The Spring 2011 issue of Tikkun is in the mail now to subscribers. Here’s the top half of the back cover:

Michael Lerner always puts on terrific events and this will be no exception. We will hear from each of the honorees above, as well as from Michael and Peter Gabel, who has guided Tikkun with Michael from the start. There will be energizing and spiritually deep music in between speeches. So if you can hop a plane, car or bike and come along, don’t miss it! Click here to register.

Protest in Wisconsin photo by A. Renner

Special Dispatch: Solidarity in Wisconsin

In Jordan, teachers protested this week for the right to form unions. In Wisconsin, they fought to keep that right. The stakes and the dangers in Jordan are enormously higher, but it’s a sad irony that we find ourselves sliding down to the status of a country that doesn’t even pretend to be a democracy. I wish with all my heart for these dangerous struggles in the Mideast and North Africa to bear real and lasting fruit, that in each of these cases, justice will prevail.

And I’m proud of my home state. I’ve been proud all week. Newly-elected Tea Party Governor Walker proposes to remove collective bargaining rights on workplace rules, safety, pensions, benefits, overtime, and, for salary, more than a cost of living adjustment would require a state referendum! This drastic curtailment of a voice for workers in their working conditions affects teachers, custodians, game wardens, university employees, librarians, health service workers, everyone except firefighters, police, and state troopers.

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Wisconsin Unions: The destruction of public sector unions in Wisconsin will directly undermine your economic well-being in the years to come. Almost all of us who are not rich have for decades derived hidden benefits from the ability of unions to set wages at a level that makes it possible for a middle class family with two wage earners to make a decent living. Their actions have a ripple effect that goes all the way up and down the class ladder.

If the unions are smashed, don’t be surprised if your job options and pay diminish dramatically in this decade. And that’s only one of many reasons not to allow the forces that wish to take care of the needs of America’s wealthy and powerful elites first before taking care of the rest of us to get away with destroying public sector employees — and these forces are in both major political parties and demonstrably in the Obama Administration as well. There’s also the reason of pure “justice, justice shalt thou pursue.”

Nancy Calef produces rich, detailed paintings of people and places — illustrations she refers to as “narratives containing many threads of humanity.” Whether she’s portraying casino culture, Wall Street, or the mainstream media’s misplaced priorities, Calef says she tries “to capture the common denominator and the unique quality in all of us.”

“Peoplescape” is the term Calef has coined for her people-focused visual narratives, in part to emphasize their coherence with her early work – mostly plein air landscapes. “I used to paint these beautiful landscapes, and it became too sugary for me because I realized the world isn’t only beautiful landscapes,” says Calef, who spent her twenties traveling and painting. Although Calef continues to create “travelscapes,” she has shifted her focus to depicting people.

I'm Just Saying

To see more of Nancy Calef’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and the artist’s website.

This week’s spiritual wisdom on unconditional love comes from Joyce Rupp’s “Fragments of your Ancient Name: 365 Glimpses of the Divine for Daily Meditation.” Rupp is an author, retreat leader, and spiritual midwife. For more information on Rupp, visit her website.

Unconditional Love

You are Love like no other.
Love so large you contain our smallness.
Love so deep you accept our shallowness.
Love so strong you carry our weakness.
Love so wide you enclose our wandering.
Love so tender you experience our hurting.
Love so tolerable you outlive our apathy.
Love so ardent you thaw our coldness.
Love so true you endure our betrayals.
Love so patient you wait for our returning.

Today: I accept that I am loved unconditionally.

One of the biggest risks of nonviolent protest is that those whom you are protesting might respond with violence. Ask Mohandas Gandhi and those who struggled for India’s independence. Ask Martin Luther King, Jr., and other African-Americans who joined in the civil rights movement. Such was the case most recently in Bahrain on the morning of February 17th. Yet in 2011 in the United States of America, if you were to engage in a silent and nonviolent protest in front of a major national leader, say merely turning your back on her while she was giving a speech on, say, the importance of free speech, would you expect to be brutally beaten and jailed by her security detail? Until receiving an email message from Ray McGovern, we would have answered that question with a resounding no.

Photo by Patricia Smith Melton, www.PeaceXPeace.org

This is my sketchy outline (all I can do in a blog post) of how close we were several times to peace in the last two decades, and what undermined this each time:

The first major blow to the Oslo peace process was Baruch Goldstein’s mass murder of Palestinians at prayer in Hebron. Israel contritely apologized but didn’t act as Meretz and other doves urged at the time, to forcibly evict the extremist settlers in Hebron and/or nearby Kiryat Araba. This was seriously considered by Prime Minister Rabin, but fatally rejected in the conviction that the timetable for final-status talks on the disposition of the settlements should not be disrupted. There were a couple of small Palestinian terrorist incidents before the Goldstein massacre, but they escalated precipitously afterward.

