De Gruyter Brill on the Wire

Is tolerance an achievement of secular modernity that religion has always resisted? The Concept of Tolerance in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (De Gruyter, 2026), the seventh volume in the Key Concepts in Interreligious Discourses series, says the answer is more complicated. Edited by Catharina Rachik and Georges Tamer of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, the book gives one substantial chapter to each tradition and closes with an epilogue in which the editors compare the three.

Menachem Kellner draws on Maimonides to build a Jewish account of tolerance grounded in epistemological humility. The Torah is true, but no human mind, not even Moses’s, grasps that truth completely. Christian Polke treats tolerance as a virtue practiced in the habits of a community, especially in the confession of sin and in reading scripture critically. Anna Akasoy declines to ask whether Islam is “essentially” tolerant or intolerant. She asks instead why that question keeps being put to Islam, and then traces how Muslims have handled difference across scripture, law, theology, Sufism, and political rule.

In this conversation, Tamer and Rachik discuss the series’ “archaeology of religious knowledge.” They explain why “tolerance” works as an analytical category rather than a historical one, and why the limits of tolerance require public justification. Finally, they argue that naming irreconcilable differences gives interreligious life a sturdier foundation than a manufactured consensus. Taking a cue from Goethe, they make the case for moving beyond tolerance toward recognition.

Iqbal Akhtar teaches in the Departments of Religious Studies and Politics & International Relations at Florida International University and is the Executive Director of The East-West Foundation. He is the author of Covenantal Pluralism: The Geopolitics of Interfaith Religious Freedom (Springer, 2026), available open access at this link.

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Drora interviewed Dr. Eveyln Maria Dean-Olmsted about her book, Coming of Age as Syrian Jewish Mexicans: The Pragmatics of Diaspora (Brill, 2025), published by Brill in 2026. Dr. Dean-Olmsted is a linguistic anthropologist who lived with the Jewish community in Mexico City for a time to research this book. The community includes four distinct groups: Ashkenazi, Aleppans, Damascenes, and Ottoman Sephardim. She explained how these communities formed in the early 20th century following migration from the Ottoman Empire and later Syria and Lebanon, with each group maintaining separate institutions for social and religious purposes. Evelyn noted that while these communities were once strictly separated, there is now more mixing between them, though specific ethnic and geographic identifications remain important within the community.

Dean-Olmsted discussed increased social mixing and institutional collaboration between different Jewish communities, noting that intermarriages between Ashkenazi and Syrian Jews have become more normal though family dynamics can still be tense. She explained that young people are actively navigating questions about religious practice and lifestyle choices, with many experiencing a "holy struggle" she terms "Le'heavec" - referencing Jacob wrestling with an angel - as they make personalized decisions about their Judaism. She described this as an ongoing process that counters stereotypes about Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews' religiosity, while noting that community pressure remains strong, particularly for those who don't fit traditional molds.

As an example, they discussed the tebilah ceremony of immersing in a mikveh before one's wedding. In the traditional Syrian communities this is cause for a large party and in the Ashkenazi community, which has been seeping in to all communities through ultra-orthodox Rabbis and classes, it is a very quiet private affair. This struggle to understand what is one's Judaism and how do we rethink our heritage while staying true to it and our community was a key part of the discussion.

Continue to struggle with the future of our heritage by following and participating in Jewish Tapestry talks and events.

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Fascists of the World, Unite?: A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) analyzes the ideas and forms of international cooperation between Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and fascist movements from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, and Britain. The study examines how fascists attempted to unite across borders by forming international organizations and networks, hosting conferences and exhibitions, disseminating multilingual publications, and exchanging propaganda. Their transnational cooperation was fuelled by shared ideas of ultranationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, antisemitism, racism, white supremacism, and Europeanism. The book argues that fascist internationalism, marked by contradictions, limitations, and an Italo-German rivalry, emerged in the 1930s as a counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism. The epilogue discusses reverberations in the Second World War and the postwar period and outlines the relevance of this history for understanding contemporary forms of far-right internationalism.

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Dr Raluca Bianca Roman's book is an ethnography of the Finnish Kaale, Finland's national Roma community, and of the impact of Evangelical Christianity on their social and political lives. It is based on more than a decade of fieldwork and on archival research from the early twentieth century onwards. The book follows Kaale families as they handle the consequences of settlement, urbanisation and a turn towards the nuclear household, and as many convert to Pentecostalism. It moves from family homes and prayer groups in Helsinki to small towns in Eastern Finland, and on to Roma settlements in Western Romania where Kaale believers carry out missionary work. Kaale life emerges as a set of attachments and detachments, to kin and to the Finnish nation, to custom and to faith, and to other Roma at home and abroad.

Kaale Belongings and Evangelical Becomings: An Ethnography of Finnish Roma (Brill Schöningh, 2025) brings the anthropology of Roma into conversation with the anthropology of Christianity. Its first section, on Kaale belongings, looks at life in the city, at the silence surrounding sexuality, marriage and birth that shapes Kaale morality, and at "inbetweeners" who live apart from Kaale norms. The second section, on Evangelical becomings, turns to Kaale prayer groups within mixed Pentecostal congregations, to conversion as a repeated process of entering and leaving faith, and to Roma-to-Roma missionary work in Romania. Roman shows how religious identity becomes entangled with community identity, and how Pentecostalism can both bring Kaale together with non-Kaale Finns and draw new lines between believers and non-believers.

