For more than three decades the prophetic voice of Marc Ellis has influenced generations of academics and activists. His dissident voice in the realm of contemporary Jewish identity and his theology of solidarity with Palestinians has been encouraged by numerous scholar-activists including Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Desmond Tutu and the two of us, Rosemary Ruether and Cornel West.
Unfortunately this voice is now being silenced at Baylor University where Marc has served with distinction for almost fifteen years as University Professor and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. With the approval of Kenneth Starr, President of Baylor University, Marc Ellis is under internal investigation in what looks more and more like a persecution to silence a Jewish voice of dissent. In short, Baylor is re-writing its rules to dismiss Marc Ellis from the faculty.
We, the undersigned, request President Starr to honor Dr. Ellis' academic freedom and stop all hostility toward him, including any attempt at dismissal. Join us signing this petition.
Cornel West and Rosemary Radford Ruether (co-chairs of the committee)
This is what Baylor 'currently' has to say about the distinguished career of Dr Marc Ellis...
Marc H. Ellis was born in North Miami Beach, Florida in 1952. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in Religion and American Studies at Florida State University, where he studied under the Holocaust theologian Richard Rubenstein and the American historian William Miller. He received his doctorate in contemporary American social and religious thought from Marquette University in 1980. In that same year he accepted a faculty position at the Maryknoll School of Theology in Maryknoll, New York, becoming founding director of their M.A. program and the Maryknoll Institute for Justice and Peace. He was made full professor in 1988, and remained at Maryknoll until 1995, when he assumed a position first as a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, and then a Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, as well as a visiting professorship at Florida State University. In 1998 he was appointed Professor of American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University, where the next year he was named University Professor of American and Jewish Studies. That same year he founded Baylor University's Center for American and Jewish Studies.
Professor Ellis has authored fifteen books and edited five others, among them: Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation; Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time; O Jerusalem: The Contested Future of the Jewish Covenant, and Practicing Exile: The Religious Odyssey of an American Jew. His many articles have been published in diverse American and international publications, including the International Herald Tribune, European Judaism, Ha'aretz, Jordan Times, Ord & Bild, Christian Century, and Journal of Palestine Studies. His essays have been published in a number of anthologies, most recently in Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader, published by Oxford University Press, and have been translated and published in ten languages. He has traveled and lectured extensively in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Influenced by the Jewish ethical tradition and the dissonance of Jewish life after the Holocaust, Professor Ellis has sought to rescue the Jewish ethical tradition in the face of the demands of an increasingly aggressive state of Israel. In his early career he became deeply interested in Christian Liberation Theology as an expression of the mores of the Christian tradition when faced with the socio-political-economic crises under the oppressive operation of nation-states and the international economic order. Over the years Professor Ellis has translated that expression of ethical values into an understanding of the Jewish ethical tradition, now facing its own moral crisis as Jewish identity becomes increasingly identified with the political entity of the state of Israel.
Within that analysis, Professor Ellis developed further insight into Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations, and their complexity in the modern world. Since then, he has used his position, influence and writings to elucidate further on these difficulties, and been welcomed by a wide variety of audiences, from university forums to institutes and faith-based groups seeking justice and peace while working within complex religious and political identities. In this regard, he has been invited to join an Oxford University-sponsored scholar's project on the future of the Auschwitz site, as well as given addresses at Oxford, the United Nations, Leo Baeck Seminary in London; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Carter Center at Emory University; and the James A. Baker Institute at Rice University.
The major projects undertaken by Dr. Ellis most recently focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including numerous commentary solicited by national and international media, including the International Herald Tribune, Houston Chronicle, and the Austin-American Statesman. He has been the focus of a BBC television documentary on the issue of cultural diversity and nationalism, and a congressional hearing on the Camp David peace initiative carried on C-SPAN. He regularly provides commentary and analysis on the BBC radio and National Public Radio.
Professor Ellis has also delivered a number of endowed lectures, including the First Annual Clif Elson Memorial Lecture at St. Stephen's College, University of Edmonton, and the Van der Zyl Memorial Lecture, Leo Baeck Seminary. In 2003 Professor Ellis will deliver the Niebuhr Lecture at Elmhurst College.
Professor Ellis's work extends beyond the clinical political analysis usually offered by the media to encompass the essence of spiritual evolution. In a recent work, Practicing Exile (Fortress Press, 2002), Professor Ellis looks at his own evolution as an American Jew coming of age in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, and the import of his own journey as a paradigm for the future of Jewish life. His forthcoming book, Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes (Pluto Press, 2002), addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Professor Ellis has been inducted into the Martin Luther King Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and was honored at the 2000 national convention of the American Academy of Religion with an entire session devoted to the discussion of his work. He is on the editorial board of the progressive Jewish journal Tikkun and has served as a consultant to the Programme to Combat Racism of the World Council of Churches and as a member of the steering committee of the Religion, Holocaust and Genocide Consultation of the American Academy of Religion. In 2002 he was nominated for the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his book, Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time.
Favorable commentary on his work includes: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Laureate: "Ellis provides a vital contribution to solving one of the few remaining intractable problems of our time"; Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Marc Ellis has demonstrated great courage, integrity, and insight in the very important work he has been doing for years. It has been an inspiration for all of us"; Edward Said, the internationally renowned literary and cultural critic and University Professor at Columbia University: "Marc Ellis is a brilliant writer, a deeply thoughtful and courageous mind, an intellectual who has broken the death-hold of mindless tradition and unreflective cliché to produce a superb account of post-Holocaust understanding, with particular reference to the Palestinian people and the moral obligation of Israelis and diaspora Jews. He is a man to be listened to with respect and admiration."
p.s. I count Marc as a friend and I feel very sad that he is being targeted in this way, and that the only centre for Jewish-American studies in the USA is now under threat. Baylor is a great university - I've lectured there - Kenn Starr must not be allowed to get away with this vindictive and spiteful act.
p.s. I count Marc as a friend and I feel very sad that he is being targeted in this way, and that the only centre for Jewish-American studies in the USA is now under threat. Baylor is a great university - I've lectured there - Kenn Starr must not be allowed to get away with this vindictive and spiteful act.
