Ira Rifkin

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Berlin 1936. Beijing 2022. Must China's Uighurs play the role Jews did in Hitler Olympics?

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Berlin 1936. Beijing 2022. Must China's Uighurs play the role Jews did in Hitler Olympics?

It should be evident to all paying attention that the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will proceed as planned. Forget the meager protests against China’s cruel and immoral treatment of its own. The bad guys appear to be on the verge of another power-play victory.

Never mind the plight of China’s Uighur Muslims, underground Christian churches, Tibetan Buddhists and all the other groups the Beijing government labels a political threat. They’re of no lasting concern to the international elite who are quick to issue public condemnations, but oh so slow when it comes to follow up.

China’s political power — a byproduct of its enormous economic strength — is just too much to counter. And Beijing’s despotic leaders darn well know it.

This recent Associated Press article — “Beijing Olympics open in 4 months; human rights talk absent” — underscores the point. These opening graphs summarize the story quite well. They're also a reminder of the efficacy of traditional wire journalism’s inverted pyramid style. This piece of the story is long, but essential:

When the International Olympic Committee awarded Beijing the 2008 Summer Olympics, it promised the Games could improve human rights and civil liberties in China.

There is no such lofty talk this time with Beijing’s 2022 Winter Olympics — the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games — opening in just four months on Feb. 4.

Instead, there are some calls for governments to boycott the Games with 3,000 athletes, sponsors and broadcasters being lobbied by rights groups representing minorities across China.

IOC President Thomas Bach has repeatedly dodged questions about the propriety of holding the Games in China despite evidence of alleged genocide, vast surveillance, and crimes against humanity involving at least 1 million Uyghurs and other largely Muslim minorities. Tibet, a flashpoint in the run up to 2008, remains one still.

“The big difference between the two Beijing Games is that in 2008 Beijing tried to please the world,” Xu Guoqi, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, said in an email to The Associated Press. “In 2022, it does not really care about what the rest of the world thinks about it.”


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Push comes to shove on climate change. What more can clergy and religion reporters do?

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Push comes to shove on climate change. What more can clergy and religion reporters do?

Imagine, if you dare, being forcibly parachuted into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the world’s current hell-hole du jour.

Suddenly you’re forced to shelter and feed your family and you’re at a loss as to how to do this.

Now consider how the increasingly dramatic consequences of human-accelerated climate change might make your already dire situation worse.

A recent New York Times piece attempted to paint this picture.

It was not pretty. Here’s its opening graphs.

Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average. Spring rains have declined, most worryingly in some of the country’s most important farmland. Droughts are more frequent in vast swaths of the country, including a punishing dry spell now in the north and west, the second in three years.

Afghanistan embodies a new breed of international crisis, where the hazards of war collide with the hazards of climate change, creating a nightmarish feedback loop that punishes some of the world’s most vulnerable people and destroys their countries’ ability to cope.

And while it would be facile to attribute the conflict in Afghanistan to climate change, the effects of warming act as what military analysts call threat multipliers, amplifying conflicts over water, putting people out of work in a nation whose people largely live off agriculture, while the conflict itself consumes attention and resources.

Just like that, a regional hell hole turns into a global tragedy that should be generating global headlines. Powerful nations half-a-world away scramble to deal with the situation — or should I say scramble to look like they’re dealing with it.

Nor is Afghanistan the only failed state suffering from ongoing political violence complicated by climate change’s frightening uncertainties. “Of the world’s 25 nations most vulnerable to climate change, more than a dozen are affected by conflict or civil unrest, according to an index developed by the University of Notre Dame,” The Times article reported.


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For Albania's 'sworn virgins,' the West's culture war over gender roles is a non-starter

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For Albania's 'sworn virgins,' the West's culture war over gender roles is a non-starter

Few issues are more contentious in today’s culture wars than those involving gender and sexuality, which is why they attract a substantial amount of hot-button media attention. That includes religion-beat coverage, of course.

