Beth Shakman Hurd
Professor of Global Politics & Religion at Northwestern. New book: Heaven Has a Wall
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chic…
Elizabethshakmanhurd.com
- Want to support Minnesotans? Here’s how.
- In which the Daily Northwestern reporter describes my new book as a "novel." Love it. Almost, but not quite.
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- ICE OUT. Minneapolis 1/23/26.
- Reposted by Beth Shakman HurdProfessor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd presents her new book Heaven Has a Wall, a powerful reflection on how U.S. borders entangle religion, law, and power. #borderpolitics #religionandpolitics @bethhurd.bsky.social
- ICE out of Evanston. Out of Illinois. Out of the US. Just get out.
- Dear US government: Stop killing our neighbors. Stop killing, period.
- Reposted by Beth Shakman HurdThe New York Times states it plainly in display type: Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis
- Reposted by Beth Shakman Hurd“.. In the last four months alone, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like the woman killed on Wednesday, fired on while in their vehicles.” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/u...
- Congrats Ramzi Kassem on being named Chief Counsel in Mayor Mamdani’s administration.
- My colleagues Heidi and Paul at Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law argue that the university's agreement with the Trump administration is illegal.
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- Reposted by Beth Shakman HurdStop using Spotify until the ICE recruitment ads stop: indivisible.org/cancel-spotify?source=bluesky
- “Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch.“ Timely, important piece by @peterbakernyt.bsky.social
- "To foster a campus climate of real inclusion, we need to convene and converse, not record and report. The details are tricky, but teachers and students can figure them out together. Our administrations and governments just have to give us the respect, job security and academic freedom to do so."
- What’s really going on at the Justice Dept? Jaweed Kaleem explains why so many DOJ attorneys are quitting their jobs rather than break the law by concocting unfounded accusations of antisemitism in order to bring universities to their knees.
- A leading public health scholar whose career has been defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality appears to have been removed because the political costs of applying those commitments to Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.
- Northwestern alums plz sign and circulate. This is the core definition of extortion in administrative law: the use of government power to coerce compliance unrelated to the lawful purpose of the funds.
- With more and more regulators burning out of the machine, Trump’s retrogression has no limit but his expiration date.
- Press release: Two Northwestern Law Profs explain that the Trump Administration violated federal law when it withheld federal funds from Northwestern and that portions of the Agreement with the Government violate both the First Amendment and federal antidiscrimination law.
- You may’ve heard the Northwestern has joined the list of universities striking a “deal” with the Trump regime. Hard to believe we’ve stooped this low. Here’s why it was a mistake.
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- Why does the First Amendment often fail to stand as a bulwark against official religious prejudice, as was the case with the Muslim ban? My latest for Canopy Forum, drawing on my new book Heaven Has a Wall.
- Please donate to support our neighbors who are under attack by the government.
- Washington has approached at least 58 governments about accepting deportees. . . Nearly all the countries involved – including Eswatini, South Sudan and El Salvador – feature in state department reports for serious human rights abuses.
- Yes. 👇
- “It’s great that you go to ‘No Kings’ protests, but who is paying for the bombs that had been raining on Gaza?” As Dekel pointed out, “Trumpism and Bibism are joined at the hip.” @mashagessen.bsky.social
- Evanston mayor Daniel Biss: “our community is under attack from armed federal agents and our police department is in a very tough position of having to do our best to keep our residents safe from our federal government,” said Biss. “It’s awful, it is obscene.” Watch the video.
- At last, a nuanced, compelling piece on the campaign of Zohran Mamdani amid the vast diversity of New York’s Jewish communities. I’ll be assigning this one to my students. Thank you @noayachot.bsky.social
- Read this piece if you want to know what’s really happening in Chicago. We are under attack, and we are fighting back. @dannypostel.bsky.social for @newlinesmag.bsky.social
- To our students: your resistance matters. You are right to refuse this training, and we stand with you in demanding a university worthy of your commitment to truth and justice. We won’t give in. It won’t stop here.
