Articles
US Politics
The Need for Progressive Realism
Yes, Obama was moderate, and still the lofty sounding rhetoric made us feel that change really was possible. Hope was in the air. With time, we didn’t so much argue about the policies of his administration, many of which seemed fair and forward-looking. Rather, we took issue with the unwillingness to fight, the folding of the hand before the cards were played, the untoward interest in compromise with those who sought his political demise, and the combination of heady discourse with reliance on advisers peddling conventional economic wisdom geared toward the rich.
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US Politics
Obama in Question: A Progressive Critique and Defense
Four years ago we seemed to take a shortcut to some kind of national redemption. The same nation that enslaved African Americans until 1865 and imposed a vicious century-long regime of segregation and everyday abuse upon them elected an African American to its presidency. The same nation that elected twelve slave masters to its presidency elected a president whose wife was a descendant of American slaves. The same nation that never would have elected a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement to national office fulfilled some of the movement’s most idealistic hymnody.
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US Politics
Why America Needs a Left
The United States today should be engaged in a great debate, not so much over who the next president will be, or over the role of government in economic life, but over the very identity and future orientation of the country itself. On the one hand, powerful right-wing voices argue that America is an essentially conservative country. On the other hand, other voices, led by the president, argue that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America!” implying that we are an essentially centrist country.
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Judaism
Sabbath Practice as Political Resistance: Building the Religious Counterculture
One thing Abraham Joshua Heschel and Karl Marx had in common, aside from having both been spectacularly bearded Eastern European Jews, is the shared insight that time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. It is this insight about time—patently obvious but frequently forgotten—that makes keeping a Sabbath day both spiritually profound and politically radical.
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Culture
A Salvo Against War, Torture, and Racism: The Art of Mariano Gonzales
Working in political isolation from most of his artistic colleagues in Alaska, Mariano Gonzales continues a noble tradition of critical visual consciousness that goes back many centuries and that thrives in the early decades of the twenty-first century. His politically and socially charged images challenge his audiences to think about the major issues of their times.
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Letters
Readers Respond: Letters from Winter 2013
Letters on restorative justice, pinkwashing, statism, and immigration from the Winter 2013 issue.
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Rethinking Religion
Coming Out on Yom Kippur
The moment I put the tallis around my shoulders, my service started. Immediately, I was taken up in the embrace of the rich cloth, the whole texture, the weave of my life, my family, the renewal of New Orleans. As soon as I felt the cloth on my shoulders, and the fringes between my fingers, I knew that the tallit is for both men and women. As I sat there, I felt every bit a woman, a beautiful Jewish woman in a beautiful Jewish tallis.
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Spirituality
In Praise of Baseball
After decades of observation and outright devotion, I believe that even in these difficult days for the sport, baseball continues to instruct on our most fundamental human virtues and values. More to the point, I believe baseball far more that any other team sport embodies and celebrates many of the principles at the core of what it means to be a progressive, and especially a spiritually minded progressive.
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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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Film
Hollywood Sci-Fi Goes Back to the Future
The value of sharing and selflessness even gets a nod, as Peter struggles to balance personal obligations with his dawning sense of purpose as a crusading superhero. Go Spidey!
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Books
Our Progressive Traditions
The source waters of the American religious imagination are larger than Christian orthodoxy—just as Jesus was an Orthodox Jew only more so, and St. Francis, a cosmic Christian whose love for his brethren included birds, donkeys, and the sun. Whatever the source of our common faith, it contains multitudes.
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Books
Comics and Jews
A most unusual book by a most unusual author in the comics world, this small-sized, thick, square volume follows in many ways upon Fredrik Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics (2001). It also departs in so many other ways that the contrast is vastly illuminating.
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War & Peace
France Doubles Down on Honoring the Memory of Vichy’s Victims
For the past few years, there have been voices of revisionism in France. It is very difficult, as everyone everywhere should recognize, to sustain sincere self-criticism regarding shameful national episodes. But President Francois Hollande has made clear that some issues must be addressed with intractability and not compromised.
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Books
Caring and Health Care
Our country expresses its values in how health care is delivered.
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Spiritual Politics
Raising the Curtain on “Gandhi Centre Stage”
I have never bothered to respond to Gandhi detractors because, like the Mahatma himself, I tend to think their pathetic writings are best left to die a natural death—the eventual fate of all untruth. Nevertheless, when Michael Lerner urged me to reply to “Gandhi Centre Stage,” the article by Perry Anderson that appeared in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, I assented.
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