(Cross-posted from Jewish Philosophy Place)

Credit: Jewish Philosophy Place

The next President of the State of Israel is Reuven Rivlin, a blue chip and well regarded Herut guy of the old liberal stripe committed to a 1 State Solution. Rivlin is on record supporting the annexation of the West Bank and extending full citizenship and citizenship-rights to the West Bank Palestinians. This essay of his appeared in the Times of Israel. It was originally written for the Israel Democracy Institute as part of the run-up for the election. Rivlin understands the symbolic office of the presidency as a form of weak or non-sovereign power or center of gravity. One could call its value “paedeic.” Against the grain, the thinking reflected in this piece is open-minded, post-nationalist, and post-Zionist. Instead of “hasbara,” instead of occupation, he wants Israel to be “a light unto the nations.”

(Cross-posted from New American Media)

Credit: New American Media

Here we go again. Someone in a position of authority has said something racist. More specifically, something racist about President Barack Obama, and gotten caught. Only this time the person didn’t make a fried chicken or watermelon joke, or call the commander in chief “boy.” He actually used the n-word. And did I mention this authority figure—who used the most offensive racial slur imaginable—also happens to be a member of a local police commission?
Robert Copeland, a police commissioner in Wolfeboro, N.H., referred to Obama—in public—as “that f–king n–ger.” A witness subsequently reported the incident to other members of the police commission, which eventually generated a reply from Copeland that read, in part:

“I believe I did use the ‘N’ word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse (sic). For this I do not apologize—he meets and exceeds my criteria for such.”

Credit: Creative Commons

Ali Abunimah, an internationally known, Chicago-based political analyst, has completed a new book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine, published by Haymarket Books. His earlier book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, published in 2007, has been widely discussed, as has his website, The Electronic Intifada, co-founded in 2001 and known for its no-holds-barred advocacy for Palestinian rights.

With his second book, Abunimah has brought forth a comprehensive, multi-faceted analysis of the varied ″battles″ within the Israel-Palestine conflict. His new book also contains a careful explanation of what is lacking in the proposed two-state solution, and what is abundantly present in his proposed solution: self-determination for the Palestinian people.

A significant part of Abunimah’s new book focuses on major developments in both America and Israel, such as: minority-group incarcerations; brutal mass policing; the escalating success of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement; and Netanyahu’s insistence on Israel being recognized as a Jewish State (whereas Abunimah asserts that Israel – Jewish or not – has no more right to exist than the US or any other country).

A few years ago, while visiting a school in Ghana, I walked by a framed portrait of a woman who looked somewhat familiar. I stopped to examine it more closely, and then I recognized her: Maya Angelou.

A student saw what I was doing, and saddled up to me. “She lived here,” he said, proudly.

Indeed she did. Angelou, the acclaimed author who died last week, spent three formative years in Ghana in the early 1960s. But most of the tributes and obituaries about Angelou sped quickly past that period, focusing instead on the traumas of her early life and her triumphs later on.

That’s too bad, because Ghana – and Africa more broadly – were central to the way that Angelou and a whole generation of Americans thought about race, civil rights, and global affairs. Many countries in Africa were seen as comprising the vanguard of a worldwide march for freedom.

(Cross-posted from New American Mediaby Anna Challet)

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Salmon Hossein, an Afghan-American Muslim working on a joint law and public policy degree at UC Berkeley and Harvard, says that his own family hates that he has a beard. The outward sign of his Muslim faith, he says, makes his family worry about his future.

“They say, ‘How are you going to get a job? How are you going to be successful?’” He knows that they’re just looking out for him, he says. But he intends to keep his beard; it provides him with a connection to his spiritual journey.

Hossein, who spoke on a recent panel of young Bay Area Muslims in San Jose organized by New America Media in partnership with the One Nation Bay Area Project, is among a generation of young Muslims who grew up in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the rise of Islamophobia in America. Some have personal experience with hurtful speech and ignorant comments about their faith. Yet many still choose to show their faith through practices like prayer and fasting, wearing a hijab (head covering), or growing a beard.

Credit: Creative Commons

This spring, an obscure, right-wing extremist, organization which oxymoronically characterizes itself as the “American Freedom Defense Initiative” (AFDI), has managed to force Washington DC’s transit authority to be misused for the purpose of the posting of their odious speech and imagery, not necessarily protected by the First Amendment according to the 1942 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. It wasn’t the first time: this happened once before, in September of 2013, as well.

The ads currently being displayed on buses of our transit system, state “Islamic Jew-Hatred: It’s in The Quran” and next to an image of Hitler is the caption which states that a Palestinian he is talking to is “His Staunch Ally (and) The Leader of the Muslim World.”

On March 28 Brooklyn rock band The Shondes (Yiddish for “The Disgraces”) were disinvited from the Washington Jewish Music Festival, at which they were scheduled to perform on June 2, due to band members’ views on Israel and Palestine. Founding members, singer Louisa Rachel Solomon and violinist Elijah Oberman, have written this open letter in response.