Then, there was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Nov. 1995 by a pro-settler extremist, which left Israel under the leadership of Shimon Peres, who stumbled badly during his brief tenure as prime minister. His most damaging error was in unwisely authorizing the Shin Bet hit on Yihyah Ayyash, the Hamas master bomber known as “the engineer.”

Earlier, Peres had failed to exploit Rabin’s postmortem popularity with a snap election, which Peres would undoubtedly have won. Instead, he called an election later, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad struck back for the killing of Ayyash with a wave of attacks that took 60 Israeli lives in the middle of Jerusalem (with two exploding buses) and Tel Aviv (where numerous mothers and children were murdered in a central square). This was in the middle of the election campaign, and Peres immediately lost his 20-point lead and was defeated by Netanyahu in a squeaker on May 26, 1996. This terrorist wave had occurred hard on the heels of Israel’s withdrawal from most of the West Bank’s population centers and its authorization of the first free election in Palestinian history, with Arafat elected as president of the Palestinian Authority.

Is it possible for pro-family conservatives and pro-human progressives to come together to block the job-killing, recession-reviving agenda of pro-corporate Republican elites? A perusal of conservative Christian websites makes me think it might be.

As you may know, every week I monitor as many Christian Right websites as I can find for “Tikkun Daily,” and again this week the websites continue to be dominated by anti-health care, anti-abortion (including attacks on Planned Parenthood), and anti-gay posts.

With all the problems this country is facing — with high unemployment and heartless budget-cutting threatening ordinary Americans, with health costs sky-rocketing and expectations of secure old age dashed, with young men and women dying in a war that has no clear purpose and no end in sight — why would conservative Christians support the Christian Right’s narrow agenda? I can understand the moral imperative for conservatives around abortion, but why the virulent attacks on making health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans and on legal equality that would help gay and lesbian couples and their children? I understand that Christian conservatives think homosexuality is morally wrong; I just don’t understand their obsession with it.

Two things just brought this new collection to my attention. Our friend the poet Adam David Miller came by with a review of it, and two of the poets, Rose Black and Melanie Meyer, let us know that the first San Francisco reading from it will take place next Tuesday evening, February 22nd, at Temple Emanu-El, San Francisco (details here).

“Five Bay Area writers, Rose Black, Margaret Kaufman, Melanie Maier, Susan Terris, and Sim Warkov, all published poets, invited five additional published poets, Dan Bellm, Chana Bloch, Rafaella Del Bourgo, Jackie Kudler, and Murray Silverstein, to contribute to this collection of poems of Jewish identity.”

Chapter & Verse: Some notes and observations

By Adam David Miller

When Rose Black handed me a promo sheet for Chapter&Verse I read “Five Bay Area…poets, invited five additional…poets…to contribute to this collection…,” I wondered what manner of work was this. With the thin-skinned, fragile, ego-driven, fractious nature of many poets I wondered how they even got the book together.

I need not have wondered. From Ethan Kaplan’s cover photograph of “Stained-glass window from Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco…”; to Tania Baban-Natal’s tasteful cover and book design (in this case “You can tell a book…) with two apt blurbs; to Jane Miller’s (“a well known American poet) thoughtful and inviting Introduction, Chapter &Verse is an anthology readers will immerse themselves in, learn from, cry and laugh with the poets who do cry and laugh at themselves. In plain speech, this is one helluva fine collection.

For most of the last decade, I lived in the crazy, cold, contradictory state that is Wisconsin. I wrote research papers in Madison, performed poems in Milwaukee, walked picket lines in Jefferson, organized student conferences in Eau Claire, led artistic workshops in Green Bay, spoke at my roommate’s wedding in Merrill, and went camping with my future wife at Black River Falls.

A big-city kid from the East Coast, I never fully got used to the overwhelming whiteness of Wisconsin – the winter, and yes, the people. But I eventually learned how to wear five layers in February, and that amidst the farms and abandoned factories, there was a working-class people with a strong populist ethic. As my freshman roommate from Wausau once told me, “Josh, I don’t follow politics. I just hate corporations.”

Fast-forward to 2011: the new Republican Governor, Scott Walker, has declared war on my old roommate and all Wisconsin workers. Under the guise of a budget deficit, Walker just put forth a bill that would destroy the unions that represent teachers, social workers, and over 100,000 public employees. He’s also making huge cuts to schools, health care, public transportation, and anything that actually helps people live.

Want more crazy? Walker ordered the National Guard to get ready to respond to a strike or any resistance to his plan. The last time Wisconsin called in the National Guard was way back in 1886, when they shot on a rally of Milwaukee workers advocating an 8-hour work day. Five unarmed workers were killed in the massacre.

