Part 3: Back in the Day

Once Upon A Time

Like Munayer and Loden, I believe in the power of narrative to foster reconciliation, and I think that Messianic Jews are writing (or rediscovering) a great narrative that’s true to Jesus and has the potential to reinvest the world in his teachings and in the Abrahamic tradition in a positive way, whether or not God actually exists. I believe that Messianic Jews do have the potential to serve as a bridge to peace in the world, starting with Hashevenu in the U.S. and the friends of Christ at the Checkpoint in Palestine; in other words, the ones who aren’t right-wing.

Messianic Jews have the potential to serve as a bridge to peace.

Here’s my version of their narrative, which I offer as an amateur, not a credentialed religious scholar. It starts with the Jews before Jesus who already had thoughts and feelings that we think of as Christian today, many of which are inscribed in the Old Testament. Psalm 82 captures their changing conception of God from the jealous and vengeful force found elsewhere in the Old Testament to the warmer and more compassionate figure in the New. And Jesus’s summary of Jewish Law as the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) is similar to the one attributed by the Talmud to Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who lived just before Jesus.

As for the specific embodiment of Christ, the book of Daniel describes a divine Son who sits with God in side-by-side thrones in Heaven, and who will be revealed in the End Times. Psalms, Second Kings, and other books describe a Messiah king descended from David who restores Israel. Isaiah 53 can be read to prophecy that this Messiah will be made to suffer physically, and Daniel Boyarin argues that it had been read this way before Jesus. The New Testament combines these two Old Testament traditions, a messiah king and a divine Son, but it’s not even the only Jewish book from the period to do so. The apocryphal Similitudes of Enoch does the same thing, with no mention of Jesus. (Confusingly, these writings refer to the victorious human messiah figure as “Son of God” and the divine son as the “Son of Man,” rather than the other way around.)

So the Jews wanted a messiah. As Boyarin writes, “The job description–Required: one Christ, will be divine, will be called Son of Man, will be sovereign and savior of Jews and the world—was there already and Jesus fit (or did not according to other Jews) the bill.” This expectation became tied up with the Jews’ belief in tikkun olam, or healing the world, the hope that the Jewish people would some day restore peace.

“The job description–Required: one Christ, will be divine, will be called Son of Man, will be sovereign and savior of Jews and the world — was there already and Jesus fit (or did not according to other Jews) the bill.”

Jesus himself was Jewish, as was his immediate circle and almost all of his earliest believers—the people who knew or witnessed him physically. We don’t know if Jesus intended to start a new religion distinct from Judaism, but we do know that he furthered an active strain of Jewish thought that was seen by many Jews as a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. We also know that he and his followers threatened the authority of both the local priesthood and the Herod family, who ruled the province of Judaea as clients under Rome.

For a generation or so after Jesus, the growing group of believers in his messianic and divine status remained mostly Jewish. But many Gentiles also came to believe, especially the Godfearers, the ethnic Gentiles who had already embraced Jewish theology. Over the next couple of centuries, Christianity exploded and became predominantly Gentile. But meanwhile, Jewish Christians continued to follow Jewish law and live in their own communities — a lost identity that today’s Messianic Jews scripturally justify and seek to recapture.

Sidebar: Barbecue at the Great Temple The Roman province of Judea in the 1st century is a familiar setting, often recounted, with tensions between imperial Rome and the local Jews of various sects: the lawyer Pharisees, wealthy Sadducees, hippie farmer Essenes, and rebel Zealots. Jewish worship centered around the Second Temple in Jerusalem, where worshippers made pilgrimages from all Judea, bearing choice livestock for ritual slaughter and burning. After the burnt offering, choice cuts of the animals were eaten by the priests, the priests’ families, and the pilgrims. These rituals were prohibited elsewhere, which gave Jerusalem an enforced monopoly on what we would, from today’s more detached perspective, call barbecue. To modern sensibilities, the Temple operated as a glorified barbecue joint that honored life and the taking thereof, and a central controversy in the Old Testament is whether altars (a.k.a. “high places”) should be allowed to exist outside of Jerusalem, to enable people to butcher, partially burn, and eat clean animals locally.

To modern sensibilities, the Temple operated as a glorified barbecue joint that honored life and the taking thereof.

According to recent archaeological evidence, pilgrimages and animal sacrifices drove Jerusalem’s economy. It was against this background that the Lamb of God was sacrificed in Jerusalem, a liminal Trickster figure crossing between the realms of human and divine, bringing the high low and the low high.

