About Tikkun

Tikkun Wins 2014 Magazine of the Year Award​

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Tikkun is the winner of the prestigious 2014 “Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage” award from the Religion Newswriters Association! Managing Editor Alana Yu-lan Price accepts the RNA award on behalf of Tikkun. Credit: Dawn Cherie Araujo. Tikkun caught the eye of the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA) with our special issue on immigration, which took discussions of spiritual religious principles and values beyond the confines of temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues, and instead debated their application in political and social realms. Reading Puck Lo’s report on a Sikh temple that mobilized to protect a worshiper from deportation, a diverse array of articles on why scripture should energize faith communities to fight for more caring policies on immigration, Ross Hyman’s impassioned article about why it’s a Jewish obligation to stand up for collective bargaining rights, and the many other wonderful contributions to that issue, the judges at the RNA decided to offer this special honor to Tikkun. The immigration issue lauded by the RNA was just one example of the deep convergence of religious and political thought that makes Tikkun powerful and unique.

Reviews

Jewish Thought

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Human Nature & Jewish Thought
Alan L. Mittleman
Princeton University Press, 2015

Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought
Edited by Elliot N. Dorff and Laurie Zoloth
Jewish Publication Society, 2015

One of the popular ways to dismiss plans for healing and transforming the world is to assert that the distortions we see in the contemporary world are an inevitable outcome of a fixed human nature. In his careful examination of Jewish thought, Alan Mittleman insists on the centrality of moral personhood not constrained by any set of conditions external to the process of ethical reflection and intuition. Not only are reductionist programs incoherent, he argues, they are also absurd. He argues for real freedom and transcendence but simultaneously insists on our human limitations: “We are holy—and capable of unimaginable evil.” Holding both, he suggests, is one of the great strengths of the Jewish tradition. Some genetic diseases are more prevalent among Ashkenazic Jews than among the general population, largely because Jews were always a small population and historically predominantly married only other Jews.

2015

Writing and Spirituality

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Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places
Gary Snyder, in conversation with Julia Martin
Trinity University Press, 2014

Nobody Home presents three interviews conducted by South African scholar and writer Julia Martin with the poet Gary Snyder that take place from the late 1980s to 2010, along with a selection of letters between them covering the same period. Martin was a young academic in apartheid South Africa when she first reached out to Snyder, motivated by her critical work on his poetry and thinking. Martin’s study and practice of Buddhism and her intuitive grasp of Snyder’s importance as a forefather of a growing international movement of spiritual environmentalism provoked Snyder to respond with sympathy and encouragement. They had an instant rapport in letters, which led to the interviews. This is a great period for Snyder, as his thinking about the nondualism of self/no-self and its relation to the world and all phenomena is culminating in his concentration on finishing Mountains and Rivers Without End, one of the crowning works of his generation of poets.

About Tikkun

Summer 2015 Table of Contents

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This quarterly issue of the magazine is available both online and in hard copy. Everyone can read the first few paragraphs of each piece, but the full articles are only available to subscribers and NSP members — subscribe or join now to read the rest! You can also buy a paper copy of this single print issue. We sent an email and postcard to all current members and subscribers explaining how to register for our members-only area. If you remember the username and password you created for Tikkun, you’re all set.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery (and below that Jeffrey Sachs) on the Iranian Nuclear Deal

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Editor’s note:

Avnery is sage in his analysis, but too much into big-power-politics thinking for comfort. As a result he underplays the role of ideology, and understates the evil deeds of the Iranian mullahs against their own people. Some people respond to the balance of power argument, then, by saying that Iran is more serious about ideology and hence might be willing to do a first strike on Israel even if that did lead to their own destruction. But here we agree more with Avnery–it is precisely because of their ideology that makes them want to remain the society that brings Islam to the world. To be the advocate for a growing Islam, rather than its grave-digger, a Muslim Iran has to avoid being wiped out by a second retaliatory strike by Israel should the Iranians use the nuclear weapons they will likely eventually acquire in ten or twenty years.

About Tikkun

Pastoral Prose Poetry

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Urban Pastorals

Clive Wilmer
Worple Press, 2014

In this short, rich book of prose poems, Clive Wilmer renews the pastoral tradition by eschewing romantic idealizations and coming into contact with the living image of an Eden corrupted by natural processes. Those processes, which connect us to the mystery of life and spirit, include both the workings of memory and the mechanisms of civilization. Wilmer’s memories are of a midcentury South London childhood “injured by enemy bombs”; of wooded commons where trees were “the very image of freedom in community”; of discoveries of Shakespeare’s power and Louis Armstrong’s musical “good place, where the leopard lies down with the kid”; and of art as “the expression of man’s pleasure in labour.” These memories form a groundwork for his warmly drawn and enigmatic human portraits, which enliven a religious vision that is convincing for its glowing clarity and sense of scale. Also recommended: Wilmer’s New and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012).  

To view Tikkun Recommends as a PDF, click here.

