Pricey Revealer readers,
This August, after 21 years, Angela Zito is stepping down as co-director of the Heart for Faith and Media at NYU, the place that has served as The Revealer’s house since its genesis in 2003. Angela co-founded the Heart for Faith and Media with Faye Ginsburg, initially considered one of ten “facilities of excellence” throughout the nation first funded by Pew Charitable Trusts after which with an endowment at NYU. The Heart for Faith and Media has a proud historical past; quite a few students, journalists, and activists have benefited from its presence and choices. And one of many Heart’s most visionary and long-lasting tasks is The Revealer, a publication that, if not for Angela Zito’s dedication, wouldn’t nonetheless exist at the moment.
In 2003, when many within the media had been responding to the USA’ invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following the September 11 assaults, the Heart for Faith and Media launched The Revealer to supply correctives to how mainstream media talked about faith, to “reveal” extra incisive and researched views about faith all over the world. Angela employed journalist Jeff Sharlet to helm the publication as its first editor. Over the subsequent 5 years, Sharlet invited quite a few students and journalists to contribute to The Revealer and to supply readers extra nuanced views about faith than they may discover elsewhere.
After Jeff’s departure from NYU, The Revealer might have ended. However Angela believed in its significance and ensured it might proceed. She employed author Ann Neumann to function The Revealer’s subsequent editor. Neumann introduced her personal expertise for reportage and literary nonfiction to the publication and expanded the sorts of tales The Revealer publishes. Ann shared the next about working with Angela on The Revealer:
“My private curriculum vitae for Angela consists of all the discipline-defining occasions of her scholarly life, but in addition a separate class known as, say, Above and Past, or Who Does That? On this class I record the ridiculously excessive variety of instances Angela taught me one thing—a lesson, a reality, a trick, a means of seeing—I maintain like a talisman in my ‘surviving this world’ pocket. There’s the time she instructed me that one can expertise a selected liberation after the lack of a mother or father. My father had died, I suspected she was heartless, then, in weeks, I understood that she was proper because the solar. Or the time she stated to me—after I had been a shit particular person, undecided, unreliable, scared and caught—that ‘we should always all get to do what we wish.’ It’s of nice observe that she was my boss on the time. Then there’s the time she graciously promoted me right into a job I didn’t assume I might do, however beneath her path finally discovered. After which additionally the best way these ‘determining’ abilities turned a profession, a satisfaction, a future, a dream. Angela’s mental contributions on the Heart for Faith and Media have helped change how these two juggernauts of American life are studied and mentioned. Her unusual potential, all through her profession, is centering neighborhood—a means of being on this planet that has modified so many lives, together with my very own.”
After Ann stepped down as editor, Angela employed Kali Handelman who served as The Revealer’s editor for the subsequent six years. With Angela’s help, Kali remodeled The Revealer into its present kind as a month-to-month on-line journal. About working with Angela, Kali writes:
“Angela taught me that it was attainable to steer via collaboration. From Angela I realized easy methods to use power and assets (by which I actually imply capital — social and monetary — salaries, honoraria, actual property, all of it) to help work one believes in. I realized how to do that explicitly — by internet hosting occasions and publishing work — but in addition extra quietly, by connecting folks with each other and with assets. On the Heart for Faith and Media, and particularly The Revealer, Angela created a spot the place so many individuals had the prospect to determine what we need to do and have been supplied with the assets and help to do it. Our accomplishments are, in no small half, a credit score to Angela. She created one thing sturdy and versatile, forward of the curve, however by some means additionally on the identical time attentive to what folks ask and push for. I’m assured it can go into the long run simply as sharp and powerful and daring because it began, and that it’ll carry ahead Angela’s singular stability of courageous critique and open-minded generosity.”
When Kali left her place as editor, Angela might have determined the time had come for the journal to fold. However as a substitute, and to my nice delight, she insisted on its significance. She knew the world wanted astute writing about faith and a spot the place teachers and good journalists might share their experience. She believed in The Revealer’s worth, and after I took over as editor within the final months of 2019 my solely aim was to not smash the publication. Angela inspired my concepts and supported my choices to strive new issues like themed particular points and to launch a podcast to enrich the journal.