Politics and Religion

What happened to these original Messianic Jews, the Jewish Christians? They were key figures in early Christianity, perhaps even with a divine mandate. But the Jews who believed in Jesus while also following the whole Torah grew apart from both mainstream Jews and Gentile Christians. And in the 4th Century, as Rome was becoming officially Christian, Christianity divested itself of many elements of Jewish theology and worship, and declared such sects heretical.

Marc Chagall, The Fall of the Angel (1932–33–47)

The Jewish Christians’ split away from the religious currents that became mainstream Christianity and Judaism began early. Around 50 CE, at the Council of Jerusalem (as documented in Acts 15), some of Jesus’s apostles decided that Gentiles could be good Christians without following Jewish law. This gave Gentile Christianity the green light, and the Gentile Christian population soon blew past the Jewish Christians numerically, as it crossed national boundaries, class boundaries, and boundaries of any kind. The Jews, Christian or otherwise, were primarily a nation united by a concrete culture, practices, and history, even in diaspora. This limited their population. But the Council of Jerusalem decision rendered Christianity a more abstract, inclusive, and radically portable new phenomenon — a religion in the current sense, based purely on belief, and unconnected to a people.

On the Jewish side, the Christians were pacifists, so they didn’t support the Jewish war against Rome that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE. Around 90 CE, Jewish synagogues began kicking out believers in Jesus, as noted in John 9:22 and 12:42. And in 132 CE, Jewish Christians also stood aside for the Jews’ final armed revolt against Rome, led by the self-proclaimed messiah Simon Bar Kochba, whose messianic claims were also supported by the influential Rabbi Akiba. The Jewish Christians didn’t believe in Bar Kochba, and they didn’t believe in violence. The Bar Kochba revolt was brutally crushed by the Roman army in 135.

The Council of Jerusalem rendered Christianity a radically portable new phenomenon — a religion based purely on belief, and unconnected to a people.

In the wake of the Jewish Wars against Rome, Judaism changed radically. The destruction of the Second Temple deprived Jews of a central place to teach and develop their traditions orally, and the dislocated Jews from all of the wars moved away to other parts of Rome, creating the diaspora. Scattered and without the Temple, Jews decentralized their worship, ended animal sacrifice, and started writing their traditions and arguments down based on rabbinical authority. The new form of Judaism that evolved derived most of its DNA from the Pharisees — Jesus’s ideological opponents in the New Testament.

During the first two centuries after Jesus, pagan Rome persecuted and martyred countless Christians. Roman citizens didn’t understand (and resented) how this nobody Jesus had such a grip on the hearts and minds of their servants and slaves. Meanwhile, the believers in Jesus enjoyed an upwelling of faith-inspired creative empowerment. Christians everywhere shared their stories and fan fiction about Jesus and his circle. Some of these writings were canonized in 367 CE as the New Testament, and others remained apocryphal, like the First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ, which describes how the baby Jesus’s used swaddling clothes miraculously did not burn in fire. Christian identity was in flux, and many voices were contributing to its various manifestations. There was plenty of room for Jewish Christian sects like the Ebionites and Nazarenes, who followed Jewish law and believed in Jesus. In contrast with the authority-based Jewish writings from the same time and later, the folklore dynamic of Christianity reflected Jesus’s democratic message.

The apocryphal First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ describes how the baby Jesus’s used swaddling clothes miraculously did not burn in fire.

The abstract nature of Christian belief enabled anyone to attain eternal life through faith alone. But this unlimited property also made it the perfect breeding ground for human politics because it allowed for conflicting theologies to emerge that were unanchored by any physical reality or specific cultural practices. Arguments over theological points like whether Jesus was of the same substance as God (homoousia) or of similar substance (homoiousia) became indistinguishable from power struggles, and grew to mark the borders of belonging vs. enemy territory, like different flag designs. This misdirection continues today, with conflicts over the control of land, water, money, behavior, allegiance, etc. represented as fights over religion.

This political side of Christianity is what cut the Jewish Christians out of existence. In 312 AD, prompted by Constantine the Great’s controversial vision of a cross with the words “In hoc signo vinces” (“By this sign you will conquer”), Rome started down the path of becoming officially Christian. For practical matters, this let the Roman government subsume the Christian churches’ social-welfare infrastructure, which had grown to feed, clothe, heal, and teach people throughout the Empire. And on the ideological side, the government sought to standardize Christian beliefs, which meant officially favoring some Christian authorities, groups, and theologies over others. The Roman government offered the Church a deal, which Rev. Michael Mautner, a born Jew who converted and now serves as Rector of St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Oakland, summarized this way: “You accept imperial involvement in your theological internal affairs, and we’ll give you a monopoly to run your hospitals and schools.”

