Freud and Kafka Revisited

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Review of Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst by Adam Phillips and Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt by Saul Friedländer.

Articles

Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders

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In 1975, I covered the trial of heiress Patty Hearst for the Berkeley Barb. She had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and was forced at gunpoint by her abductors to participate in their robbing a bank.

Culture

Small Father

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Crispy on the crust, moist, nutty, with dhana giro baked in, Mom’s stuffing is like a cross between her juicy lamb kababs and perfectly golden cornbread. At eight years old, I was there beside her at Publix the night she first asked a woman in the poultry department for help. That woman and another then explained, patiently, respectfully, how to clean and stuff a turkey, how to prepare the gravy.

Articles

The Disfigured Self: What Hannah Arendt Got Right

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The great question that lurks at the heart of all Holocaust study, it seems to me, is the question of the self: What would I have done if I had been there? Arendt is unique in making that question present for us, and while Strangneth professes to be in dialogue with Arendt’s book, she does not wrestle with its argument in more than a superficial way.

Culture

Chris Hedges on the movie “American Sniper”

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Editor’s note: While we at Tikkun do not feel it fair to blame Christianity or imply that all Christians somehow implicitly support the kind of Christianity that leads some American Christians to feel that their murdering of Arabs or Muslims is doing Jesus’ work, and want to remind our readers (before reading Chris Hedges piece below)  of the many progressive Christians who join the Network of Spiritual Progressives and other organization that oppose the US “Strategy of Domination” and instead identify with Tikkun’s Strategy of Generosity (as manifested in our proposed Domestic and Global Marshall Plan (please re-read it by downloading the full version at www.tikkun.org/gmp), we do think that Hedges’ powerful critique of the move American Sniper should be read by those who are too willing to forgive the American media for its implicit and sometimes explicit glorification of the US military. And shame on President Obama and liberal Democrats for not having stopped (what was at first just Bush’s)  war in Iraq when they had control of both houses of Congress and the presidency 2009 and 2010, instead backing a “surge” and providing the background and equipment that eventually led to ISIS and all its cruel perversions and murderous ruthlessness. But since it is always Tikkun’s task to find a compassionate angle from which to view people with whom we disagree, I need to put in a word for the decency and humanity of all the players in this complex picture of humanity that we face today, without letting the compassion stop us from making judgments about the violent behavior and cheerleading for that violence that has become so destructive in the contemporary world. –Rabbi Michael Lerner   rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com

 

Killing Ragheads for Jesus

By Chris Hedges

January 26, 2015 “ICH” –   “American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates.

2015

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.

2015

Romance in the Torah

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The Books of Jonathan: Four Men, One God
Gary Levinson
Self-Published, 2014

If you are itching to get away from the contemporary world, here’s a fun and steamy route: a hot gay love story based in part on an imaginative reconstruction of the relationship between Jonathan (the eldest son of King Saul) and Saul’s antagonist, David, who eventually overthrows Saul and becomes the founder of the dynasty that by legend is destined ultimately to produce the Messiah. Author Gary Levinson explores questions of faith and nationhood in a historical novel that provides a fun escape from the frustrations of the present even as it smashes any romanticization of the past.

2015

Hope in Israel/Palestine

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Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story

R.F. Georgy
Parthenon Books, 2014

The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust

Noam Chayut
Verso, 2013

 

In the wake of Israel’s bloody struggle in Gaza, it may be healing to read Absolution—a Palestinian Israeli love story by R.F. Georgy that rehumanizes what media reports reduce to political sloganeering. Here you can reconnect with the human spirit, transcending the normal boundaries of political positions to momentarily rekindle your belief in love. Another story that offers hope in this moment is Israeli Noam Chayut’s memoir of his life as a young soldier on the front line of Operation Defensive Shield, a devastating offensive against Gaza by Israel. Chayut’s memoir takes you into the inner life of a principled and caring soldier whose acceptance of the standard narrative of the Holocaust initially allows him to believe that Israel’s wars are necessary and just. His views start to change when his encounter with a Palestinian village shatters his certainty and he comes to question the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the necessity of the Occupation.

2015

Hope in Israel/Palestine

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Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story by R. F. Georgy

The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust by Noam Chayut

 

In the wake of Israel’s bloody struggle in Gaza, it may be healing to read Absolution—a Palestinian Israeli love story by R.F. Georgy that rehumanizes what media reports reduce to political sloganeering. Here you can reconnect with the human spirit, transcending the normal boundaries of political positions to momentarily rekindle your belief in love. Another story that offers hope in this moment is Israeli Noam Chayut’s memoir of his life as a young soldier on the front line of Operation Defensive Shield, a devastating offensive against Gaza by Israel. Chayut’s memoir takes you into the inner life of a principled and caring soldier whose acceptance of the standard narrative of the Holocaust initially allows him to believe that Israel’s wars are necessary and just.

2015

Poems for the High Holiday Season

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The Days Between

Marcia Falk
Brandeis University Press, 2014

Marcia Falk’s collection of blessings, poems, and “directions of the heart” for the Jewish High Holiday season is another gem by this inspired poet, whose Book of Blessings was an inspiration to a generation of feminists and their allies. With matching pages of Hebrew and English, Falk has captured some of the rich wisdom of Jewish spirituality that permeates the High Holiday prayer book (machzor), translating it into a language accessible even to resolute atheists.