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Reposted by Esther Brownsmith, PhD

Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social · 19d

If you think antifascists are bad, it just might be because you’re a fascist

Prem Thakker ツ @premthakker.bsky.social · 19d

New Executive Order just dropped

Presidential Actions
DESIGNATING ANTIFA AS A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION
Executive Orders
September 22, 2025

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Sep 10

So go out and do some damage, friends. Empathize radically and deeply. Love your neighbor as yourself. Sow wildflowers in the dung of his legacy. Water them with your tears, whether of sorrow or relief. Tend the rainbow blossoms as they grow.

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Sep 10

A man who ruled an empire of hate died today. He once said that empathy was “a made-up, New Age term” that “does a lot of damage.” (1/2)

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Sep 5

Aww, thank you so much! That means a lot.

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Sep 4

The new issue of Religious Studies Review is live, featuring responses to Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion that include my own essay, "'She Laughs at the Future' (Prov. 31:24b): Reading Sarah's Queer Jouissance." It's available open access here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

“She Laughs at the Future” (Prov. 31:24b): Reading Sarah's Queer Jouissance

Click on the article title to read more.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Reposted by Esther Brownsmith, PhD

Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · Aug 27

A 1955 writer casually dropping a “Germans tended to go along with Nazis just like your all-American wife goes along with segregation” is both the answer and the question for “how we got here”

Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · Aug 27

Hell of a passage to read in twenty twenty five

to Chicago or vice versa, the locat and, by transference, the community, too.
The German community-the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism-had nothing to do except not to interfere. Absolutely nothing was expected of them except to go on as they had, paying their taxes, reading their local paper, and listening to the radio. Everybody attended local celebrations of national occasions-hadn't the schools and the stores always been closed for the Kaiser's birthday?—so you attended, too. Everybody contributed money and time to worthy purposes, so you did, too.
In America your wife collects or distributes clothing, gives an afternoon a week to the Red Cross or the orphanage or the hospital; in Germany she did the same thing in the Nazi Frauenbund, and for the same reasons. The Frauen-bund, like the Red Cross, was patriotic and humanitarian;
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The Lives Men Lead
did your wife ask the Red Cross if "Negro" plasma was segregated from "white"?
One minded one's own business in Germany, with or without a dictatorship. The random leisure which leads Americans into all sorts of afterhour byways, constructive, amusing, or ruinous, did not exist for most Germans. One didn't go out of one's way, on a day off, to "look for
trouble" thoro loon ta

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Aug 21

Hey everyone, my interview with @gregsoden.bsky.social is live on the Classical Ideas Podcast! Listen up for discussion about my biblical studies journey, nonbinary readings of the Bible, and my exciting upcoming project on biblical killjoys. classicalideaspodcast.libsyn.com/ep-332-nonbi...

The Classical Ideas Podcast: EP 332: Nonbinary Biblical Readings of Mordecai and Beyond w/Dr. Esther Brownsmith

Esther Brownsmith (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Dayton. Her first monograph, Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor (Routledge, 2024), ...

classicalideaspodcast.libsyn.com

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Reposted by Esther Brownsmith, PhD

Kevin Solez @kevinsolez.bsky.social · Aug 4

Cool stuff!

Eric J. Harvey, Ph.D. @blindscholar.bsky.social · Aug 1

It's out, and now free to download for the next 2 weeks!
Go give my new book a read (it's short enough to finish in a sitting) and then share it far and wide to your friends who live for the connections between myth, ritual, and economics (all of them)!

Reading Creation Myths Economically in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel

Cambridge Core - Archaeology: General Interest - Reading Creation Myths Economically in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel

www.cambridge.org

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jul 11

On the one hand: I do not need to be writing a new article. Also, am not Assyriologist.

On the other hand: I found an Akkadian passage that offers a fascinating new possibility for the Sotah laws of Numbers 5.

Ugh, decisions.

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 13

This stanza from a 1937 Polish poem really spoke to me in these times.

Transcription:

How dare you have written about roses,
When history burned like woods in summer heat?
In today’s libraries the custodian dusts history volumes,
And outside the window – returning with spring,
Sappho sings a nightingale,
How her heart dictates.

Róże dla Safony (Roses for Sappho),
By Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska,
Trans. Aleksandra Gajowy

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 12

So honored that the inimitable @qgpennyworth.com used a poem that I wrote as part of a mini-zine/pop card! Check it out and share it if you like.

