Marc H. Ellis

Marc H. Ellis (August 27, 1952 – June 8, 2024) was an American author, liberation theologian, and a retired university professor of Jewish Studies, professor of history and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University. He was a visiting professor of several international universities, including the University of Innsbruck, Austria and the United Nations University for Peace, Costa Rica.

Biography Ellis was Jewish and attended Orthodox and Conservative synagogues in his youth. Later in life, Ellis belonged to anti-Zionist synagogue Tzedek Chicago and befriended Rabbi Brant Rosen.

Ellis earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in Religion and American Studies at Florida State University, where he studied under Richard Rubenstein and Catholic Worker Movement historian William Miller. After meeting Dorothy Day at a gathering that Miller had arranged in 1974, he moved to New York and lived in St. Joseph House, a Catholic Worker house, for nine months; this experience became the basis for his 1976 master’s thesis and, subsequently, a 1978 book, A Year at the Catholic Worker.

In 1980 he received his doctorate in contemporary American Social and Religious Thought from Marquette University, where he again studied with William Miller. They further resented that he did not join either of the two synagogues in the community. In 2006, the Center was renamed The Center for Jewish Studies.

Ellis's 2012 departure from Baylor was controversial as he and his supporters, including Cornel West, Rosemary Ruether, and Desmond Tutu, stated that a concerted effort was made to remove him due to his views on Israeli-Palestinian relations. Baylor President Ken Starr and the university administration denied that Ellis was being targeted for his views but that the investigation had to do with privacy rules. Ellis responded that the privacy rules he was charged with violating were selectively enforced.

Ellis officially retired from Baylor University and later served as a visiting professor at international universities such as the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica and the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Work and ideas Ellis's writings deal with contemporary Judaism, Jewish liberation theology, Jewish-Arab relations, justice, and peace. They are specifically concerned with Palestinian freedom, self-determination, and putting an end to Israeli occupation and war crimes. He believed that Jewish liberation could only be possible with Palestinian liberation.

Ellis's "Jewish prophetic" is a framework that he has described as both moral and religious, "with a political arc that bends toward justice and a profound sense of Jewish destiny. The Jewish prophetic is a deep encounter with the calling of Jewish history." Further, he argued that "the prophetic" tradition, rather than territory, is "the indigenous of Jewish history." Ellis also argued that "the Jewish tradition has this particular claim [to the prophetic] – originating and preserved in the Hebrew Bible" and at the foundation of diasporic Jewish life: "For Jews, the prophetic is local. It is the only reason to be Jewish."

In April 2018, the Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas, held a Festschrift in Ellis's honor. The contributions to that event were published in a 2021 book, The New Diaspora and the Global Prophetic: Engaging the Scholarship of Marc H. Ellis.

Later life and death After a long illness, Ellis died on June 8, 2024 at the age of 71.