Those labeled traditionalists generally feel one way on the issue and so-called progressives tend to feel just the opposite way. It’s a divide that cuts across virtually every faith group, leading to schisms and a great deal of congregational and individual pain.

Nor, I should point out, is there across-the-board agreement on these issues in secular circles.

On occasion a story turns up that seems to turn the issue on its head, scrambling our easy use of the traditionalist and progressive labels. The New York Times recently ran one such piece out of Albania. I found it fascinating. The headline: “With More Freedom, Young Women in Albania Shun Tradition of ‘Sworn Virgins’.”

Reading between the lines, one unstated point I take from the story is that today’s growing acceptance, by some, of more fluid gender roles predates the post-modern influences that today’s cable TV news polemists, and others — including politicians — argue are causative.

On the other hand, I’d be remiss to not also note that this Albanian cultural quirk is an isolated and rapidly disappearing practice as the small Balkan nation’s rigid gender roles loosen in the age of globalization. So be careful not to draw too many broad generalizations from it.

In short, gender roles, like everything else in life worth serious attention, are complicated concepts and have been across human history. Here’s the story’s top, which is long, but essential:

LEPUSHE, Albania — As a teenager locked in a patriarchal and tradition-bound mountain village in the far north of Albania, Gjystina Grishaj made a drastic decision: She would live the rest of her life as a man.


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Step back from digital news blitz with deeply layered religion pieces about China and India

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Step back from digital news blitz with deeply layered religion pieces about China and India

The web has seduced us — and by us I mean me — into a life of 24-7 journalistic overload. For me, that can mean running out of bandwidth before getting to a story that actually deserves close attention. My limited brain can digest only so much before it shorts out.

Even a strung-out news junkie such as myself needs to log off every so often. Self-styled media literacy is as addictive as blissful ignorance.

Religion coverage has suffered greatly in this new journalistic reality. We’re provided an abundance of attention-grabbing stories about clergy hypocrisy, largely involving sexual, material or political excess. We get too few stories that connect the data points of everyday religious complexity that allows us to understand issues more deeply.

Here are two recent stories that struck me as worthy of the attention that’s too often withheld. One involves China, the other India. The only connection between them is that they both reveal deep truths about the religious reality of the societies they report on.

Let’s start with China, the more straightforward of the two stories.

It comes from Foreign Policy and ran under the intriguing, but incomplete, headline: “The Chinese Communist Party Is Scared of Christianity.”

Why incomplete? Because as the writer notes, it’s not just Christianity that scares China’s totalitarians rulers. It’s all unauthorized official thinking, religious or otherwise.

Did the headline mention Christianity alone because editors figured that would play best with their mostly western readership? Is this another example of algorithmic journalism?


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Many pieces in this news puzzle: New Israeli coalition reflects land's complex religiosity

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Many pieces in this news puzzle: New Israeli coalition reflects land's complex religiosity

What does it say about Israel that its founding prime minister was someone who today might be labeled a “BuJew,” a Jew strongly attracted to Buddhist philosophy? Or that it took Israel more than 70 years to produce a prime minister who identifies with Orthodox Judaism?

The BuJew prime minister was, of course, the otherwise secular David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s George Washington equivalent. Ben-Gurion actually took several days during a 1961 two-week state visit to Burma (today’s Myanmar) to attend a Buddhist retreat. I can’t imagine an Israeli prime minister doing that today given the Jewish state’s current political turmoil and Orthodoxy’s influence.

The first Orthodox prime minister is set to be Naftali Bennett, who as of this writing is scheduled to command the top spot in Israel’s nascent anti-Netanyahu governing coalition, itself tentatively set to formally assume office within days.

Again, what does all of this say? A lot, I’d argue, about Israel’s religious complexity and the degree to which religion and politics are tightly intertwined, perhaps inseparably so, in Israel (and the Middle East in general, but that’s a larger topic for another day).

I’d also argue it underscores the importance for journalists opining on Israel to be well versed on its religious politics — from its varied and often antagonistic Jewish factions, to its distinctive Arab Muslim, Christian and Druse communities — if they are to adequately explain the thinking that goes into Israeli decision making.