A 19th-century drawing of a woman sitting in an armchair and reading. Accompanying it is a poem by Esther Brownsmith:

"What was it like to live in those times?", they will ask.

Well, I will say,
there was a lot of compulsively refreshing social media,
a lot of bracing myself every time I pulled up the news,
a lot of telling my friends that I loved them,
because I couldn't tell them that things would be okay.

And once,
my therapist told me to take a spa day.
So I sat in the hot water,
and I tried not to think about Gaza or Ukraine or Roe or ICE or—
and the water jets timed out.

I looked down at my own body;
I saw a diaphanous blanket of pinprick bubbles,
each one clinging to a hair so faint and fine
I'd forgotten they existed.

A cocoon of air,
stubbornly refusing to float from my skin.

(The bubbles are not a metaphor
for grace, or resilience, or hope.
They simply startled me
into seeing my flesh anew.)

That is what it is like.

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 7

WHAT. MY FANDOMS ARE COLLIDING. ::goes back to comb through banter::

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 3

I've written elsewhere about fanfic and the book of Esther! The first article is the most accessible; the others are more academic.
theconversation.com/purims-origi...
bibleandcriticaltheory.com/vol-19-no-1-...
www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-ch...

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 3

Curious? @tdbiii.bsky.social writes brilliantly on fanfic and early Christian writings, and @annapwilson.bsky.social does amazing work on fanfic and premodern writing.
podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/i...
journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/tw...

Episode 70: Fan Fiction and Early Christian Writings with Tom de Bruin

Podcastaflevering · It Means What It Means · 23-04-2025 · 1u 17m

podcasts.apple.com

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 3

Tl;dr: Not all scripture uses the mode of fanfic, but some of it does—and recognizing those parallels helps us to understand the goals of the biblical authors better.

A blonde white woman says "We have the same bedazzled Bible!"

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 3

Reading these texts through the lens of fanfic helps us understand how emotional attachment, entertainment, and the desire to "fix" canon all motivated ancient authors and readers of scripture, just like they motivate modern fanfic authors and readers.

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 3

Sometimes, the texts that made it into the Bible seem firmly rooted in the mode of fan fiction! Examples include the books of Esther (which seems to reimagine the goddess Ishtar as a nice Jewish girl) and Ruth (which tells the untold story of King David's immigrant ancestress).

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 3

Less simple: what is fanfic? It's a modern phenomenon, a genre, an exchange of gifts—but for our purposes, it's a mode. Fanfic is a mode of writing fictional texts that respond to preexisting texts, a mode that really emphasizes inspiration, passion, creativity, and community.

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 3

Let's start simple: what is the Bible? It's a library: a set of conversations preserved in dozens of texts that respond to each other and build upon each other. (And it's just one fragment of the broader conversations that took place in the ancient world.)

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Jun 3

Is the Bible fan fiction? A thread. 📜

A "Fleabag" screencap that depicts a white brunette woman in the bathtub, reading a Bible. She looks aghast at the camera with a hand over her mouth.

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Reposted by Esther Brownsmith, PhD

Hadassah Brandeis Institute HBI @hadassahbrandeis.bsky.social · Jun 2

Congratulations to Esther Brownsmith @brownsmith.bsky.social, Ph.D., 2020 HBI Scholar in Residence & @universityofdayton.bsky.social Asst. Prof., on the publication of GENDERED VIOLENCE IN BIBLICAL NARRATIVE, THE DEVOURING METAPHOR, now available in Open Access. 1/
www.routledge.com/Gendered-Vio...

Book cover with text Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative, The Devouring Metaphor, Esther Brownsmith

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Apr 24

… While it certainly hooks onto the fascination/frustration model, I wonder if there’s a specific parallel to the way that slash imagines “what if these characters, but with an erotic aspect to their bond.” Something connected to an erotics of devotion to Jesus. Idk, just spitballing.

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Apr 24

I’m halfway through, and this is such a delight! (Also apparently I’ve been mispronouncing your name and I am so sorry. I’ll do better.) One specific thought: I was really struck by your comments about the texts that say “we love this story, but we’d like to see it with more love for Jesus.” …

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Esther Brownsmith, PhD @brownsmith.bsky.social · Apr 18

It’s working! Just responded via DM.

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