Anti-Zionist land based Judaism? Stephanie Gray, ‘Ecological Entanglements: Imagining a Land-Based Judaism’, in Clayton Crockett, Saswat Samay Das, Ananya Roy Pratihar (eds), Religion, Politics and the New Materialism: Philosophical Perspectives, Palgrave, 2026, pp, 113-131 | settler colonial studies blog

Anti-Zionist land based Judaism? Stephanie Gray, ‘Ecological Entanglements: Imagining a Land-Based Judaism’, in Clayton Crockett, Saswat Samay Das, Ananya Roy Pratihar (eds), Religion, Politics and the New Materialism: Philosophical Perspectives, Palgrave, 2026, pp, 113-131

02Feb26

Abstract: Attention to New Materialist theories transforms how we engage with the political-material effects of religion, including the intersections of white supremacy, fossil fascism, settler colonialism, and climate catastrophe. Climate change apocalypse is both a material and a spiritual concern, especially for those left on the margins. For Judaism, what lessons can we learn from diasporic Judaism rooted in a decolonial land-based politic that would challenge a Zionist ideology that has worked to strip Judaism of its ecological imperative to be in right relationship with the land? Can a Judaism beyond Zionism provide new ways to energize discourses of political liberation, Jewish ritual and practice, and ecological relation to the earth? Here is the potentiality of a kinship that conceives new spiritual and political entanglements that in turn generate energetic possibilities through a process of teshuva, or return. This chapter draws from Jewishand and decolonial studies, to examine the world that is engaged in a genocidal war amid the inescapability of climate change, as well as the world to come, and the world as it could be, in spiritual-material terms.

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