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Vol 3 No 2 Table of Contents

• Publisher's Page by NAN FINK

The Uprising: Gaza and the West Bank

• The Occupation: Immoral and Stupid by MICHAEL LERNER
  Rabbi Lerner condemns Israel’s brutal policies against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as harmful for all Jewish people. Arguing that the nationalist and defense heavy sensibilities that arouse from Jewish persecution are adverse, Lerner insists that those who have been through such pain ought not echo it.
  

• A Voice from the Peace Movement by HANNAN HEVER
  In response to recent attacks in Israel by Palestinians and military conflicts in Lebanon, many Israelis have been voicing their dissent. Protesters have lost faith in peace organizers like the once popular Peace Now, countless are perceiving the group to be ineffective and too wrapped up in parliamentary politics.
  

• A Voice from the Labor Party by SHIMON PERES
  Given the diversity of ethnic groups living in Israel with and without citizenship. Simon Perez contends that it would be within peace-talker’s interest to grant equality among all in the land of milk and honey as the continual annexing and immigration around Israel leads only to more crime and discontent.
  

• Israeli Responses by ALOUPH HAREVEN, YAROM EZRAHI, ABBA EBAN, STANLEY COHEN, SHLOMO AVINERI, GALIA GOLAN, EDDY KAUFMAN, JEREMY MILGROM, JANET AVIAD, SHULAMIT ALONI, DAVID HARTMAN
  A panel of Israelis gives their take on the occupation.

• Interview with Mubarak Awad
  Director of the Center for Nonviolence, Palestinian resident Mubarak Awad discusses with Tikkun the need for a nonviolent attitude as a solution towards the growing violence in Israel and Palestine. 

Articles

• Liberalism's Public/Private Split by BETTY MENSCH and ALAN FREEMAN
  Given the changes in governments and culture throughout history, the distinction between our private lives and the public sphere is an inherent part of our existence. Alan Freeman and Betty Mensch discuss how this mental split does more feed the illusions of class, power and class and its connection with choice than the propagated reality in modern culture.
  

• A Response to Public/Private by PAUL STARR
  Opposing the call of Mensch and Freeman for a merging of traditional public and private sectors, Starr argues that maintaining the public-private distinction is essential to a free and democratic society.  Only by keeping the two spheres separate can those who wield power be held publicly accountable and the state restrained from intruding on society’s myriad forms of free association, including those for economic initiative and expressions of religious faith

• Healing through Meeting by MAURICE FRIEDMAN
  Friedman proposes an approach to psychotherapy that takes much from the philosophy of Martin Buber, while rejecting Freud’s theory that psychological distress is most often the result of a frustrated gratification of drives. Friedman starts from the view that growth of the authentic “self” depends on meetings at the “between” with another person, a partnering condition in which each person confirms the other by perceiving in full consciousness the other’s dynamic center, or uniqueness.

• Writing and its Discontents by SANFORD LEVINSON
  “Getting it in writing” is generally viewed as a way to remove existing doubt and promote future stability with respect to binding obligations.  Sanford Levinson shows, however, that the notion clearly does not hold with respect to many normative legal and religious documents.  One reason is that changing history often overrides their provisions.  In addition, the writing itself becomes subject, in time, to conflicting interpretations

• Reclaiming the Hammer by SHARON COHEN
  In rabbinical tradition, the “midrash” was a process in which rabbis sought to better understand biblical texts by debating alternative, and often conflicting, interpretations of particular words, passages, or characters in scripture.  Diverse as the interpretations were, however, they remained constant to the patriarchal view that women are both rightly subordinate to men and responsible for evil in the world.  This raises the question, How can the scriptures be read today in ways that are meaningful to women with feminist values?

• Report from the Movement by REENA BERNARDS and GORDON FELLMAN
  The authors were democratically elected delegates to the thirty-first quadrennial Congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), held in 1987, and comment on their experience and its implications.  As Progressive Zionists, they helped thwart an attempt by Orthodox Israelis to redefine “Who is a Jew?” in restrictive terms, spearheading passage of a resolution that gave “complete equality of rights to all streams of the Jewish tradition.”  The authors express consternation at the disruptions and fraud perpetrated by right-wing delegations during this vote, and at the acquiescence of the Labor delegates in accepting a ruling from the chair that further discussion and votes connected to Palestinian rights or to the peace process would be postponed.