Don’t miss this exclusive analysis from Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco and a long time contributing editor of Tikkun, just posted here on our main website.

Mubarak’s Ouster: Good for Egypt, Good for Israel

By Stephen Zunes

The inspiring triumph of the Egyptian people in the nonviolent overthrow of the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak is a real triumph of the human spirit. While there will likely be continued struggle in order to insure that the military junta will allow for a real democratic transition, the mobilization of Egypt’s civil society and the empowerment of millions of workers, students, intellectuals and others in the cause of freedom will be difficult to contain.

It is disappointing, then, that what should be a near-universal celebration comparable to what greeted the nonviolent overthrows of authoritarian regimes in the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Chile, Serbia and elsewhere has been tempered by the right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel and its supporters in the United States who oppose Egypt’s democratic revolution.

Israel’s standing among democrats in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world has no doubt suffered as a result of the Israeli government’s outspoken support for Mubarak and opposition to the pro-democracy struggle during the Egyptian dictatorship’s final weeks. Indeed, the very assumption that the continued suffering of 82 million Egyptians under a corrupt and brutal authoritarian regime was somehow less important than the possible negative ramifications of democratic change for five and half million Israeli Jews smacks of racism.

In reality, Israel has nothing to worry about….

The rest is here.

We got word today that Borders was declaring bankruptcy. I’m the co-owner of a small business and a partner in a small publishing cooperative and I was wondering what would happen to all the books, DVDs, CDs, and other products Borders had “purchased” from publishers but hadn’t yet paid for. Would Borders return those products to us? Would they pay us if they wanted to keep the products? Or, would they hold onto them and sell them and get whatever money they could for them without ever having to pay us?

I’m betting you can guess the answer.

By Edward Cherlin

Sharing in Gaza
For my 64th birthday last year, I played Beatles Rock Band with my family- I played drums while we sang, appropriately enough, “When I’m 64.” What made this birthday infinitely more memorable were the thousands of presents from a multitude of people I don’t even know– Palestinians, international charities, the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), and the government of Israel. These presents were XO education laptops. On this birthday, April 29th, after ten months of delays, the UNRWA’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) celebrated the beginning of its program in Gaza. The UNRWA’s core team of administrators, parents and the children of Rafah Co-Ed Elementary School D joined OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and UNRWA Commissioner-General Filippo Grandi for the donation.

A classroom of Palestinian children with their XO laptops, courtesy of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Photo by Nicholas Negroponte.

Giving education laptops to Palestinian children is one of my favorite projects and a mitzvah for not just these Palestinian children, but the entire world. Israel also grudgingly played its part, eventually allowing the computers in as humanitarian goods. Even a not-entirely-willing mitzvah is still a mitzvah.

I always think about Timmy around Valentine’s Day. He was my first boyfriend, or he would have been had he not gotten his head bashed in with a bat.

Tim came into my life late one night through my bedroom window. We were twelve. Tim, like my ten year-old brother, was short, blond and scrappy. He often sported contusions from schoolyard rumbles or his mother’s fists. Tim fought with everyone other than his Mom. He resembled an elf with poor tree-climbing skills: pointy ears, pointy chin, bumps, scrapes and wide blue eyes.

My brother, Billy, had unlocked my window for Tim, who was his best friend, but then had forgotten to tell me. I slept directly beside the window; my two younger sisters snoozed away in a bed across the room.

I was dreaming that a monkey was sitting on the sill. I woke up fully when Tim’s foot slipped and kicked my head.

“What do you think you’re you doing?” I demanded.

“It’s me…Tim,” he answered as if that explained everything. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. I was looking for your brother.”

“Maybe you should consider entering through the door, Batman,” I snarled.

In honor of Valentine’s Day and the removal of Hosni Mubarak, here is a link to an insane but hopefully amusing and perhaps even educational parody-satire about Mid East Dictators and their complicated relationship with the U.S.

“Mubarak’s Valentine’s Day”

It’s done in the spirit of The Godfather and Fatal Attraction. There is no boiling bunny but something equivalent, kind of.

It stars Mubarak, Obama, Clinton, President Zardari, Gaddafi, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, President Assad of Syria, Shimon Peres, King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia and Blackberry Messenger.

Hope you enjoy.

- hope all have a lovely and wonderful Valentine’s Day…unless you’re in Malaysia, in which case I simply offer you a “good luck.”

This is the first post in an exclusive Tikkun Daily series highlighting Muslim activists, entrepreneurs and artists who are making waves online.

