I term "the phenomenology of the secular," which is theoretically grounded, for the most part, in the work of anthropologist Talal Asad and his historicist and genealogical critique of "religion." I argue that the phenomenologists of the secular are implicated in power reductionism and thus risk an antirealist and reactionary position. This debilitates their capacity to theorize an alternative to the hegemonic discourse they critique.
Religions, 2021
Religion can be good and bad. For too long, the field of religion and peace has repeated this arg... more Religion can be good and bad. For too long, the field of religion and peace has repeated this argument, cogently articulated by R. Scott Appleby in his field shaping The Ambivalence of the Sacred. It is time to examine whether there are other arguments to be made. The field of religion and peace is multifaceted and has grown exponentially in recent decades, primarily by enhancing various sites of policy making to mobilize “good” religion more effectively for its utility while devising more complex mechanisms to contain “bad” religion. This is not a bad development in and of itself and many actors populating the religion and peace spaces of practice do a lot of good in the world. However, without also subjecting the field to critique of its basic operative categories of analysis, the field in its various nodes will remain just that: practice, without reflection to recall Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogical approach to transforming the world.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2011
This article argues that Russell McCutcheon's notion of the religion scholar as a critic is cruci... more This article argues that Russell McCutcheon's notion of the religion scholar as a critic is crucial for envisioning a distinct relevance to the academic study of religion in multidisciplinary conversations concerning questions of religion and conflict. However, McCutcheon's critical approach is insufficient for thinking about transforming conflicts and underlying structures of injustice. To actively conceptualize processes of conflict transformation, the religion scholar needs to assume the role of a caretaker and a critic and thus overcome McCutcheon's binary construal of these two approaches. The religion scholar as a critic and a caretaker may offer not only a second-order re-description of religion as a social construct but also a problem-oriented constructive engagement with histories, memories, and theological resources. The cultivation of a uniquely religious studies approach would depend on the ability of the religion scholar to become such a "critical caretaker." WILL A RELIGION SCHOLAR with training in religious studies be contacted to offer an analysis the next time religion captures the headlines? The academic study of religion has struggled to attain such public relevance. I suggest that a context-specific focus on conflict analysis and
Religions , 2021
Religion can be good and bad. For too long, the field of religion and peace has repeated this arg... more Religion can be good and bad. For too long, the field of religion and peace has repeated this argument, cogently articulated by R. Scott Appleby in his field-shaping The Ambivalence of the Sacred. It is time to examine whether there are other arguments to be made. The field of religion and peace is multifaceted and has grown exponentially in recent decades, primarily by enhancing various sites of policy making to mobilize “good” religion more effectively for its utility while devising more complex mechanisms to contain “bad” religion. This is not a bad development in and of itself and many actors populating the religion and peace spaces of practice do a lot of good in the world. However, without also subjecting the field to critique of its basic operative categories of analysis, the field in its various nodes will remain just that: practice, without reflection to recall Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogical approach to transforming the world.
This book tackles the assumptions behind common understandings of religious nationalism, explorin... more This book tackles the assumptions behind common understandings of religious nationalism, exploring the complex connections between religion, nationalism, conflict, and conflict transformation. * Speeches of political and religious leaders * Chronologies of conflicts in such places as Israel-Palestine, Sri Lanka, and the former Yugoslavia
In this article, I contend that exploring the divergences between "homeland" and "... more In this article, I contend that exploring the divergences between "homeland" and "diasporas" could facilitate the proliferation of loci of analysis and foci of peacebuilding efforts which are yet underexplored both in Peace Studies and specific scholarship on diasporas and conflict. I therefore suggest that imagining, identifying, cultivating, and mobilizing alternative conceptions of a national identity could (1) serve to enrich the scope of diplomacy (especially as it relates to the engagement of religious, cultural, and national communities as highlighted in the Task Force on the role of religion in world affairs), (2) expand the scope of peacebuilding, and (3) connect the study of immigration and multiculturalism to international relations.
Journal of Religious and Political Practice
Abstract The article interrogates the assumptions and arguments proposed by Elizabeth Shakman Hur... more Abstract The article interrogates the assumptions and arguments proposed by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd in Beyond Religious Freedom and her contribution in the present issue of the JRPP. Hurd destabilizes and historicizes the universal claims of the discourse of religious freedom, rendering it an instrument of domination and manipulation. The article critiques this approach for its power reductionism toward religion as a category. Engaging Hurd’s heuristic formulations of ‘governed’, ‘expert’ and ‘lived’ religion, as well as Hurd’s ‘two faces of faith’ framework, the article offers counter-arguments developed from the perspective of religious peacebuilding and broader constructive approaches to change processes and conflict transformation. It is argued that Hurd’s analysis of the instrumentalization of religion in ‘expert’ and ‘governed’ policy domains lacks a recognition of the hermeneutical contestation extant in religious traditions and motivations, and the internal pluralities of religion that this contestation involves. Hurd’s critique offers a prism through which to elucidate our examination of some discursive traps underpinning the language of the promotion of religious freedom. However, the practices, actors, and meanings understood in the praxis of interfaith peacebuilding stand as tangible examples of constructive religious agency that challenge the assumptions underpinning Hurd’s project as a whole.
Journal of Religious Ethics
Critical Sociology
Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializ... more Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializing and de-orientalizing sociopolitical theory and practice in Israel/Palestine. Hitmazrehut (literally ‘becoming of the East’) is understood as the transformation of relations between space, identity, and narrative through an intersectionality framework of social movement activism and intellectual counter-discourse. Exposing the intersections among sites of marginality as well as cultivating localized interpretations of identity (delinked from the orientalist positing of Israel in the ‘West’) would contribute to the possibility of the formation of transformative coalition building across national boundaries. Hitmazrehut is both an outcome and a necessary process for enabling geopolitical reframing. The article begins with the ahistorical and orientalist biases of sociological inquiry into the region. It continues with an analysis of efforts to localize and re-orient Jewish identity as w...
International Studies Perspectives, 2016
This collection of articles contributes to the growing body of research on how technology is affe... more This collection of articles contributes to the growing body of research on how technology is affecting peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, and research methodologies in the field. Assumptions about the use of technology for peace are interrogated, such as the purported deepening of inclusivity and widening of participation that technology provides to peacebuilders and communities. It frames the discussion from a peace-focused perspective, providing a response to the work done by others who have focused on the ways technology makes violence more likely. This supports a holistic discussion of the ways that technology can have an impact on contentious social and political processes. By expanding the base of knowledge about how technology can be used for peace and violence, we hope this collection increases the understanding of the circumstances under which technology amplifies peace.
Review of Middle East Studies, 2015
The Review of Politics, 2015
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2015