• Report from Israel by TOM SEGEV
  The first of a new series in TIKKUN, this “Letter from Israel” describes an interview with a young Kibbutzer and member of the Socialist Young Guard who, awaiting induction into the Israel Defense Forces, had teamed up with sixteen fellow high school graduates to write a letter to Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin.  The interviewee, in particular, had decided as a matter of conscience that, while he would willingly pursue terrorists in the territories, he would not take part in a roundup of civilians.  This leads the author of the “Letter” to reflect: Could such a conscience have made a difference in the 1956 killing by Israeli border police of scores of residents of an Arab village for the crime of breaking a curfew? 
  

Special Feature: Rethinking Sexuality

• What's the Matter with Sex Today? by JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
  Elshtain reflects on America’s strange perceptions on sex and sexuality. Criticizing modern thought as a “politics of limits” and grounding sentiments that have arisen throughout American history on sexuality, she encourages more intellectual study of this aspect of human behavior and a far truthful look at sex in America.
  

• Thinking About Sex by JUDITH LEVINE
  As the fear of AIDS spreads throughout American media in the late 1980s, sex education has been lobbied by many religious right wing organizations in the U.S. to preach abstinence and other sex-damning sentiments.  Levine in turns critiques these backwards notions as a lost definition of what sex actually is and means. The stances taken by the majority of Americans about sex is a bent context and sex needs to be stripped of these pre-conceived notions as they promote segregation and narrow-thought.
  

• Down-to-Earth Judaism: Sexuality by ARTHUR WASKOW
  Waskow explores the ethics of sexuality in Jewish life as they relate to pre- and extramarital sex, homosexuality, monogamy, and sexual practices.  Based on a fresh look at Judaic tradition, the author advocates new ethical norms for both straight and gay sexual relationships that he believes reconcile traditional rabbinic views and the desires of the Jewish community with the changing needs of individuals in today’s more complex world.

• Judaism and Sexuality by DANIEL LANDES
  The author argues that sexuality is not only a means to personal gratification, but “an eternal and problematic dialectic between alienation and integration” that is rooted in the male/female dichotomy of human nature.  Every man or woman must find him- or herself in the other, but, because that other is “other,” the unity achieved must necessarily be broken.  For relationships to endure, couples must live together in both realms.  This is illustrated in the Song of Songs, where the relationship described is consummated not in fleeting pleasure but in mutual commitment that gains social acceptance. 

• Judaism and Homosexuality by BRADLEY SHAVIT ARTSON
  The author offers a fresh analysis of traditional Jewish legal sources that challenges interpretations used to justify the rejection of homosexuality, even as it is expressed in committed and loving relationships. He points out, for example, that the castigation of homosexual acts as “to’evah,” (disgusting, or esthetically repulsive), seems to refer specifically to degrading expressions of carnality and may well be interpreted to apply to any sexual acts that are coercive, exploitative, or violent.  The question must be asked:  Does a stable homosexual couple more closely reflect the oppressive or idolatrous sexuality of the “to’evah,” or the faithful partnership of a traditional heterosexual marriage?

Fiction

• Black Box by AMOS OZ
  This excerpt from Black Box, a novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, with English translation by Nicholas de Lange, is told in the form of a letter written by a former Israeli soldier to his former wife in Israel.  Produced in the symbolically charged setting of a lakeside Chicago office building besieged at dusk by a lightning storm and made eerie by a power outage, the letter contains dark reminiscences of battle deaths in the Sinai, the oppressive bullying of a powerful father, and sexual indiscretions of the former wife.  The writer longs for vengeance, but strives in vain to fan from the embers of his hatreds more than “a momentary flicker of malice.”

Reviews

• The Cloistering of Radical Minds by SEAN WILENTZ
  Wilentz takes issue with the claim made by Russell Jacoby in his book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Basic Books, 1987) that almost nothing written by Americans under the age of fifty is of any importance in the public world of ideas.  He disputes Jacoby’s blanket dismissal of an entire generation of American radicals, citing both younger academics who have challenged conventional wisdom in many fields and non-academic feminists and conservatives who can rightly be considered “public intellectuals.”
  

