"For many in the United States, Crypto-Judaism has been shrouded in memory and for others it has become an imagined land that might have been, often with little information about the actual history and heritage of the group. Today, in the American southwest and in parts of Latin America there is a movement to reclaim Jewish identity, and people are describing the memories of Jewish identity with the family and the remnants of Jewish practice. That has sparked interest in learning more about Sepharad, the Spain of the Jews, and the diaspora of Spanish Jews and their cousins, the Crypto-Jews. Myths have grown around the concept of Sepharad sometimes obscuring the realities of what it was. There was a "golden age" for Jews in Spain during the early Muslim period, but as the reconquest heated up and Christian rule replaced that of Muslims, the Jewish experience turned dark until the light of the Jews was put out in Spain. In my experience in New Mexico, I have found that local oral traditions about Jewish family identity or reclaimed Jewish identity can be rich, but in some cases not coinciding with historical information. So, there can be multiple tracks of inherited or imagined information in addition to historical documentation. The belief about the association between Judaism and Spain that is expressed among some is that anyone of Spanish descent must have sangre Judia "Jewish blood". That contradicts what we know of the demographics of Spain, which suggest that at the time of the Expulsion, Jews were a minuscule part of the population, probably close to two percent. Crypto-Judaism is an attempt to draw a historical baseline of established information of what we know about those times and the Crypto-Jewish experience"--

Crypto-Jews: The Long Journey

History

Ron Duncan-Hart

Americas

Institute for Tolerance Studies

Creativity and Inspiration is about Abella Ballen's creative process, including drawings and notes from her notebooks with linkages to images that resulted from those ideas. She says it best, "How do I get ideas that result in art? What do we call art? How does 
art communicate and to whom does it communicate? These are questions 
that are always posed to artists. 
"As artists we are members of a particular group influenced by the 
environments we inhabit whether they be physical, social, cultural, 
psychological, or artistic, and this becomes the source of our artistic 
interests and visual responses. 
"The imaginative and intellectual work I do in the studio is a form of 
research, an exploration of a particular subject to be developed in a 
personal visual manner. The development of visual expression, when 
using the imagination, often draws from memory, which is tinged by 
feelings."

Creativity and Inspiration

Arts & Photography

Gloria Abella Ballen

History & Criticism

Evangelicals and MAGA is a historical case study of the Fulton Cotton Mill neighborhood in Atlanta where Christian nationalism took root in the late 1960s and 1970s as people transitioned out of the Jim Crow era. During the transformative decades between the 1954 (Brown vs Board of Education) and 1973 (Roe vs Wade), the Federal government banned segregation, Bible reading and prayer in schools, and discrimination against women and minorities, producing a White backlash and re-alignment of American politics. I was doing research in Cabbagetown during that time, looking at at racial attitudes, churches and religious life, and gender and family. I saw the messaging of Evangelical leaders becoming more politicized as they protested those bans on their traditional values and called to make America great again by returning to traditional Evangelical values. Preachers used the Christian ontology of good and bad, God and the Devil, as a framework to understand the changes. They saw their lifestyle as God given and good; the changes were bad. Their calls for Christian leadership in government to enact laws based on the Bible would later emerge as elements in the Christian nationalism movement and MAGA.

Evangelicals and MAGA: Politics of Grievance a Half Century in the Making (Monographs on Religion and Tolerance)

Duncan Hart, Ron

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