Fatemeh Fakhraie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Muslimah Media Watch, the premiere website for Muslim women to discuss media images of themselves since 2007. In 2009, Fakhraie published her first book, Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Hijab Styles in Urban Iranian Women, a textbook version of her master’s thesis. In addition to blogging at Muslimah Media Watch, she also contributes to Bitch Magazine, Racialicious, AltMuslimah, and her own eponymous blog.

In an interview this month, I asked Fakhraie about Muslimah Media Watch and what motivated her to launch a site which is truly peerless.

“I hated everything I saw about Muslim women in mainstream media, and didn’t see myself in traditional feminist media,” she explained. “So I made a place for myself and women like me. In U.S. media, Muslim women are much more visible and even welcomed than we were when I started. But I think that there are still huge problems with that visibility: a lot of books and movies about Muslim women still fall into one stereotype or another, and a fair amount of news articles that feature Muslim women are reductive or coddling – I see so many articles that simply just pat Muslim women on the head for doing stuff that isn’t in itself exceptional, but seems like such a big deal for a Muslim woman to do.”

Like every other lover of democracy in the world I have been thrilled and at times moved to tears by the courage and success of the Tunisian and Egyptian democracy movements. And like many others I have wondered: where did this extraordinary commitment to nonviolence and creative organizing come from? One commentator wrote that they thought the most critical moment followed Mubarak’s speech on February 10, when he was expected to resign and didn’t, and the Tahrir Square protesters restrained themselves from reacting with violence. If you look at this map of Tahrir Square, above, on the BBC site where it is interactive, you get an idea of how that degree of self control was possible: these people were organized!

But this piece, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History”, from yesterday’s New York Times has done more to explain the movement to me than anything else I have read. The article explains the deliberate way leading organizers like Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer, went about schooling themselves in nonviolent organizing. They were particularly taken with the example of Otpor, the Serbian youth movement that helped overthrow Milosevic, and they were greatly assisted by an organization in Qatar (where it’s worth recalling that Al Jazeera was also founded) called the Academy of Change. Both Otpor and the Academy of Change draw deeply on the work of American political theorist Gene Sharp. According to Wikipedia:

Gene Sharp (born 21 January 1928) is known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle: he has been called both the “Machiavelli of nonviolence” and the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare.”

How are we each implicated -- or refusing to be implicated -- in the horror of racially biased, mass incarceration?

On Saturday I attended the first annual “Love Warriors’ Convocation” – an event that was put together by Seminary of the Street, one of my favorite local organizations in Oakland.

For the last few years I have had the good fortune of having regular walks with Nichola Torbett. I accompanied her, in conversation, through a process of resigning from her last job and founding this organization. Hers is the courage that takes people into confronting their deepest fears and opening up to life.

Over the course of Saturday’s event we were asked to do just that. I was most struck by what happened in the first part of the afternoon, as part of continuing to digest what has happened in Oakland since Oscar Grant was killed. Sujatha Baliga from Communityworks invited us to share in a circle our response to the following question: “How are you implicated in police brutality and the criminal injustice system?”

There were about 22 of us in the room. The object that was held by each speaker kept moving through the room. As each of us spoke, I felt a growing sense of honesty, a bond of truth between us. Everyone present contributed to a growing tapestry of clarity about what keeps it all in place. One by one we shared stories, small and large, of moments in which we had opportunities to stand up, to make a difference, and to show our humanity, and didn’t because of fear.

Last week in the House, eight Tea Party Republicans (along with 18 others) joined with 122 Democrats in Congress in refusing to extend the Patriot Act.

Opposition was expressed in particular towards parts of the Patriot Act that would authorize the government to continue to monitor the library records of American citizens, use roving wiretaps during surveillance operations, and spy on non-citizens who are not connected to any identified terrorist group. In an interview on MSNBC, progressive Rep. Dennis Kucinich praised the Tea Party Congressmen who opposed the Patriot Act, saying they are clearly serious about civil liberties and about preventing the government from reaching into people’s private affairs. He hopes to work with Tea Party Caucus members in the future on anti-war initiatives.

What Kucinich failed to mention, however, was that 44 out of 52 members of the Tea Party Caucus actually backed the extension of the Patriot Act, which is stunning, given the libertarian principles professed by the movement. It will be interesting to see what happens when Republicans bring the Patriot Act up for another vote this coming week.

No matter how it all turns out, I think it is refreshing to see at least some Tea Party libertarians stand on principle. The White House, however, was reportedly not happy.

During the interview on MSNBC, Kucinich offered the White House the following advice:

This is about the Constitution. And I think it would behoove the White House to align itself with the Constitution. That’s a very strong position to take…. The people from the Tea Party take the First Amendment seriously — right of free speech, freedom of association. They take the Fourth Amendment very seriously, right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. These are things that the White House would, I think, find even more support, if it chose to align itself with the Constitution of the United States.