On The Shelf

It's finals season here in Northfield, and I'll admit to being swamped. Today was a big day in that respect--my last Hebrew test ever was taken, and I sent in my 15 page case note for Constitutional Law. On the horizon remains the final draft of a 10 page Hebrew research paper (due next Wednesday), my Hebrew oral exam (Friday), my Constitutional Law final exam (Monday or Tuesday), a 5 page Science and Society paper (Tuesday), and a 12 page Science and Society research paper (Tuesday). So yeah, blogging may take a back seat.

But even in the depths of soul-crushing work, I still make time to read. I'm in the middle of Notes of a White Black Woman: Race, Color, Community, by Judy Scales-Trent. It's quite good (though not as awe-inspiringly amazing as Kenji Yoshino's "Covering", which I finished a few weeks ago. Best book I've read in ages). Also on my laptop are two SSRN downloads: "The Equal Protection of Free Exercise: Two Approaches and Their History" by Bernadette Meyler (H/T: Rick Garnett), and "An Evaluation of Federal Tax Policy Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics" by Susan Pace Hamill (H/T: Dan Filler). The former just plays off a generic taste I have for Religion Clause jurisprudence. The latter holds interest to me because I've skimmed its prequel article, "An Argument for Tax Reform Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics." The latter article was written by Professor Hamill in support of a plan to overhaul Alabama's insanely regressive tax structure so that it was fairer to the poor. Needless to say, I support that goal. However, as frequent readers of the blog know, anytime I read "Judeo-Christian" my stomach ties in knots, and in fact I first found this article when composing a scholarly critique of "Judeo-Christian." In her overview of the impact "Judeo-Christian" arguments had on American political development, she cites almost entirely to Christian actors, with a single reference to Rabbis supporting the Civil Rights movement buried at the end of a footnote. And unfortunately, this new article (which I am only part way through) appears to suffer from the same flaw--a lot of analysis on "Christian" ethics, with a "me-too" citation to a single Jewish scholar at the end of each point (at least the scholar--Elliot Dorff--is a name I know and respect on the subject).

This isn't to be too hard on Professor Hamill--I'd suspect that the Jewish tradition would, in fact, be appalled by the Bush administration's tax policy, though perhaps for different reasons. But I still can't shake the feeling that the "Judeo" is present in these arguments less for the independent perspective the tradition provides on difficult moral questions, and more to add faux-diversity to a single-sect argument. Basically, saying that something is justified by "Christian ethics" seems narrow and provincial, while saying its justified by "Judeo-Christian ethics" seems to add at least some degree of cultural pluralism. But we're being used, people--if it turned out that the Jewish perspective was incontestably different from the Christian one, I suspect Professor Hamill would not change her article in the slightest--she'd just drop the "Judeo" pretense entirely and focus entirely on "Christian ethics." And why not? It fulfills her stated goals just as well--by her own admission, nearly 80% of America identifies as Christian (with around 2% claiming to be Jewish)--in Congress, that number rises to over 90%. If the objective is to show the powers that be that they aren't adhering to their own stated value systems, then Jews are a pretty small player in the game. I like seeing Jewish arguments on topics of moral importance as much as the next guy, but I'd rather they be presented as independently valuable, as opposed to Christianity's ethnic doppelganger.