Arguments over theological points like whether Jesus was of the same substance as God (homoousia) or of similar substance (homoiousia) became indistinguishable from power struggles.

Under both Christian Rome and the Church-dominated centuries that followed, Christianity divested itself of elements seen as Jewish. In 325, the Council of Nicaea declared as heretical the Christians who calculated the date of Easter using the Jewish calendar (the Quartodecimans). The Nicene Council also officially pronounced Jesus and the Father as different persons of the One God (homoousion) rather than considering Jesus as like the Father in all essential respects (homoiousion). This decision made Christianity incompatible with the strict and literal monotheism at the core of Judaism. The popular form of Christianity that held otherwise, Arianism, became heresy and mostly disappeared. Judaism became the ideological enemy, incompatible with Christianity.

As Orthodox Jewish Rabbi David Kasher told me, if this Council of Nicaea decision had gone the other way, belief in Jesus might have remained compatible with Judaism. But as it played out, Jews became the Christ-killers, justified by Matthew 24:25, in which the Jewish mob at Jesus’s trial say, “His blood shall be on us and on our children!” All converts had to leave their Jewish identities behind, often under threat of violence. As Messianic Jews note today, it was the Church, not Judaism, that most vigorously perpetuated the notion that a person cannot be a Jewish Christian, often at the point of a sword. In response to this and to the associated centuries of Church-sanctioned genocide, Jews came to accept this framing. Judaism became more inward-looking and Jesus became the other, a focus entirely outside of Judaism.

All In The Family

Today, most Jews in the U.S. don’t consider themselves religious and seldom or never attend religious services. The religion of Judaism, defined as tradition-based worship and study practices centered around the Old Testament and Rabbinic literature, isn’t that important to most Jews.

And believing certain things was never the primary prerequisite for being Jewish. As Daniel Boyarin argues, Judaism was not considered a religion at all until Christianity defined it as one in opposition to itself. Before this, Jews had considered themselves a nation, if in diaspora, defined by a combination of culture, practices, beliefs, and history. Jews long resisted the characterization that they were defined by religious beliefs, and it wasn’t until the 18th Century that they even had their own word for their religion, the German word “Judentum.” As the old Jewish saying goes, if prayer really worked, people would be paid to do it.

If the Council of Nicaea decision had gone the other way, belief in Jesus might have remained compatible with Judaism.

I get the historical reasons why Jews see belief in Jesus as a special case, an especially threatening prospect that renders the term Messianic Jew a contradiction whereas BuJu (Buddhist Jew) is fine. But just because something has happened one way for a long time doesn’t mean it can’t change. Dan Juster recalls the leading Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod predicting that Messianic Judaism would be accepted by mainstream Judaism in a couple of generations, so long as it doesn’t assimilate into mainstream Christianity and it continues to carry on Jewish traditions and scholarship. “It needs to prove itself,” he explained.

But perhaps the Jewish mainstream’s non-acceptance of Messianic Judaism is shaded not just by the religious question of What is Judaism, but also by the more hotly debated question of Who is a Jew? Different authorities vary on this. The Orthodox Jewish definition hinges entirely on matrilineal descent or conversion, and has nothing to do with belief, which actually supports the Messianic claim. Reform Judaism allows Jewish identity to be passed through the father. Israel’s Ministry of the Interior makes their own determinations of whether prospective immigrants are Jewish in the eyes of that country. Many Jewish thinkers reject the whole project of determining who is or isn’t Jewish. As Douglas Rushkoff offered me, “I don’t generally consider people ‘Jews’ or ‘not Jews.’ I mean, is there some party they can only attend if they’re official? Am I granting them Aliyah? I don’t know if nature or God categorizes things like this.”

Messianic Judaism is a mutt. It isn’t classy. And for

elitist Jews, this may be its ultimate heresy.

