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Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism ed. by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo
Angela Berliner
Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. Pp. 188. $35.00, paper.
The essayists in this book examine why marginalized groups with similar goals sometimes do not achieve solidarity and how their related struggles might be better served through understanding the things that appear to separate them. The book mostly achieves its stated purpose, but some of the authors' anti-Zionist bias in a discussion on failed solidarities between marginalized Israelis and Palestinians diminishes legitimate critique. [End Page 277]
In the first chapter, "Broken Solidarities," Perin Gürel explores a moment of failed solidarity with the case study of Turkish politician Merve Kavakçı, who refused to remove her headscarf in Parliament and was subsequently banned from taking her oath of office. She received transnational support, serving as a symbol of religious freedom and rights for Muslim women. In what could have been a moment of solidarity among Muslim women across state boundaries, Kavakçı rejected support from some Iranian women politicians because they represented what she viewed as a repressive regime.
Juliane Hammer's essay on the 2016 Women's March examines a moment of failed solidarity in which two chair members, Muslim women activists Linda Sarsour and Zahra Billoo, were ousted from their positions following an Antisemitism scandal. Hammer reflects on how this event incited a conversation on solidarity, social justice movements, and accountability. Atalia Omer and Ruth Carmi's chapter, "Transgressive Geography and Litmus Test Solidarity," argues that white supremacy and racism in Israel disallow solidarity between marginalized Jews and Palestinians. Through criticism of anti-Arab and Islamophobic Israelis and political parties, Jewish power, and Zionism, the authors seek to express how Black and Brown Jews fail to find solidarity with Palestinians.
In "To Confound White Christians," Brenna Moore seeks to reinvigorate the academic discussion on enchantment, disenchantment, and secularism through a case study on Claude McKay, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance whose involvement with a group of international Catholic creatives reflects the most successful moment of solidarity in the book. McKay and his cohorts sought to resist white supremacy, nationalism, and colonialism in part through the mystical aspects of Catholicism. McKay's story suggests an alternative and successful (albeit short-lived) approach to solidarity across national boundaries. The final chapter, "Seeing Solidarity," by Melani McAlister, discusses what can create solidarity while maintaining people's differences. The writer summarizes the thesis of the book and preceding chapters, and except for Moore's, says that the book reflects wishful thinking—an imagination exercise in what might be, instead of how things are.
Moore's chapter is a thoughtful example of how religion can create solidarity among people across national and ethnic lines. She reinvigorates religious ideas by offering an alternative perspective for scholars about how and who has made an impact. She never falls into the trap of deifying her subject. McKay's anti-Protestantism was problematic, but that does not mean we should dismiss what [End Page 278] worked about his movement. The troubling anti-Zionism expressed in Omer and Carmi's chapter plays into tropes of Jewish power and levels false accusations that Israel is an apartheid state and an example of settler colonialism. The authors unironically paint Israel as the Big Bad, while ignoring how regimes like Hamas (et al.), whose stated aim is to commit genocide against Jews and colonize their state, might also have something to do with broken solidarities.
For the most part, the aspirational solidarities expressed in this book reflect a vision of what could be, not what was or is. When differences become divisive, when self-righteousness diminishes self-reflection, and when an us-versus-them mentality wins out, solidarity becomes a pipe dream.
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