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Emma Rosenberg, Ph.D.
erosenberg@nyu.edu
Faculty Fellow, Center for European & Mediterranean Studies
New York University
Year of PhD: 2022
Country: United States (New Jersey)
About Me:
I am a Faculty Fellow at NYU's Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame where I was a Doctoral Student Affiliate of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. I am a Comparativist studying nativism, and religion and politics with a focus on Central Europe. I have a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School in 2016 at Tufts University and I received my BA in Medieval Studies and History from the University of Chicago in 2008. Prior to Notre Dame, I worked as Director of Communications for a Chicago city councilman and on campaigns in the Chicagoland area.
Research Interests
Religion & Politics
European Politics
Immigration & Citizenship
Political Communication
Political Psychology
Nativism
Identitarianism
Countries of Interest
Austria
Germany
Hungary
Poland
Croatia
My Research:
I study the relationship between religious identities and nationalism, with a special focus on the far-right and legacies of religious conflict and fascism. Regionally, I explore these primarily in Central Europe and the United States.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Do societal religious practices affect European policies towards Muslim veils? We argue that public religious behavior has a substantial effect on European countries’ and regions’ decisions regarding whether or not to ban the wearing of the veil in public spaces. Using data from the European Social Survey, we find that countries with higher levels of religious attendance are substantially less likely to enact veil bans than those where religious attendance is less common. We augment these findings with data from Switzerland, where variation across subnational units parallels the patterns witnessed in Europe more broadly: aggregate religious attendance decreases the likelihood of both voting on veil bans and actually enacting them. In environments characterized by a salient secular-religious divide, high levels of religious attendance lead to greater support for the public expression of religion – even for religious outgroups – and this support is often channeled into more accommodating policies towards religious expression.
Across Europe and North America, political leaders and elites use ethnoreligious appeals based on white supremacist ideology with increasing success. Yet this rhetoric frequently includes positive references to Jews and Israel. What explains this pivot away from the historic reliance on the so-called “nefarious, menacing Jew”? Rather than interpret the transformation of the white supremacist Jewish trope as an ideological shift, this article demonstrates that the transformation reflects a mainstreaming of white supremacist discourse. More specifically, as white supremacist discourse increasingly finds a home in successful nativist political parties, framing Jews as a religion rather than a race sidesteps hurdles to attracting votes. Second, positive references to Israel rather than Jews demonstrates the evolution of an identitarian strand within white supremacy rather than a de-escalation of racist ideology. A comparison of the German AfD and the American Republican Party, two parties that increasingly employ white supremacist rhetoric alongside pro- Jewish rhetoric, illustrates the phenomenon. Within a larger political context, the de-racializing of Jews in white supremacist discourse reflects a shift in twenty-first century nativism from a preoccupation with race and nationality, to a focus on civilizational, cultural, and religious identities.
The rise of nativist parties in Europe has been accompanied by an increase in religious rhetoric. There is no reason to suggest that voters for nativist parties are motivated by religion, to the contrary, more Christian voters tend to vote for Christian Democratic parties. This article argues that religious rhetoric allows nativist parties to pursue ethno-centric agendas in an acceptable way and differently from Christian Democratic parties. Through the compilation of an original dataset of religious appeals from Austrian, German, and Swiss nativist and Christian Democratic party platforms between 1990–2021, this article demonstrates that changes in the distribution of the religious demographics of Muslims rather than Christians provide a catalyst for religious rhetoric but not an but not an explanation for type of appeal. Instead, the historical role religious identities played in the development of nationalities explains how nativist parties deploy religious rhetoric in the present.
The religious freedoms afforded by the First Amendment are rarely explored as potential threats to the survival of strict sects in the United States. Strict sects—ultra-insular, literalist religious groups—have historically suffered from state persecution; their survival depended on their ability to maintain a buffer zone, a strict separation, from society and its threat to both their physical well-being and their salvation. Intuitively, the state-sanctioned protection and mandate of non-involvement with religious groups should benefit strict sects. However, these protections actually come at a price to strict sects; a threat to the very separation that ensures their survival. For centuries, many strict sects, such as early Mormons, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Seventh Day Adventists, survived by operating in the shadows of the state. However, as state capacity grew in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the reach of the law expanded, religious practices deemed preferential or harmful to individuals became the source of conflict between strict sects and the state. These conflicts nearly always play out within the legal system. Ironically, in order to preserve the separation from society that is integral to their strictness, strict sects must engage with the state. I argue, however, that despite the modern, secular, legal context of these conflicts with the state, the strategies deployed by strict sects retain significant aspects of the survival strategies employed during periods of historical persecution by the state. Through an exploration of Amish and Hasidic litigation, I demonstrate that while the Amish use litigation as a survival strategy to further institutionalize their separation from society by minimizing interactions with government and state apparatuses such as education and healthcare, Hasids use litigation to further institutionalize their separation from society through separate accommodation within these state apparatuses.
Why do clergy talk with congregants about elections to a greater extent in Mozambique than Indonesia, or in the United States than Taiwan? Arguing that context shapes religious actors’ micro-level incentives to discuss or avoid electoral politics, we seek to explain variation in religious politicking— religious leaders’ and organizations’ engagement in electoral campaigns. Our framework integrates individual-level and country-level approaches, as well as theories of modernization, secularism, and religious competition. Drawing on survey data from 24 elections in 18 democracies in the Comparative National Elections Project, we find that human development depresses religious politicking, while secularism and religious pluralism boost it. However, “civilizational” differences in levels of religious politicking are muted and inconsistent. Finally, at the individual level, across the globe, citizens with higher levels of education are consistently more likely to receive political messages. Our results suggest the insights obtained from an approach emphasizing individuals embedded in contexts.