The Review: Rioting Jews; A Pornographic Poem; an Iranian Artist

On diversity, religion, and censorship. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. On Yom Kippur, in 1904 in London, say — or else in Montreal, in 1905, or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1900, or Warsaw, Poland, as late as 1927 — a group of young Jewish men gather at a tavern. It’s the holiest day of the year. They should be fasting and repenting. Instead they’re ordering vodka. They begin to get drunk. They call for bacon, proscribed at all times, and more vodka. They get drunker; they toast to reason; they roll cigarettes and mock the rabbis. And then it’s off to the Yom Kippur Ball. Such anticlerical revolts were a notorious feature of life across the Jewish world in the early part of the last century. Beginning earlier, in the 1880s in London, irreligious Jews, usually on the political left, would organize carnivalesque inversions of the solemnities of Yom Kippur. Violence from offended religious Jews would sometimes ensue. As a New York Times [headline]( put it in 1898, “Mob of Hebrews Again Attacks Diners … THE POLICE ARE KEPT BUSY … Crowd Could Not Stand the Sight of Their Co-Religionists Eating on the Day of Atonement.” To their thousands of participants, these ritualized performances of emancipation seemed necessary — freedom from the old strictures and the old power structures required desecrations of the old symbols. Giving offense was felt to be a requirement of freedom. As Eddy Portnoy [writes]( in Tablet, “Some people partook to spite a god they don’t believe in. Others to antagonize their parents. Still others to harass the religious establishment. In fact harassment may have been the biggest draw.” But try it on a college campus now and you might get in trouble. That’s one of the lessons of Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder’s latest [piece for The Review.]( Khalid and Snyder use a recent [controversy]( over anticlerical art at Macalester College (a series of drawings called “Blasphemy,” by the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand, depicted a woman in traditional Muslim dress in erotic poses; some Muslim students said they suffered “harm"; the administration temporarily closed the exhibition) to pose an essential question: “What to do when a campus controversy results in conflicting claims of harm”? After all, other students felt harmed not by Talepasand’s irreligious work but by the conservative reaction to it. As one Iranian student told The Mac Weekly, “It was really hurtful to see my people die” — in the ongoing protests over the compulsory hijab in Iran, set off when Mahsa Amini was beaten to death for not wearing a hijab — “and then see someone who’s like, ‘But why are they protesting in this way? Why is someone making this art?’ It was really frustrating and felt very invalidating.” The Macalester incident is especially interesting because, unlike the earlier [Hamline controversy]( over a medieval devotional depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in an art-history class, it does indeed involve an irreligious, even antireligious, intention (you don’t call your drawing “Blasphemy” if you’re not hoping to ruffle some religious feathers). The Hamline case was about the right of scholarship and teaching to proceed unimpeded by the strictures of religious orthodoxy, and so cuts to the very heart of the academic enterprise. The Macalester case is about the right to forms of cultural expression — here, in the service of a political protest against the government of Iran — that offend religious sensibilities by design. Like the freethinking Jews desecrating Yom Kippur a century ago, Talepasand’s offensiveness makes an argument: Political emancipation necessitates anticlerical offense. Such disputes have a long history. The Macalester administration’s deference to the wounded feelings of its religious students should be understood not just with respect to the newly sensitized campus and the impingements of what Khalid and Snyder call [“DEI Inc.,”]( but also to a problem that has occupied secular or secularizing states since the 19th century: Are insults to religion a form of dignitary harm? And if so, are the irreligious similarly protected? For most of the history of blasphemy prosecutions in the West, of course, “blasphemy” was not at all a question of how it made anyone feel. It was wrong per se — and it risked precipitating God’s wrath. That’s why they killed you for it. But by the time of the last execution for blasphemy in Britain (Thomas Aikenhead, in 1697), both elite and popular sentiment were turning against such punishments. Other parts of Europe took a little longer, and blasphemy remains a capital offense in some of the Muslim world. But in Britain at least, by the second decade of the 19th century, “the time had passed when the government claimed to prosecute because of the affront of blasphemy to God, religion, or Christianity,” as Leonard W. Levy puts it in Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, From Moses to Salman Rushdie (1993). (I have relied on Levy