About Tikkun

Christianity for the Postmodern Mind

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Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

James Carroll
Viking, 2014

The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World

Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu
HarperOne, 2014

James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword unveiled to many Christians the sordid way that Christian institutions transformed Jesus’s message of liberation into a doctrine to support imperial domination and the persecution of Jews. In this newer book, Carroll attempts to reclaim the prophetic voice of Jesus that is rooted in Jewish messianism: “Recovering that sense of Christian Jewishness, like recovering the Jewishness of Jesus, defines the essential work that Christians must do in a post-Auschwitz world.” Throughout this powerful and insightful presentation of the ways a Christian can be “faithful to the classical tradition of Christian faith while simultaneously limiting assertion about (Jesus) to a modern—or postmodern—mind,” Carroll reads Christian texts from a contemporary perspective, in light of the distortions that led to the destructive misuse of these texts in the past. Contemporary Christians can take special pride in the work of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the outspoken Christian activist whose challenge to apartheid won him the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. Tutu became the chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to lead his country beyond the pain and anger that had festered under racist oppression. This beautiful and insightful book should be part of the school curriculum in every country of the world.

2015

Readers Respond: Letters to the Editor, Spring 2015

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A NOTE ON LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:

We welcome your responses to our articles. Send your letters to the editor to letters@tikkun.org. Please remember, however, not to attribute to Tikkun views other than those expressed in our editorials. We email, post, and print many articles with which we have strong disagreements, because that is what makes Tikkun a location for a true diversity of ideas. Tikkun reserves the right to edit your letters to fit available space in the magazine.

About Tikkun

Spring 2015 Table of Contents

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This quarterly issue of the magazine is available both online and in hard copy. Everyone can read the first few paragraphs of each piece, but the full articles are only available to subscribers and NSP members — subscribe or join now to read the rest! You can also buy a paper copy of this single print issue. Members and subscribers also get online access to the current issue and all archives. If you are a member or subscriber who needs guidance on how to register, email miriam@tikkun.org or call 510-644-1200 for help — registration is easy and you only have to do it once.

Israel/Palestine

Dispatches from the Open Hillel Movement

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This collection of pieces was born out of the debates modeled by the Open Hillel conference. Some essays represent voices or ideas that are currently excluded by the Standards of Partnership, some discuss the challenges presented by the Open Hillel movement, some tell personal stories of political transformation, and some discuss the historical diversity of Jewish opinions about Zionism. The collection represents a taste of the vibrancy of Jewish opinion, ideas, and debate that the Open Hillel movement is working to revive. These essays represent the beginning, not the end, of a new kind of conversation.

About Tikkun

Participants in the Selma march included:

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Saul Berman | Congregation Beth Israel, Berkeley, CA

Solomon S. Bernards | Anti-Defamation League

William Braude | Temple Beth-El, Providence, R.I.

Maurice Davis | Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation 

Maurice Eisendrath | president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations

William Frankel | Beth Hillel Congregation, Wilmette, Illinois

Albert Friedlander | rabbi for Jewish students at Columbia University

Jerome Grollman | United Hebrew Congregation, St. Louis

Joseph Gumbiner | director of UC-Berkeley’s Hillel

Leon Jick | Free Synagogue of Westchester, Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

Wolfe Kelman | Rabbinical Assembly

Saul Leeman | Cranston Jewish Center, Rhode Island

Arthur Lelyveld | Fairmount Temple, Cleveland

Allan Levine | Temple Emanuel, Rochester, N.Y.

Israel Mowshowitz | Hillcrest Jewish Center, New York

Gerald Raiskin | Peninsula Temple Sholom, Burlingame, CA

Steven Riskin | Lincoln Square Synagogue, New York

Nathan Rosen | director of Brown University’s Hillel

Sanford Rosen | Temple Beth El, San Mateo, CA

Murry Saltzman | Temple Beth-El, Chappaqua, N.Y.

Sidney Shanken | Temple Beth-El, Cranford, N.J.

Matthew Simon | Temple Ramah, Los Angeles

Herbert Teitelbaum | Temple Beth Jacob, Redwood City, CA

Andre Ungar | Temple Emanuel, Pascack Valley, N.J.

Joseph Weinberg | Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco

Perry Nussbaum | Temple Beth Israel in Jackson, MS, was bombed in 1967

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Politics & Society

Colonial Dynamics in the Middle East

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Inside Syria

Reese Erlich
Prometheus Books, 2014

The Darker Side of Western Modernity

Walter D. Mignolo
Duke University Press, 2011

 

To many Westerners, the Middle East seems more confounding each day. How could the killings get any worse, the struggles more irrational? When the rebellion of Syria’s people against the oppressive Assad dictatorship suddenly turned into a civil war, thus giving strength to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the confusion only worsened. Reese Erlich, a prominent independent journalist, begins to unpack some of our questions. Setting the current struggles in the context of the world powers that created Syria, Erlich demonstrates how the histories and dynamics of international struggles are indispensible for understanding the current realities.