Instead of using strict religious or hereditary definitions of who is Jewish, many Jews use the metaphor of a family or a tribe. They’re proud to belong to this old and important family, and regarding Messianic Jews, perhaps they don’t want to be too permissive about whom the clan should adopt in. For all of its proud Nobel Prize winners, public intellectuals, and cultural machers, believing in Yeshua has no part in their Jewish identities. Messianic Judaism is a mutt. It isn’t classy. As Dan Juster describes it, it’s a wild-and-wooly movement that recalls what the Pentecostals were like 100 years ago. And for secular, elitist Jews who couldn’t care less about antiquated notions like religious beliefs, this may be the Messianic movement’s ultimate heresy.

Marc Chagall: Christ in the Night (1948)

But this view is basically vanity. It runs counter to the ongoing Jewish hope for a messiah, for a peaceful and just world where all people join the Jews in following God’s law. Jewish history is littered with the remnants of such hopes, but practically, Jews have always needed to put their own family first in order to survive — just like other nations, ethnicities, and religions.

Now I believe that Jews have the power and proper conditions to be more inclusive, like Jesus was. We can leave our defensiveness behind, step up, and engage our narrative talents with those of Messianic Jews, Palestinian Christians, and others to fulfill ancient prophecies, or at least leverage them, in order to make the world a better place. We can take a lesson from the early Christian narrators, canonized or otherwise, and invite anyone who feels estranged to belong to the same reconciled human family that we belong to.

We can engage our narrative talents to fulfill ancient prophecies, or at least leverage them to make the world a better place.

In processing what I learned about Messianic Judaism, I was inspired to write some religious fan fiction of my own. Munayer and Loden’s call for creating shared narratives should apply to stories about the future, I believe, as well as about the past. So here’s what the muses gave me when I pondered what tikkun olam might look like, and whether it has room for elitism, exclusivity, and old grudges.

Part 4: The Shattering Conclusion

Speculative Fiction

As it is written, the Jewish nation was born out of a struggle with God coming to earth in human form. In Genesis 32:22–32, the patriarch Jacob confronts and wrestles a man whom he takes to be God. That’s the moment when he is named Israel. Some interpretations explain this confrontation as a metaphor; Jacob was alone and mentally wrestling with himself. Either way, this origin story suggests that Israel was destined to wrestle with God literally walking the Earth, or else just struggle with the idea of it.

And it shall come to pass that researchers develop a cheap DNA microarray that tests for Jewishness with a claimed accuracy of ±5%. Makes a great stocking stuffer! From this test, many Jewish-identified geneology buffs are surprised to learn that they do or do not not have matrilineal Jewish ancestry. And rabbis argue about whether an 0.8 or 0.9 confidence level should be the threshold for official Jewishness on the test, others take it as a sign to shift their focus to the more important gift from the Jews: understanding we are defined by the stories that we tell about ourselves, and that they are worth writing down. As anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj argues, knowledge about our genes can reinforce or change the narratives behind our sense of self, but it’s our choice either way.

This origin story suggests that Israel was destined to wrestle with God literally walking the Earth, or else just struggle with the idea of it.

In that day, a normative Jew has a Messianic Jewish neighbor and friend. Over the years, their personal connection evolves to include practicing Jewish traditions together, and the Jew starts to consider his friend a genuine part of the Jewish family — in spite of the dividing lines decreed from above.

The secular intelligentsia reconsiders its weekend morning ritual. They realize that going out to brunch and reading the Sunday New York Times at their own tables alienates them from their local community and implies the insignificance of anything that isn’t blessed to appear in the newspaper’s pages. Some join their local Sunday Assembly, while others start attending more traditional congregations, infusing them with new blood.

A secular general-interest publication breaks the taboo against scriptural references (John 1:1) cited inline in articles that are not about religion. Some readers are offended and stop subscribing, but more appreciate the connections into texts with ongoing cultural relevance, whether or not they believe. Other secular publications follow.

Reading the Sunday New York Times alienates them from their local community and implies the insignificance of anything that doesn’t appear in the newspaper’s pages.

Roll-your-own religionists come out of the closet, standing up to criticism from both traditionalists and atheists. Together, they create a Neo-Crackpot movement that shares and collaborates on new, morally-centered theologies which they then user-test as compatible or incompatible with the established religions in their own communities. The movement’s bottom-up creative dynamics recall the cross-pollination and memetic ferment of early Christianity. Contributors under current religious repression, who are on the front lines of the movement, participate via anonymization tools, while the global community of Neo-Crackpots have their backs.