About the author

Raluca Bianca Roman is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast, where she is a member of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict and the Centre for Creative Ethnography. Her research focuses on religion, particularly Christianity, as well as ethnicity, nationalism, migration and humanitarianism, with a focus on Roma communities in Finland and Romania. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, where she was later a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Advanced Grant project RomaInterbellum. She was also a researcher on the Academy of Finland project Roma and Nordic Societies at the University of Helsinki. She co-edited Roma Writings in History (Brill, 2021) and a special issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies, Counter-readings on Finnish Nationhood: Minority Strategies and the Making of the Nation (2021). She is now developing research on artificial intelligence and transhumanism.

About the host

Niall Herron is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast. His ethnographic work examines queer experience during the Northern Ireland Troubles, taking the everyday as a focal point for how queerness and space were assembled across the period, and how sexuality, gender, region, ethnonational identity, and class were bound up together. His writing has appeared in the anthropology journal Ethnos and the academic queer history blog NOTCHES.

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Repetition, reconfiguration, or adaptation form key characteristics of the Indian literary traditions. Jain literature exemplifies this vividly, especially through its rich narrative tradition. The Examination of Religion (Dharmaparīkṣā): A Jain Tradition of Narrative Adaptations (Brill, 2026) studies one such narrative, known as the Dharmaparīkṣā ('Examination of Religion'), which has intrigued audiences for its ridiculing critique of Brahmanical beliefs and authority.

This book is the first to examine six versions of the story in classical and vernacular languages and from different periods together as a tradition of adaptations. Revealing the adaptive practices Jain authors applied as literary and socio-historical contexts evolved, the book offers a diachronic perspective on Jain polemics, and on the conceptualization of adaptation and translation in South Asia.

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The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system, Luc Bulten presents a gateway into everyday social realities surrounding caste, conjugality, (forced) work, and land tenure. In doing so, he demonstrates how both European expansionism and local agency reciprocally affected the ways such social realities were shaped. Tune in to our conversation about Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka (Brill, 2026)

Dr Luc Bulten is Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History at Radboud University and Postdoctoral Fellow in Sri Lankan History at the University of Cambridge. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology—an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being refashioned in a variety of arts and media. Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (Brill, 2025)
explores a wide range of cultural experimentation, collectively termed “playing with plays:” the theatricality embedded in commentary, the poetic and visual imagination arising from drama illustrations, the interactions between reading and singing arias, the imbrication of reading plays and practicing religion, and the ludic act of writing playful essays on drama. Through engaging these disparate phenomena with media studies, the book advances a new model for thinking about drama history, and shows the entwinement of plays and different forms of media in shaping perception, molding experience, and enabling new subject positions to emerge in early modern China.

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Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society is the latest book from Dr Andres Saenz De Sicilia, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London. Andres’ excellent title, published with Brill and released in soft cover with Haymarket Books late last year, is an in-depth exploration of the concept of subsumption as it appears in the works of three great thinkers, and the relevance of the paradigm for modern critical theory.

In this book, Andres traces the concept of subsumption through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, in both its philosophical dimensions and its relevance to critical social theory. Andres examines the utilisation of subsumption as a conceptual framework whereby a particular is brought under a universal, up to the complex and dynamic operations of subsumption in modern-day capitalism, as a system that subsumes human life under the logic of value. As Andres illustrates through the intricate and careful argument in the book, following the use of subsumption in the work of these key theorists not only offers a new perspective to understand these thinkers, but helps articulate a historically-focused and robust framework to investigate the mechanisms of capitalist power. Of particular interest perhaps from a political economy perspective is Andres’ investigation of Marx’s journey through subsumption within the pages of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx, and also how the theoretical framework of subsumption helps us understand production and social reproduction under capitalism.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

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Much scholarship has sought to decode the polarization of American culture. Eric O Silva's analysis of the public discourse on contested realities (immigration, vaccines, electric vehicles, transgender youth medicine, campus protests of Israel, the regulation of AR-15s, and race and police brutality) reveals that Americans are not governed by coherent, diametrically opposed worldviews. U.S. culture is more fractured than dominant narratives of a polarized society would suggest. Moreover, these cultural disputes result in the generation of materials for constructing identities. Disagreement over how to define reality inevitably leads to a contest over the authority and moral worthiness of the individuals involved in the dispute. Contested Realities and Identity Destigmatization: Identity Construction in the Culture Wars analyzes how participants in public discourse stigmatize but also destigmatize their adversaries. This study not only demonstrates that there are people who are seeking to "turn down the temperature" in public discourse but the generic processes by which they do so.

Michael O. Johnston is Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His research explores symbolic interaction, leisure, meaning, place, community, and sociology of everyday life. He is the author of the forthcoming book Smalltown Urban: Performing the City in Rural America (Bloomsbury, 2027), The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla, and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest. His forthcoming book examines how small towns create moments of urbanity through festivals, public gatherings, and everyday social life. Since joining the New Books Network in 2017, he has interviewed more than 100 authors across sociology and the social sciences, helping connect scholars and their work with a broad public audience.

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Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert, Revised Second Edition (Brill, 2025) revises the first edition of this book (2004) which is long overdue. Many segments needed revision due in large part to the veritable flood of studies published in the wake of the first edition. In other cases, the author changed his mind in his continued study of the scrolls improved by the new images of the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. Hyperlinks to this library are now added to most references to the scrolls. This book covers many aspects of a handbook for those who study the scrolls, material culture, and edit scroll fragments.

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