Risking Communion: Dorothy Day on Israel and Palestine

What Might Dorothy Say Today?

Dorothy Day, and Risk of Speaking Broadly

An Old Writing Resurfaces

About two weeks ago, I got this email forwarded to me:

Dear Professor Werntz:

Just a note to say kudos and thank you for this essay, especially the section on Dorothy and the Jews.

Some ideologues on the left and the right, pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, are using her writings to shore up their arguments favoring Israel over Palestine and vice versa.

My gut tells me that her heart would be breaking over the Israeli and Palestinian children being killed in this war.

Thanks and best wishes

It was responding in part to this essay that I wrote about ten years ago for a relatively unknown online academic journal, and frankly, had forgotten all about¹. It’s strange revisiting something from that long ago, mostly because I don’t teach at all on interreligious engagements, and writing about interfaith issues is off the beaten path for Dorothy Day. Her concerns were more immediate, even if they are rooted in complex theological reasons.

As I’ve argued, the theological core of her work is her commitment to Christ’s work on behalf of all humanity, a theme which appears very frequently. Thus, whenever a question of social division comes up, what we see is an appeal for solidarity on the basis of Christ’s work. It’s pretty straightforward, and appears all the time: whether in writing about class divisions, or racism, or war, she consistently points to the unity of Christ, and that all persons are actually or potentially members of Christ’s body.

At dinner two nights ago, I spent the better part of an hour talking with a friend at the table about solidarity, of what it means to join with the interests of another, and to advocate for their good, even when it doesn’t necessarily benefit oneself. It’s an interesting problem for this reason: the very dynamics which create societies (in-groups and out-groups, those with whom we have a common form and life and those we don’t) are the very things which we have to overcome or disavow in order to advocate for those not from our own group.

Solidarity theory tries to do this by leaning into the agonism between groups, by defecting from one group to another, but all this does, I think, is displace the agonism somewhere else: you never get to something approaching a common good, because the deck chairs are just being rearranged, albeit in favor of a group which was previously maligned or unjustly biased against.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This obviously seems different than Day’s way of thinking, but the emailer is right, that it also seems like Day would grieve for the violence being committed, particularly against civilians. So what might Dorothy say?

We’ve recently seen no shortage of solidarity statements over Palestine, of student encampments and protests. In rereading my older essay, I was—like the emailer—wondering how Day would approach the question of the war in Palestine, particularly in light of her commitments to the unity of all persons in Christ². In what follows, I’ll revisit her basic argument on how to understand the Jews, some limits to her framing of the question, and also, some ways in which her frame evokes important questions for how, forty years after her death, we think about the origins of violence.