A participant in the Open-Source Judaism movement, which seeks to further Judaism’s history of collaborative innovation using the metaphor of software development, writes what he calls a Messianic Judaism plug-in that ports belief in Jesus to Judaism. In the ensuing discussion, many participants come to consider Christianity and Islam as versions or flavors of Judaism, because they’re based on the same kernel, just as Debian and Ubuntu are based on Linux. Following this reasoning, they start referring to Christians and Muslims as Jews, in mixed company, hoping to win over anyone who might take offense through respectful discussion.

In the Holy Land, Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians develop an alliance for peace and shared narratives. Palestinian Muslims engage with the idea, backed by religious scholars like Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, that Islam represents a return to Jewish law and principles, in reaction to Christianity. Because Arabs and Jews alike trace their lineage to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, Arab Muslims have a greater claim to being Jewish than Christian Messianic Jews, and should be welcomed as citizens of a state with a combined Jewish / Jewish-Muslim population — a one-state solution with a Jewish-Muslim majority.

Christianity and Islam are versions of Judaism, because they’re based on the same kernel, just as Debian and Ubuntu are based on Linux.

Believers see an End Times reconciliation of the ancient family estrangement between Abraham’s sons Isaac and Ishmael. Palestinian Muslims convert en-mass to their own Islamic branch of Judaism and claim Israeli citizenship. The conversions are not initially recognized by the State of Israel, but they are supported by Israeli Messianic Jews, liberal Israeli Jews, and Palestinian Christians. Among participants and supporters, these conversions feel righteous and intoxicating, like a family breakthrough.

The love, acceptance, and hope are infectious. Israeli Jews talk about Jesus’s sacrifice again, and Jews everywhere are emotionally struck and convicted by the underlying truth of his story, regardless of doubts about his literal physical resurrection. They realize that all humanity and all life are loved, for want of a more exact term, in some way that exceeds the love that we have for each other and eludes the compartmentalization and replicability of science.

Battling Israel’s militant and protectionist old guard, the inclusionist reformers look back and wonder if their country took a wrong turn in its early years, when it became a predominantly Jewish “Jewish State” rather than a “state for the Jews” guided by democratic Jewish ideals. They wonder what Israel would be like if, back in 1949, Joseph Klausner had been elected its first president, rather than Chaim Weizmann. Klausner, a renowned Jesus scholar, criticized the Jews’ rejection of Jesus and considered Jesus to be “the Jewish moralist par excellence,” according to A Tale Of Love And Darkness, by Klausner’s nephew Amos Oz (which will soon be a movie directed by and starring Natalie Portman).

They wonder what Israel would be like if, back in 1949, Joseph Klausner had been elected its first president, rather than Chaim Weizmann.

Under increasing criticism at home and abroad, the defensive rhetoric of Israel’s old guard stops resonating. Fed up with ugliness, the Israeli electorate have a come-to-Jesus moment in which they embrace the Enlightenment ideal of separation of Church and State — or as Jesus put it, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” They accept the Palestinian Muslim converts as Jews, and voluntarily surrender themselves to the view that all Abrahamic faiths are basically Judaism. With new confidence, they negotiate for a unified one-state solution. They realize that the great and final lesson of the Chosen People for the rest of the world, is that the antichrist of exceptionalism will never bear good fruit, no matter who nurtures it. God guided the Jews through much of history to demonstrate this to everyone, and after the lesson takes, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

With an Arab majority in Israel, everyone argues about what the country’s name should be and what its flag should look like. The dispute threatens to derail the whole agreement until everyone realizes that they’re arguing about an abstract word and a piece of cloth. As a compromise, they decide to rename the country Zion, and with that, humanity reaches a higher level of consciousness. An era of peace begins.

The dispute threatens to derail the whole agreement until everyone realizes that they’re arguing about an abstract word and a piece of cloth.

To commemorate the occasion, the government of Zion decides to throw a massive party in Jerusalem that visually fulfills all End Time prophecies of the Abrahamic faiths. Watched remotely by all nations around the world, as prophesied, the spectacular outdoor show weaves together an aerial battle between the Christ and Anti-Christ, the Mahdi, trumpets, horsemen, angels, and all of the other far-out apocalyptic imagery. It’s like a bar mitzvah party for all of humanity, and former nonbelievers are astonished at how it all came to pass, through these chosen people, just as promised thousands of years ago when Abraham put God above his son Isaac.

God smiles. After a rocky adolescence, His children are finally grown up, ready to obey the law, and as Monty Python’s Life Of Brian puts it, all work it out for themselves. That was His plan all along — and indeed what every parent wants.

Whither Messianic Judaism?