Credit: Creative Commons/Flickr/Meaghan O'Malley

The idea of “The Jewish Community” gets thrown around a lot, even though we have never been a singular or remotely unified group. Jews have wildly different traditions, experiences, and opinions about what Jewish-ness even is. Are The Shondes part of this often-invoked, elusive community? In many ways the answer is clearly yes. But when its institutional guardians draw borders around it to keep out people and ideas they deem unsavory, out-of-line, or “off-brand,” it is an incredibly fraught belonging, to say the least. That kind of policing is the antithesis of the Judaism we love.

Editor’s Note:

Abba Solomon and Norman Solomon’s article “Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism”, responded to below by Milton Masur, has generated lots of controversy among Tikkun readers. Some of it has taken the form of denunciations of Tikkun for publishing the article at all. Milton Masur takes a more balanced approach in his criticisms. However, relying on Gershon Gorenberg’s history of the conflict has its problems. For example, Dr. Masur gives only passing mention of the systematic attempts by right wing Zionist groups to terrorize and massacre Palestinian civilians. In particular, the assault and mass murder at Deir Yassin was aimed at Palestinians who had conveyed their desire to live in peace with the Jewish population of Palestine–thereby conveying to Palestinian civilians that they would not be safe in the emerging Jewish state. The official leadership of the Zionist movement denounced these acts, but did little to prevent them or punish the leadership of these terrorist groups, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom became prime ministers of the State of Israel rather than brought to trial for conspiracy to commit murder. While there was no official plan to expel the Palestinian people as a whole, Israeli historian Benny Morris demonstrated that the forced march of tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes by what was to become the Israeli Defense Forces was an outcome of a strong feeling by Ben Gurion and others that eventually the Land of Israel would have to be rid of most if not all Palestinians, though it was important to them to not say so publicly at the time (hence the evidence for this claim lies in their journals and private conversations). Still, much of what Masur writes below deserves serious consideration in tempering one’s assessment of the way Israel came into existence in 1947-49. Moreover, this particular historical fact does not necessarily yield a reason to delegitimate Israel in 2014. The massacre and displacement of Palestinians in 1947-49 looks rather tiny in comparison with the much greater displacements and massacres committed during and after the second world war, and in the creation of the current states of India, Pakistan and China, yet it is only Israel that faces a sustained assault on its legitimacy as a nation state 7 decades later. This imbalance gives credence to the Zionists who claim that the movements in opposition to Israel are motivated by anti-Semitism. And that is one reason among many why Tikkun does not support any movement that seeks to delegitimate the right of the Jewish people of Palestine to have security for the State of Israel, even as we remain strong critics of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and are doing all we can to oppose the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza.

–Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun

Revelation is the heart of Torah. “G-d spoke to you face to face,” Moshe reminds the people as he recounts the great event of Sinai in which they all took part (Deut. 5:4).

That we all took part in it is essential to the meaning of Sinai. The revelation described by the Torah was not the property of one leader alone, or of an elite group, whose report had to be taken as authoritative truth. The authority of the revelation in the Torah is rather to be vouched for by the experience and the memory of each one of the community. Just as the redemption from Egypt was unmediated – “Not by means of an angel, not by means of a seraph, not by means of an agent;” “I, G-d, I and no other” – so, too, was the revelation to which the redemption led: “There was no intermediary,” said Abraham ibn Ezra (ad loc.).

On the path up Mount Sinai. Credit: Creative Commons/Templar1307.

As it was at first, so it remains: the authority of the revelation is to be found within. Its authenticity emerges simultaneously with the emergence of the authenticity of the self. As interesting as all other arguments may be for Torah, this essential argument is not an argument at all. It is pre-argument – the same way that we come to know that we are who we are, that reality is as reality is, so do we intuit how the authority and authenticity of Torah is as it is.

How is the content of that revelation written down for the ages? In some ways, it is not written down, for if it is to be as immediate and present for us as our own identities, there is unfolding something new to say each moment. It is, as Moshe says later in Deuteronomy, “in your mouth and in your heart, as you do it.”

But some of it was written down, engraved in stone, as we have learned to say. And the very first word on the stone is anochi – I.

It is, as it appears in the book, as it appeared on stones, the I of G-d. But the mystics break the word down to its elemental letters, each of which can be re-expanded and then stand for a full word. ANoChY – Ana Nafshi Ketavit Yehavit – wrote My self down and gave it (Likkutei Torah 48d).

Beyond giving of law, beyond imposing an order, the root of the revelation, the root of the Torah is G-d’s giving of self.

The receiving of Torah must match the generosity and the creativity of the giving.

(Cross-posted from New American Media)

SACRAMENTO – Irma Montoya, 53, had to wait for three years to get her hip replaced. Her severe pain finally triumphed over her fear of deportation and prompted her to seek the medical care she needed.

Montoya still needs access to health care because she has been diagnosed with diabetes and cancer, but she’ll have to wait for treatment because the hospital has placed her on a waiting list, said her son, Alessandro Negrete.

“I can’t wait to see the bill passed,” said Negrete, 31. “The first thing I’ll do when it happens is get my mom checked for everything and get myself a physical, too. I haven’t had a proper doctor’s visit since I was seven years old.”

Negrete was speaking about a bill introduced by Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, which will allow California to fund an expansion of health care to cover its low-income residents who are living here without documents.