Israel/Palestine
Israel/Palestine
Why Yair Lapid’s Electoral Success Is Not Really a Centrist Victory
Both Israeli and foreign media have repeated the same prevailing narrative about Israel’s election—a narrative in which the Israeli center has returned to full strength and the Israeli right has taken a whipping. But in fact the right is in a comfortable position to forge a ruling coalition. The two current hard-right parties together won forty-two seats, a formation far more stable than the center-left parties with their forty-eight seats. Further, those hard-right parties have purged themselves of any vestige of center-right leaders of the past.
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Israel/Palestine
Mapping a Jewish Activist Future: A Review of Nepon’s Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue
How can we create space for friction and dissent from within Jewish institutions, such as the Jewish Federation or Hillel?
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Israel/Palestine
Crossing Borders, Planting Olive Trees
Joshua Davis has played music in South American rainforests, on the promenade in Havana, in old mining towns in Michigan, and beyond. But Tuwani, a village in the Palestinian West Bank, tested his comfort level perhaps more than any previous gig.
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Israel/Palestine
Languages of Liturgy and Occupation
Living in Ramallah has meant that I must see my Judaism differently. It means I sometimes have to turn myself inside out. I see our religious symbols differently. I experience Hebrew differently. I hear Hebrew as the five million Palestinians who live here do: not as a spiritual language but a language of military occupation.
Israel/Palestine
An American Jewish Identity Crisis
“Jewish life had its renaissance because Israel was born,” Rabbi Marvin Hier recently told my partner Deborah Kaufman and I during an interview for our documentary film Between Two Worlds.
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US Politics
The Jewish Community’s Drift Toward the Right
In the absence of a visionary or even steadfastly progressive leadership, the Jewish community has become stuck in a vicious cycle of recriminations, while slowly shifting to the political right.
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Israel/Palestine
Debating Pinkwashing
An Inconvenient Truth: The Myths of Pinkwashing by Arthur Slepian Responses to Arthur Slepian: The Greater Context of the Pinkwashing Debate by Katherine Franke Revealing the Truth Behind the Rainbow: Seattle’s Anti-Pinkwashing Success by Wendy Elisheva Somerson Pinkwashing, Brainwashing, and …
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Israel/Palestine
A New Heroism in Israel and Palestine
Mejdi is a tour company founded in 2010 by Dr. Marc Gopin, an orthodox rabbi. The idea behind Mejdi is that Arabs and Jews doing peace and coexistence work through NGOs are notoriously under-funded; hundreds of them are literally poor. They also spend a disproportionate amount of time writing grants and fundraising rather than doing their critical on-the-ground work. It’s an unsustainable model, and the Mejdi co-founders felt they could create a business for peace-building that was also self-sustaining.
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Israel/Palestine
Poisoning Arafat
For me, there was no surprise. From the very first day, I was convinced that Yasser Arafat had been poisoned by Ariel Sharon. I even wrote about it several times.
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Israel/Palestine
Revealing the Truth Behind the Rainbow: Seattle’s Anti-Pinkwashing Success
As a queer anti-Occupation Jew living in Seattle, I was part of the coalition that worked to get the Seattle LGBT commission to cancel the pinkwashing event, “Rainbow Generations: Building New LGBTQ Pride & Inclusion in Israel,” sponsored by Arthur Slepian’s organization, A Wider Bridge. In response to Slepian’s article, “An Inconvenient Truth: The Myths of Pinkwashing,” I want to clarify why we worked to cancel the event and counter his misinformation about pinkwashing.
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Gender & Sexuality
Israeli Occupation and LGBT Rights: Inextricably Intertwined
Improving the lot of gays in Israel without addressing the suffering of Palestinians under Occupation is a palliative measure. The oppression facing Israeli minorities, whether they be LGBT or Israeli Palestinians derives from the same root: the original sin of racism and dispossession.
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Israel/Palestine
Pinkwashing, Brainwashing, and Queer-Palestinian solidarity
It is utterly impossible to truly be simultaneously queer and Zionist. The following has been said thousands of times, but it deserves to be repeated until it sinks in: a “Jewish and democratic state” is a horrific, racist contradiction in terms, especially considering upwards of twenty percent of Israel’s population who are not Jewish. By the same token, as long as the LGBT community in Israel struggles only for the rights of the LGBT community, showing near total disregard for other groups that are oppressed—arguably more oppressed than we—our struggle loses a great deal of its legitimacy.
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Gender & Sexuality
The Greater Context of the Pinkwashing Debate
While I can’t speak for all who charge Israel with pinkwashing, I think it’s fair to say that the aim of the pinkwashing critique is not LGBT Israelis, but rather Israeli state policy that uses members of our community and/or our interests to burnish its own international reputation. In this respect, the concern is how LGBT rights get taken up by the state as a marketing tool and are served up to an international audience as part of a national rebranding project that necessarily implicates geo-political, religious, and international relations that far exceed gay rights.
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Israel/Palestine
Statism and Anti-Statism: Reflections on Israel’s Legitimacy Crisis
In today’s Israeli political culture, opposition to the state takes a wide variety of forms, ranging from principled anti-statism to rejection of the state in its current form on diverse grounds. A review of some of the recent turbulence can serve to highlight the breadth of this phenomenon, which has recently given rise to high-profile manifestations across the Israeli religious and political spectrum.
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War & Peace
All We Have in Common: Youth Dialogue Offers a New Vision for Israel/Palestine
If we truly want peace, we must highlight and strengthen solutions to the conflict that instead seek to build thoughtful relationships between Palestinians and Israelis. Programs that bring together Jewish Israeli and Palestinian youth offer such a solution.
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