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"Together Forever"?: Strange and Storied Alliances Between Hindus and Jews, India, and Israel

Date:
-
Location:
Boone Center at UK
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):
Shana Sippy

This talk emerges as a scholarly response to the eruptions of violence, physical and rhetorical, that surrounded the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Invested in questions of representation, this research takes the massacres in Mumbai as a point of reference from which to explore larger social and political issues between and among Hindus, Jews, and Muslims. Noting the real and imaginary grounds upon which religious, national and geopolitical fault lines are drawn and alliances made, the talk explores the politics of solidarity and the (re)shaping of sensibilities in order to foster on-going alliances between Hindus and Jews. The paper tries to place the interfaith memorial services and solidarity gatherings which occurred after Mumbai into the context of the development of Hindu-Jewish and India-Israel coalitions and scholarship over the past twenty years. It seeks to examine how perceptions of the “Other” (Hindus of Jews, Jews of Hindus, and Hindus and Jews of Muslims) inform the rhetoric and varied agendas of these alliances, including discourses of victimization, the cultivation of personal relationships, and the desire for multi-national defense contracts. 

Shana Sippy teaches in the Religion Department of Carleton College. Her work focuses on articulations and representations of religious and cultural identity.  In specific she examines the making of Hindu and Jewish selves and communities in modernity, as well as the intersection of religious traditions with colonialism, social movements and globalization.