Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/education-culture/page/4/)
On 3 April, Howard University laid off eighty-four staff members, including E. Ethelbert Miller, a Howard alum and director of the university’s African American Resource Center. Though it doesn’t make the largest financial impact, cutting staff at the reeling university leaves the largest public impression that the institution is getting serious about costs, doing the hard thing for the greater good.
That summer my Palestinian-Jordanian Arabic teacher and closest confidant asked me, seriously, as many cynics told me she would, if the Holocaust actually happened. That summer I summoned up all the grammar and honesty I could find to say “Yes. And to admit that it happened does not excuse what has been done to the Palestinians. It’s not Jewish history, or Zionist history; it’s human history. Just like the Nakba is human history.”
Bandura found in his “Bobo Doll Experiments” that young people can be highly influenced by observing adult behavior, and perceive that such behavior is acceptable, while freeing their own aggressive inhibitions. They are then more likely to behave aggressively in future situations.
Labels aren’t helpful unless we seek to understand why we’re using them in the first place. I will admit that I use them in this article, though in using them I also hope to draw attention to their meaning, and to build a bridge where we can become conscious of our usage of such words and seek to translate them.
There is a “people’s history” of Selma that we all can learn from—one that is needed especially now.
I responded poorly to the young librarian by declaring, ‘they say that our imagination must be free to receive communications from God, for it is only the imagination can accept the inexplicable as real, and can find explanations for it.’
Vassar College professor Hua Hsu wrote in the New Yorker recently that “There should be nothing controversial about everyday kindness; civility as a kind of individual moral compass should remain a virtue. But civility as a type of discourse—as a high road that nobody ever actually walks—is the opposite. It is bullshit.”
Too many of us also tell old stories half-heartedly when it’s time to throw a new log on the fire. Sometimes we shy away from telling the hard parts because we fear being vulnerable. Yet the strongest stories and deepest power can come from these tender points.
Blogger Michael Nagler comments on what nonviolent resistance would look like in Mexico in light of the recent Iguala massacre after speaking with Mexican professor and nonviolent activist, Pietro Ameglio Patella.
Open Hillel launched a three-day conference, determined to create what Jewish institutions have largely refused to permit: dynamic spaces where both Zionists and anti-Zionists can come together and discuss Israel as equals, and with equally valuable perspectives as respected members of the American Jewish community.