Consider the following. Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the longtime right-wing prime minister, is a secular Jew, as are most Israeli Jews. Yet he nonetheless enjoyed the support of his nation’s ultra-Orthodox parties. Netanyahu gained their support by including the parties in his ruling coalitions, giving them great access and sometimes control over public funds needed for their community institutions and economic safety nets.

Bennett, meanwhile, has gained the condemnation of several leading Orthodox Jews, even though identifies with this religious descriptor.


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Press coverage of Mount Meron tragedy offers window into Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews

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Press coverage of Mount Meron tragedy offers window into Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews

By now most GetReligion readers are likely aware of the fatal crushing of 45 Jewish pilgrims during a religious festival at Mount Meron in Israel’s north at the end of April. It’s been called one of the worst, if not the worst, civilian tragedy in Israel’s history.

(Sadly, the Meron tragedy has been superseded in the news by the serious explosion of Israeli-Palestinian violence this week. But as sad as this is — and as a Jew and a Zionist I find it almost debilitatingly sad —that’s not the subject of this post, so let’s return to Meron.)

For those in need of a refresher, here’s an early Times of Israel news story on the Meron catastrophe.

The sudden and dramatic loss of more than four dozen lives is, of course, a national trauma for a relatively small country such as Israel, which is not much larger than New Jersey. As has been noted elsewhere, “numbers numb.”

Among the dead were six Americans. Other victims came from Canada and Argentina. The youngest of the dead was a boy of nine. Some 150 others were injured.

Beyond the deaths themselves, the Meron incident surfaced major — and intricately interwoven — political and religious implications for Israel. That’s not an unusual mashup in Israel, where the divide between religion and state is near impossible to discern.

For journalists, the tragedy also underscores a Journalism 101 reality of the craft. Which is that the most interesting public commentators are often those closest to the story, such as varied eyewitnesses and longstanding, articulate members or observers of whatever groups are germane to the story.

I’ll say more about this below. First, some pertinent background.

The Meron tragedy took place on the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer. Because this is generally considered a minor holiday by most Jews, it’s largely ignored by the theologically liberal in Israel and elsewhere.


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Ira Rifkin offers Jewish (and Buddhist) thoughts as he lives with the ashes of his son

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Ira Rifkin offers Jewish (and Buddhist) thoughts as he lives with the ashes of his son

I shared the following story a year ago, but I thought of it again when reading a stunning piece in the Forward by my GetReligion colleague Ira Rifkin. The headline there is simple, but unforgettable: “The day my son’s ashes arrived in the mail.”

Journalists who cover the religion beat know that it includes everything from national politics to local-church politics, from sports to the arts, from fights over ancient doctrines to the latest trends in digital worship. But it’s important to remember the degree to which religious rites, traditions, doubts and questions help define many of the gateway moments in human life.

Before I share a few passages from Ira’s must-read essay, let me return to something that happened in the early 1980s when I was working for the now-deceased Charlotte News. I was writing a story about the last local church that was resisting the use of a hymnal prepared for the merger that created the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

It was a battle between the “red book” and the modernized “green book.” Here is a flashback:

At this Charlotte church, I met with an older man who led the fight to retain the “red book.” He had a long list of reasons — historical and theological — for why the old hymnal and prayer book was superior to the new. …

When the interview was over, we walked the center aisle toward the foyer and main exit. At the last pew, he stopped and picked up a battered red hymnal. Tears began running down his cheeks.

“I married my wife with this book,” he said. “Our children were baptized with this book. I buried my wife with this book. … They are not going to take it away from me.”

This man was wrestling with issues that transcended logic. He was dealing with the basic building blocks of his own life and faith, his past and his present. This was an issue that involved both head and heart.

This brings us to overture of Ira’s piece for the Forward:

The ashes came to my home in Maryland from Southern California, shipped via special delivery by the aptly named funeral home Ashes to Ashes. They arrived encased in a rectangular, polished, dark wood box about the size of a loaf of artisan bread. I immediately opened it to make sure it was not empty. It was not.


