Richard Hecht

Active versus Passive Pluralism: A Changing Style of Civil Religion?:

The reform of the United States Immigration Act in 1965 transformed what Robert Bellah identified as “American civil religion” and one of its central components: Americas unique religious pluralism. At midcentury, Will Herberg showed how religion functions in the creation of American identity through what we call here “passive pluralism.” This passive pluralism allowed the mainline religions of America to claim a presence within the nation. But the new immigration patterns have created what the author calls here “active pluralism,” which lays assertive claim to the meanings of public time and space. This argument is explored through the construction of an Orthodox Jewish ritual space or eruv in Los Angeles.

Divisions at the Center: The Organization of Political Violence at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount/al-haram al-sharif — 1929 and 1990

Carnage has come often to Jerusalem. At the city’s sacred center, major collective violence has occurred twice in this century, first in August, 1929 and more recently in October, 1990. In this essay we examine the social organization of these violent encounters at the site which the Jews claim as the platform of their nation’s ancient Temple and for Muslims the point from which the Prophet Muhammad leapt to Paradise. We analyze these episodes of violence at the center as a particular form of ritual politics, not just as irrational explosions of communal hatred.

The Symbol and the Stone: Jerusalem at the Millennium

This article explores the relationship between sacrality and sovereignty, between symbolic and material realities in Jerusalems politics from the Six Day War of 1967 to the present and as Jerusalem moves toward the millennium. It begins with the Israeli efforts to separate the citys sacred places from political solutions and how this affects religious traditions and their communities in the city. It takes up the growing symbolic importance of Jerusalem for American evangelical Christians, then how the city functions as a ritual theater for Israeli and Palestinian politics, and, finally, how the city is doubly cleaved: between communities at the level of politics and within each community around the relationship between the political order and the religious order, especially since the signing of the Oslo accords and the defeat in 1993 of Jerusalems longtime liberal mayor, Teddy Kollek, and his replacement by center-right Likud mayor Ehud Olmert.

Not All Actors Are the Same: Some Comments in Response to Gideon Aran and Ron E. Hassner's “Religious Violence in Judaism: Past and Present”

Gideon Aran and Ron Hassner begin their article on ‘‘Religious Violence in Judaism: Past and Present’’ by noting different scholarly ways to think about the relationships between religion and violence. First, there are those who believe that religion is inherently violent and thereby trivialize history and reduce the agency of actors belonging to religion. Second, there are those who argue certain religions have a violent core and other religious traditions are inherently peaceful. They too strip the actors within these traditions of responsibility or agency. They are violent or peaceful because that is the nature of their religious traditions. Third, there are those who argue in a classic instrumentalist view in which religion is a very effective system to either mobilize people to act violently or to justify the violence. They develop a fourth theoretical position which they describe as a dialectical theory or interpretation in which religion is not fully constraining, which I take to mean that they view religion as not determinative in an abstract form. Rather religion is a part of lived experience and thus not a collection of immaterial theological ideas. It is existential rather than abstract. For Aran and Hassner, the actors within religious traditions:

The Political Cultures of Israel's Radical Right: Commentary on Ehud Sprinzak's The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right∗

(1993). The Political Cultures of Israels Radical Right: Commentary on Ehud Sprinzaks The Ascendance of Israels Radical Right. Terrorism and Political Violence: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 132-159.