Provable facts stand on their own and are easy to believe, but stories and beliefs that strain credulity require constant maintenance. This gives them the beautiful effect of inspiring community and mutual personal support, where people help each other believe together. No one needs to repeatedly surround themselves with others saying that the sun and the moon exist.

That’s why, so long as we are capable of loving each other unquestioningly, we will bind ourselves together with far-out and unprovable notions that resonate with our hearts and provide hope. If atheists want to appeal to more people, they need to come up with an adequate substitute.

By themselves, beliefs don’t do anything tangibly important, at least not in this life. They don’t directly feed, clothe, shelter, teach, or heal people. But I believe that they are still worth working on with self-conscious attention because they underlie, and undergird, how we identify ourselves. And if we can modify the basic categories that seed our emergent and ever-changing fractal of social identification, we can make more people feel included rather than marginalized, and provide a framework within which people are more willing to help one another.

So long as we are capable of loving each other unquestioningly, we will bind ourselves together with far-out and unprovable notions.

My unprovable, possibly far-out, but hopeful belief is that Jews will some day accept Messianic Jews as their own, and that this brave example will help inspire people all over the world to creatively re-think long-held categories and narratives in a conscious and positively transformative way. Jesus may or may not be personally involved in this transformation, but if there’s an afterlife as promised, I hope he is. I shared this hope with Dan Juster, including my “Party Time” End Times vision above, and wondered whether he would object to its not being Messianically correct. He didn’t— he liked it and thought it was interesting, and said that such a scenario is indeed possible, so long as people can empathize with views that they do not hold.

Even if mainstream Jews come to accept and appreciate Messianics without its sparking any grand transformation, which is the normal and likely scenario, I think that would also be good. For any Jews who view such a change as a threat to their survival, I will point them to the immortal words of Gloria Gaynor: “I will survive, I will survive. As long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive.”

Marc Chagall, Exodus (1952–66)

[Sidebar: How to Know the Truth]

*Footnote — a note about word usage:

Ultimately, this is a story about words; in particular, the word “Jew” and its etymological kin. The questions “Who is a Jew?” and “What is Judaism?” are old ones, but as with any other semantic debate, the answer is to unpack what each word represents in the worldviews of the people who disagree on it, and identify the differences underneath.

As biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins writes, “Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use. The mere presence in the dictionary of a word… does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.”

Definitions vary, so for simplicity throughout this article I will refer to Jews, rabbis, salvation, and other concepts directly, without questioning their use by the people I report on. I leave it as an exercise for you, gentle reader, to supply any quotation marks needed to frame these usages in a way that conforms to your own model of how the world works.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ed Baum, Chris Becktold, Gordon Becktold, Lynda Becktold, Wendy Becktold, Timon Birkhofer, Laura Cochrane, Thomas Coohill, Skye Corbett, Andrew Day, Brian Elson, Susan Esterly, Maureen Fitzgerald, Mark Frauenfelder, Robert Fung, Grace Gellerman, Tom Giesler, Mark Glaser, Adam Gomolin, Travis Good, Blake Hampson, J. D. Henry, Jeff Herzbach, Peter Hopkinson, the Inkshares team, Amandeep Jawa, Jenny Kassan, Lowell Kaufman, Harold Lee, Thomas Metcalf, Mike Miller, Sarah Minor-Massy, Liz Pallatto, Matt Payne, Gwyan Rhabyt, David Rudolph, Jonathan Sandlund, Noran Sanford, Sean Scullion, Michael Shuman, Sarah Marie Smith, Julian David Stone, Jonna Tamases, Amy Tanner, Jeremy Thomas, Brian Tierney, Vanessa Warheit, Ben Watts, Kirk Woerner, and Thad Woodman for generously supporting this writing project on Inkshares.

Thanks to Daniel Boyarin, Charlie Cohen, Barnaby Conrad III, Jennifer Epstein, Adam Gomolin, Dan Juster, Barney Kasden, David Kasher, Jessica Carew Kraft, David Lazarus, David Levine, Michael Mautner, Boaz Michael, Mike Miller, Charles Neveu, Gad Pratt, Russ Resnik, David Rudolph, Douglas Rushkoff, Russel Smith, and Aaron Trank for helpful discussion, input, and interviews.

Thanks to Barnaby Conrad III, Mark Glaser, Adam Gomolin, Dan Juster, Michael Mautner, Charles Neveu, and Stephen Rumph for helpful reading and feedback on draft versions.

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