• From Moscow to Port Huron by PAUL BERMAN
  Village Voice columnist Paul Berman critiques Maurice Isserman’s If I had a Hammer...: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (Basic Books, 1987).  Starting from the breakup of the American Communist party in the 1950s, the book recounts the growth of a wide variety of democratic radical projects that laid the foundation for the mass New Left movement of the 1960s.  Berman credits Isserman for offering an original, detailed and accurate account of these developments, but takes him to task for stressing the “pragmatic” failure of the radical groups to build a unified movement, while overlooking their successes in pushing moral causes and their contributions to political theory.

• AIDS: The Mythology of a Plague by FRANK BROWNING
  Browning points up a revealing sidelight of the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in America in his review of Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (St. Martin’s Press, 1987).  Browning lauds Shilts’s book as “a masterfully researched investigation” into the pathology and societal impact of AIDS.  However, the book’s “abiding genius,” he says, is its dissection of two middle-class American subcultures, each probing the other’s secrets.  As doctors and epidemiologists studied gay sex, Stilts shows, they came to see how initial random acts of lust often led in time to friendships, organizations, and community.

• Jewish Psychology by JEREMY ZWELLING
  For Israeli social theorist Mordechai Rotenberg, Western psychoanalysis is another face of Christian triumphalism.  So writes Jeremy Zwelling in his review of Re-biographing and Deviance: Psychotherapeutic Narratism and the Midrash, the latest volume in Rotenberg’s trilogy offering alternative “Jewish” theories of social interaction and individual psychology.  For Rotenberg, Freud’s Oedipal theory is a variation on the Christian theme of death and rebirth that pervades Western culture from Paul to Freud.  As an alternative, Rotenberg constructs a Jewish psychology that is based, in the rabbinic midrashic tradition, on non-dogmatic reinterpretations, or “re-biographings,” of traditional Jewish material.

• The Banality of Good by LAURENCE JARVIK
  Reviewed by Laurence Jarvik, the documentary film “Weapons of the Spirit” (directed by Pierre Sauvage, 1987) tells the story of the people of a small Protestant town in France who, during the German occupation of World War II, stood up at the risk of their lives to save some five thousand Jewish refugees from deportation and death.  In Jarvik’s view, the film refutes a growing misconstruction of the Holocaust as an incomprehensible mystery that defied effective moral response.  It shows to the contrary that Eichmann’s “banality of evil” could in fact be matched by the “banality of good.”  

• All They Are Saying: Survey of Center/Right Literature by MILTON MANKOFF
  In their book Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda (Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, 1987), co-authors William Lind and William Marshner contend that cultural radicalism in American society is tied to an erosion of cultural and social restraints that leads inevitably to instant gratification and social disintegration.  In his review of the book, Milton Mankoff questions the philosophical and historical arguments put forward in support of alternative conservative principles.  He concedes that some of the social and economic goals proposed are admirable, but says they come with a familiar authoritarianism that would abridge cultural and social freedoms. 
  

Current Debate

• The Crisis in Jewish Philanthropy by GOTTLIEB HAMMER, JEROLD C. HOFFBERGER, ELIEZER JAFFE
  In his review of Eliezer Jaffe’s article “The Crisis in Jewish Philanthropy” (TIKKUN, Sept./Oct., 1987) Gottlieb Hammer, longtime chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and United Israel Appeal in New York, claims Jaffe “misrepresents and distorts” both the management and work of the Agency.  In response to Jaffe’s charges that most charity funds going to the agency are mishandled, Hammer asserts that “no other Jewish philanthropic enterprise in the world … receives as much surveillance, inspection, and rigid reviews as does the Jewish Agency.”  Jaffe urges funding for Israel through the United Jewish Appeal be eliminated in favor of maximum spending for Diaspora Jewry in his article “The Crisis in Jewish Philanthropy” (Sept./Oct. 1987 issue of TIKKUN), but it is strongly opposed by Jerold Hoffberger in his review of Jaffe’s article.  Hoffberger, who is past chairman of the board of governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel, argues instead that Jews who live in a free and affluent Diaspora have the duty to help build up the land and State of Israel as well as to help strengthen local and national Jewish institutions