throughout.) What prosecutions did occur were justified by the public good — namely, maintaining peace and order by preventing blasphemers from stripping the poor of “the consolations of religion.” SPONSOR CONTENT | University of Birmingham [University of Birmingham Grows a Global Partnership]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. In both Britain and America, a decisive transformation over the course of the 19th century saw blasphemy become an offense not against God or the state but against the feelings of believers. In 1821, in New York, the state chancellor James Kent acknowledged that although Christianity was not the established religion of either the nation or New York, blasphemy prosecutions should be permitted when a blasphemer outraged the feelings of the public. In 1837, Delaware’s Chief Justice John M. Clayton defended laws against blasphemy on the grounds that the religious sentiments of the majority should not be needlessly wounded. An 1841 English Royal Commission convened for the purpose justified blasphemy laws this way: “The feelings of mankind upon a subject of great moment would be frequently outraged, if an unrestricted license were permitted to all men to speak and write and act as they pleased.” Freedom of religion was preserved, the commission thought, so long as manner rather than matter constituted the crime. You could reject the truths of Christianity all you wanted, but you could not do so insultingly. That sentiment summed up the thinking of many on both sides of the Atlantic. The theory had its weaknesses. After all, disputatious insult was essential to the history of Christianity itself, from Paul onward. And what about the feelings of nonbelievers, who were routinely exhorted to accept as truths, on pain even of eternal damnation, things that seemed absurd to them? Should they not also enjoy protections against shocked feelings? Moreover, one person’s scurrility might be another’s decorousness. The “manner” test was inherently subjective. That problem came to a head in Britain’s last blasphemy prosecution, the notorious “Gay News case” of 1977. The English poet James Kirkup, then living in the U.S. and teaching at Amherst College, published a homoerotic religious poem called “The Love That Dares to Speak its Name” in Gay News, a British journal. The poem is spoken in the voice of a Roman centurion who converts to Christianity by having sex with Christ’s dead body: “For the last time / I had my lips around the tip / of that great cock, the instrument / of our salvation.” The conservative social crusader Mary Whitehouse instigated a prosecution for blasphemy. Gay News lost the case. In 1979, an appellate judge upheld the conviction and proposed expanding blasphemy laws — which in Britain applied only to Christianity, and indeed only to the established Church of England — to other religious groups as well. “In an increasingly plural society such as that of modern Britain, it is necessary not only to respect the differing religious beliefs, feelings, and practices of all but to protect them from scrutiny, vilification, ridicule and contempt.” For the first time I am aware of, the language of diversity came into contact with legal thought about blasphemy. It did so at the expense of another kind of diversity, a fact which only the pro-religious bias and the entrenched homophobia of the judges could have blinded them to. The proposed expansion never happened; instead, blasphemy laws were repealed entirely in England and Wales, and, to a lesser extent, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, in 2008. The last blasphemy trial in the United States occurred in 1971, in Pittsburgh; the accused blasphemers won. a question of law, there is no longer any chance of blasphemy prosecutions here. But the Macalester situation suggests that, at the level of private institutional policies and norms, blasphemy prohibitions are perfectly plausible. At Macalester, as in the Gay News case, the juxtaposition of erotic imagery and religious symbols proved especially contentious. As in the [Salman Rushdie]( controversy, a multiculturalist paternalism will seem to some to justify proscribing religiously insulting speech. And as in all such conflicts, there will be those — the anarchist Jews of the Yom Kippur Balls; the Iranian Macalester student for whom the hijab is “bad and controlling and censoring"; the poet James Kirkup, who felt so wounded by his poem’s prosecution that he said he’d never return to England; the artist Taravat Talepasand — who will ask: Why do the feelings of the religious matter more than mine? Read Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder’s [take on the Macalester controversy](. For more on Yom Kippur Balls, read Eddy Portnoy’s [essay]( in Tablet and Rebecca E. Margolis’s [article]( in Canadian Jewish Studies. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [It’s Not Just Our Students — ChatGPT Is Coming for Faculty Writing]( By Ben Chrisinger [STORY IMAGE]( And there’s little agreement on the rules that should govern it. 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