In my first yr as editor, because the Covid-19 pandemic spiraled throughout the Trump presidency and my sense of dread for the world worsened, Angela offered me with the inspiration for the way I might finally edit and form The Revealer to today. She shared considered one of her favourite quotes from author Raymond Williams: “To be really radical is to make hope attainable quite than despair convincing.” I had seen that quote on the backside of Angela’s emails, however someday we talked about it and since then it has knowledgeable how I see my position at The Revealer and the duties that include it. In these years of right-wing hate, rising Christian nationalism, local weather change, and the push for fascism, we might simply publish articles month after month that depart readers with despair. However a way of doom can paralyze folks and provides them the impression that different political choices aren’t attainable, which might let the fascists and bigots win. So, from Angela’s cue, The Revealer has aimed to tell folks whereas additionally exhibiting pathways to raised prospects and avenues for hope. I take it as considered one of my key duties that we should illuminate the present workings of the world alongside higher options. For those who’ve learn an article in The Revealer prior to now few years or listened to our podcast and had a way of hope, you’ve Angela Zito to thank.
With these ideas about Angela’s affect on The Revealer’s legacy in thoughts, I’m happy to share our Summer season 2024 situation with you. The difficulty opens with Oren Kroll-Zeldin’s “The Symbolic Significance of Jewish College students within the Professional-Palestine Campus Protests,” the place he shares the explanation why so many Jewish college students participated within the spring protests in opposition to the struggle in Gaza and why their visibility as Jews issues. Then, in “Layers of Dune,” Patrick D’Silva explores this yr’s blockbuster movie Dune 2 and considers the way it and the bigger Dune franchise deploy anti-Muslim tropes and interact in cultural appropriation. Subsequent, whereas interested by mass media, in “From Drake to Zac Efron: ‘Trying Jewish,’ or Not,” an excerpt from Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, & White Supremacy, Jonathan Branfman displays on folks’s shock after they be taught a star they didn’t anticipate is Jewish and what that reveals about Jewish id, race, and antisemitism at the moment. And, as we begin to consider the back-to-school season, in “Reside by the Coin, Die by the Coin: Faith and Gen Z Coin Boys,” Corey Wozniak displays on a pattern amongst Gen Z the place they make life choices based mostly on a coin toss or a tarot card studying and what that claims about younger folks within the face of local weather disaster, how they view the long run, and sudden spiritual rituals amongst at the moment’s youngsters.
The Summer season situation additionally consists of two new episodes of the Revealer podcast. Within the first, “Elisabeth Elliot: Evangelical Icon and Her Alarming Third Marriage,” Liz Charlotte Grant joins us to debate evangelical chief Elisabeth Elliot’s teachings in regards to the supposed ultimate Christian marriage, the disturbing particulars of her personal marital life, and other people’s reactions to our viral article about Elliot that we revealed in February. Within the second episode, “Jewish Our bodies and Jewish Celebrities,” Jonathan Branfman joins us to debate bodily and racial stereotypes of Jews, how some Jewish celebrities navigate these stereotypes, and what classes representations of Jews within the media reveal about antisemitism and racism at the moment. You possibly can hearken to each episodes on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
As summer season involves a detailed and we stay up for a fall that may inevitably embrace extra protests and political turmoil, I return as soon as extra to Angela Zito’s knowledge and the insistence that we find and unfold hope. Her inspiration to offer options to despair will proceed to tell our work. And right here at The Revealer, one signal of constructive issues to return is that Elayne Oliphant, affiliate professor of Non secular Research and Anthropology at NYU, will step in as the brand new co-director of the Heart for Faith and Media alongside Faye Ginsburg. Which means we now have a shiny future. And it will likely be a future formed by the astute foresight, incisive knowledge, and indelible legacy of Angela Zito.
Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.
