We are always interested in ideas and links our readers send us, though we editors don’t always have time to check them out. For weeks we have been deep in deadlines to get 118 pieces for Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary issue into the print magazine (in bookstores now! buy one here!) or onto the web (where the web exclusives will all be up by week’s end, we trust), plus we just launched a new and beautiful newsletter which you can see here, and sign up for here (along with other Tikkun emails) and we are designing an even more wonderful new magazine website. That’s the Tikkun office headlines.

Luckily we did manage to read this email from one of our readers, Scott Rosenblum, which we are very happy to post. Incidentally, Letty Cottin Pogrebin is one the authors in the current print issue of Tikkun.

For Tikkun Daily, I thought you might be interested in an op-ed from the newest edition of the Forward, written by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a leading figure in American Jewish feminism and the founding editor or Ms. magazine. In her editorial and with the two year anniversary in mind for Operation Cast Lead, she gives her take on the Jewish response to Richard Goldstone and the Goldstone Report, namely that many of Israel’s defenders have acted contrary to Jewish values in their attacks on him and his report on the Gaza War. She argues that the criticism against Goldstone should be condemned on specifically Jewish grounds because:

“the observant and educated of Goldstone’s attackers surely knew that speaking ill of another human being (“hate speech” in current parlance) violates one of Judaism’s most sacrosanct laws, the prohibition against lashon hara (the Evil Tongue – i.e., gossip), which Maimonides defined as any utterance (true or not!) that might cause a person physical or monetary damage, or shame, humiliation, anguish or fear.”

Here is the full article. We have been saying very similar things in Tikkun for a long time now: see this piece by Brian Walt and Michael Lerner’s 2009 interview with Goldstone.