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Despite China's vast religious and political repression, 2022 Olympic boycott still unlikely

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Despite China's vast religious and political repression, 2022 Olympic boycott still unlikely

We’re rapidly approaching the inflection point on whether China will get to stage the 2022 Winter Olympics without some sort of concurrent international protest — such as a major boycott — prompted by Beijing’s often outrageous treatment of its Muslim Uighur, Tibetan Buddhist and underground Christian religious minorities, as well as its secular pro-democracy movement.

The question for me is: Will the international community — and in particular the United States and other democracy-espousing nations — punk out as it did with the Nazi-run 1936 Berlin Olympics. Or will the International community find some righteous backbone and either boycott the 2022 winter games, or make its opposition to Beijing’s policies known in another significant and unmistakable manner?

China, of course, has threatened retaliation against any nation that dares to challenge it by linking the Olympics and human rights.

When I last posted about the possibility of an international boycott of the upcoming China Games, — back in 2019 — I wrote off any boycott possibility as an extreme long shot.

As of this writing, I think a widespread boycott is still highly unlikely. But it’s no longer a completely dismissible long shot, I believe, because of changed circumstances — not the least of which is the ongoing coronavirus crisis and China’s oblique explanations of the pandemic’s Wuhan region origins.

Why still unlikely? Ironically, for the very same reason a protest is now slightly more conceivable, the coronavirus.

The U.S., without which no boycott can succeed, as well as its major pro-Western democratic allies, are all still deeply engaged in trying to halt the coronavirus.

We don’t know how much longer this fight will go on or what surprises are ahead. Regardless, the effort has left them economically vulnerable and politically drained. I’d say they lack the necessary additional emotional and intellectual bandwidth to take on another international crisis. Certainly not one they can avoid without triggering immediate dire consequences for their own citizens.

Forget the morality of the situation. Moral avoidance is a well-honed government strategy with a global heritage.


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Local news? Tricycle's Western Buddhism essay shows how religions adapt to new environs

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Local news? Tricycle's Western Buddhism essay shows how religions adapt to new environs

Religions evolve and accommodate as they migrate around the globe. What works in one time and place may not in another for a host of cultural and political reasons, forcing adjustments that facilitate their establishment or survival.

Historical examples abound. Not the least of which are the monumental transformations that occurred within early Christianity as it migrated across the Roman world from the Levant, and within early Islam as it spread from the Arabian Peninsula west to the Atlantic coast and east across Asia.

Here are two more recent examples of religious accommodation.

The first occurred in the late 19th Century when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a corporate decision to jettison its public practice of polygamous marriage to smooth the way for Utah’s full acceptance into the expanding United States. This despite plural marriage remaining part of the church’s scriptural doctrine to this day. The practice, though illegal under secular law, is still followed by some breakaway Mormon sects.

The second example was the melding of Roman Catholicism and West African tribal beliefs in the Caribbean and South America by Black slaves and their descendants. This gave rise to syncretic faiths such as Santeria and Voodoo. They persist today side by side with the church in ways that would scandalize the hierarchy, were it happening on a similar scale in the United States.

It’s not unusual for Mass-going Cuban, Haitian and Brazilian Catholics to also draw meaning from West African-derived rituals that to outsiders might appear hard to reconcile with core church beliefs.

A contemporary religious travel story is the Westernization of Asian Buddhism. Tricycle, a leading American Buddhist publication, deconstructed the phenomenon in its Spring 2021 issue.

The piece is well worth the time of journalists interested in moving beyond today’s often superficial religion headlines. To understand a group’s sociology is to better understand why members act as they do in the public square, journalism’s primary purview.

I suggest you view the Tricycle essay — which weighs in at more than 3,600 words — as a sort of crash course in the adaptation of religions to new circumstances. This will help reporters spot stories in the communities served by their newsrooms.


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