Marc Ellis, Pioneer of Jewish Liberation Theology, Dies at 71

Marc Ellis, the theologian who pioneered Jewish liberation theology and whose career trajectory was profoundly transformed by his encounter with the Catholic Worker, died on Saturday, June 8, according to a Facebook announcement by his family. Ellis had been battling an illness for several months. 

In recent years, Ellis has been an outspoken voice insisting that Jewish liberation bound up in the liberation of all those oppressed, occupied, or marginalized, particularly Palestinian liberation. His time at the New York Catholic Worker in the 1970s and at the Maryknoll School of Theology introduced Ellis to Latin American liberation theology. He became a critical scholar connecting Latin American liberation theology with post-Holocaust Jewish theology.

Ellis was born in North Miami Beach, Florida, on August 27, 1952. He attended college at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. As a freshman at Florida State, Ellis intended to major in political science, but he encountered theology and religious studies when he took an Introduction to Religion course. His class studied everything from Martin Luther to the Bhagavad Gita, a curriculum “which just absolutely, totally fascinated me,” he said in a 1988 interview with Rosalie Riegle. 

At Florida State, Ellis also met the Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein, author of After Auschwitz, who pioneered post-Holocaust theologies that grappled with how Jewish conceptions of God were challenged by the experiences of the Shoah. Rubenstein was an impactful teacher for Ellis. “When I heard him, I said, ‘This is my life’s work,’” Ellis recalled.

Ellis majored in sociology and religious studies but he called religious studies “my real love.” He was fascinated by religious belief and its influence on social practices.

During his senior year of college, in the fall of 1973, Ellis met William Miller, one of Dorothy Day’s biographers. Rubenstein suggested Ellis attend a series of lectures Miller was presenting on the Catholic Worker. These lectures consisted solely of Miller playing tapes of interviews he had done with Catholic Workers during his research for his book on Day, A Harsh and Dreadful Love. Miller provided sparse commentary on the tapes. That was Ellis’ introduction to Miller, Day, and the Catholic Worker. “Although I hardly understood it at the time, the tapes of his conversations were introducing me to a world of suffering and commitment and a way of looking at the world through the eyes of faith,” Ellis wrote in a March 1996 article in The Catholic Worker.

Miller brought Dorothy Day down to speak at Florida State, and Ellis met her his senior year. Because of his encounter with Miller, the Catholic Worker, and Dorothy Day, Ellis declined a graduate school offer from Vanderbilt University and went to New York to spend the next year living with the Catholic Worker community.

Ellis lived at St. Joseph House on 36 East First Street for nine months from the fall of 1974 to 1975. He described that time at St. Joe’s as his first cross-cultural experience: he was a Jewish young man immersed in a Catholic environment. It was, he said, difficult and challenging. It was the first time he, as a middle-class kid from Florida, had truly encountered the poor. He felt out of place and lonely, but, he said, it was one of the most important times of his life.

Ellis returned to Florida State to pursue a master’s degree in American Studies with William Miller. His master thesis was a series of reflections, or “diaries,” as he called them, on his time at the Catholic Worker in New York. Ellis expanded on these reflections to create his first book, A Year at the Catholic Worker, published by Paulist Press in 1978. 

Next, Ellis went to Marquette University in Milwaukee to pursue a doctorate in contemporary American social and religious thought. After completing his PhD at Marquette, Ellis found his next step when a Maryknoll priest happened to read his book A Year at the Catholic Worker just before leaving for the mission fields. The priest was moved by Ellis’ work and wrote him a long letter telling him so.

Ellis was intrigued: he had never heard of Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, a society of male religious in the United States dedicated to overseas missions among the poor. Ellis wrote back to the priest, saying he wanted to teach at the Maryknoll Society’s seminary: rather than a typical university post, Ellis wanted to teach those who were dedicated to working among the poor. Thus, at the age of 27, Ellis became the Director of the Peace and Justice Institute at the Maryknoll School of Theology outside Ossining, in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Shortly after completing his graduate work at Marquette, Ellis published a biography of Peter Maurin, building off his own research and Arthur Sheehan’s out-of-print biography The Gay Believer. 

Throughout the 1980’s, while working at Maryknoll, Ellis grew increasingly interested in connecting Jewish theologies with liberation theology, coming out of the South American continent. He published Faithfulness in an Age of Holocaust in 1986 and Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation the next year. 

Ellis introduced Naim Ateek, often called the father of Palestinian Liberation Theology, to the Maryknoll Fathers’ publishing house, Orbis Books. Orbis published Ateek’s seminal work of liberation theology Justice and Only Justice in 1989. 

After spending the 1983-1984 year at Tantur Ecumenical Institute’s Inter-faith Academy of Peace, Marc Ellis returned to participate in the first Palestinian Liberation Theology Conference at Tantur Ecumenical Institute in March of 1990. 

“So one of the things that I’m trying to do is initiate a dialogue between the Jewish community and liberation theology from Latin America and other places around the world from the aspect of solidarity,” Ellis told Riegle in 1988.

“Basically, theology needs to nurture the questions the historians are creating.  And when it ceases to do that, we need a new theology,” Ellis added. “Holocaust theology is basically a

theology revolving around the Holocaust and it’s powerful, but it doesn’t have within it the ability to critique our problem.” He saw liberation theology as a powerful dialectic that connected post-Holocaust theology to the struggle for justice and brought Jewish theology into solidarity with “all those who are struggling for justice.”

Throughout his fifteen years at Maryknoll, Ellis spoke–including at three Friday Night discussions at Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City–about nonviolence, nonviolent resistance, and Palestinian intifada and the Israeli occupation.

“I’m trying to be faithful as a Jew,” Ellis said of his theological work and his critique of the state of Israel. In a 2017 talk at Tantur Ecumenical Institute, Ellis described the “permanent occupation” in Israel as “infecting Jewish identity with atrocity.” This spirit of empire and domination had long inflicted Christianity, and resisting this temptation to power and empire was a new challenge for the Jewish people in the twenty-first century. But, he said, the Jewish tradition of prophetic witness persisted. “The Jewish prophetic will survive; it will continue to accompany and haunt those Jews who enable and perpetuate injustice against Palestinians,” he said.

Ellis felt the same tension and loneliness at Maryknoll that he had at the Catholic Worker: being the only Jewish man in a predominantly Catholic context. Robert Ellsberg, who arrived at Orbis Books in 1987, recalled Ellis complaining about crucifixes in the classrooms. “I really respect and honor the contributions he made, the work he did, and the seeds of solidarity and justice he planted,” Ellsberg said. “Both of us, in very different ways, got our start at the Catholic Worker.”

In 1995, the Maryknoll School of Theology closed. That same year, Ellis was appointed a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions. He also served as a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.

In 1998, Ellis served as a visiting scholar at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He taught a graduate seminar on Liberation Theology for Baylor’s J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies. The following year, he was appointed a professor of American and Jewish Studies at the University.

Ellis served on the board of the Society of Jewish Ethics and was inducted into the Martin Luther King Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. In 2000, the American Academy of Religion discussed his work during a session.

In 2012, Ellis retired from Baylor University. He retired to his native Florida. In a statement announcing his passing, his family wrote of his love of painting, photography, breaking out into song and dance, the New York Yankees, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young.

They also described his passionate dedication to theological writing and his copious reading and energy for encounter with others. “Since 1986 he has insisted: Jews and the Jewish future are intertwined with Palestinians and the Palestinian future. There is no Jewish liberation, without Palestinian liberation,” they wrote.

As those who have known him have said: may his memory be a blessing.