- “It would be a mistake to view the plan as a historic breakthrough for Palestine. Trump’s vision is yet another American-Israeli concoction cooked up without any input from Palestinians that would retain Israel’s perpetual control over Gaza’s future.”
- Please watch to see what’s happening at the protests against ICE near Chicago, where immigrants are being violently detained and Turning Point supporters are lionizing Kirk.
- “We’re losing this country,” Newsom said. “We’re losing it in real time. This is a chaos presidency. He is a wrecking ball. This is unlike anything we’ve experienced in our lifetime. It is code red. No time for neutrality. It’s time to stand up, pick a side, and be firm and resolute.”
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- “A show of force for nothing.”
- The opinion on Tuesday left no doubt that Judge Young came away from the trial convinced of the core point made by the academic associations: that the Trump administration had successfully turned an obscure element of immigration law into a cudgel to intimidate opposing voices. Exactly.
- Thank you @ulrich-schmiedel.bsky.social !
- “The antisemitism in Northwestern is not where I was told it would be,” (student Holly) Simon said. “The students and faculty organizing for Palestinian freedom and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza have continuously welcomed me as my full Jewish self.” I stand with these students.
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- The border no longer divides only countries. It snakes between white and brown, between families and neighbors, between citizens and the rights they once thought were inviolate.
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- The university’s trustees and leaders view it as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal. We are simply choosing not to be a university.
- While new collaborations between Israeli and U.S. universities lack widespread buy-in from American faculty and students, framing them as redress for supposed discrimination against Jewish or Israeli students, “is a cynical but very effective way to make sure these partnerships are untouchable.”
- It’s harder and harder for Democratic politicians who want to position themselves as sensible, moderate liberals to defend a country that carries out such grotesque crimes against its stateless and rightless noncitizen subjects.
- The problem with Antisemitism Here/Now is that its tendentious and simplistic approach to enormously complex histories, including the history of Zionism, is at odds with the mission of the university: to teach, not to indoctrinate. www.chronicle.com/newsletter/t...
- CURA is looking for an assistant director! Here’s your chance to work at the oldest center for the study of religion and world affairs in the U.S. Please share widely! jobs.silkroad.com/BU/External/...
- This is not a temporary measure in an abnormal period. These agreements help create a new normal. If we are being extorted, then just say so. But don’t call a stick-up a voluntary agreement, and don’t sell it as a return to the way things were. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...
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- Part II of my discussion with @hannahmstrommen.bsky.social about her new book Bibles of the Far Right. Fantastic, creative work on some of the most vexing questions of our time. @cmnd.bsky.social
- Important.
- The fact that we now have two genocides marks a terrible historical irony. Our vast and varied response to the first genocide—a response motivated in large part by our determination to prevent such a thing from ever happening to us again—must now be understood as one of the causes of the second.
- Sometimes a book is exciting because it makes you think in new ways. Other times it's important to a particular historical moment. Rarely does a book do both. Hannah Strømmen’s new book The Bibles of the Far Right is the exception. My review for @cmnd.bsky.social urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...
- “I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.”
- Reposted by Beth Shakman HurdWow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump. Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt. Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:
- “We were shocked by the video…which directly vilifies the movement for rights for Palestinian people and non-Zionist Jews who stand against genocide,” Bez said. “It explicitly requires students to adopt the position that there’s no room for anti-Zionism, and that all anti-Zionism is antisemitic.”
- "It really motivated us to want to speak out before such a deal is made and implore our Board of Trustees and our president to not capitulate. Don't give in to this blackmail. We know it's going to be a tough road, but it won't stop here," Nielsen said.
- For Immediate Release: Northwestern Faculty Group Opposes “Dealmaking” with Lawless Trump Administration
- One of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious universities is reviewing whether to launch divestment drive and drop the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
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- “Parties thinking they can wheedle their way into a bargain with a capricious administration are bringing intuitions from the world of private deals, backstopped by the rule of law, into the very different realm of political bargains with absolutism-adjacent executive branches.”
- My conversation with Jacob Barrett about Heaven Has a Wall for New Books Network is up!
