Without a Claim is a book of leave-taking and transience, filled with poems about loss and decline, poems that look at the world intently but refuse to cling or assert dominion.
2014
A Secular Analysis of Evil
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In the second book of his trilogy, Lawrence Swaim explains in strictly human terms what causes aggression to replicate itself and how aggression—when rationalized, concealed, or dissembled—can become evil.
2014
Picasso and Chagall: Two Thought-Provoking Art Books
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by Susan Tumarkin Goodman and T.J. Clark
2014
Political Posters for the Twenty-First Century: A Spotlight on the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative
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Surveillance. War. Immigration. Palestine. Social justice heroes. Occupy. The political posters of the Justseeds collective take on all this and more.
Articles
Very Much Present at the Creation: John Judis’s Book on American Jews and the Establishment of Israel
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Judis’s Genesis, which stresses the importance of American Jewish/Zionist activism and lobbying in persuading President Harry Truman to support the establishment of a Jewish state, is not that different from the received narrative. What is different is that Judis makes explicit that he doesn’t understand how American Jewish liberals could so completely forsake their liberal ideas in opposing Palestinian efforts to retain their homeland.
Articles
At the Gravesite
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Had I become an academic only to disprove the myth that Jews are only interested in making money, or to confirm the stereotype that Jews are smart? Or did I honestly hope to influence the younger generation?
Articles
Alona Kimhi’s Magical Brutalism
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Lily La Tigresse is unsparing in its critique, but it’s also seminal in terms of launching its indictment of Israel—a society that, in Kimhi’s view, is no more generous or compassionate than the barbarous terrain of Europe, not to mention the U.S.S.R.
Books
The Muscular Song
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Many of Piazza’s poems insightfully—powerfully—explore this idea, illustrating the ways in which fear and love are not abstract emotional states but transformative processes of physical and psychological becoming.
Books
Challenging Christian Hegemony in the United States
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Reading Paul Kivel’s groundbreaking book Living in the Shadow of the Cross is by turns invigorating and overwhelming for exactly the same reason—he is shining a spotlight on the often unnoticed but pervasive system of Christian domination in the United States.
Culture
Pete Seeger: A Personal Remembrance
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I could scarcely believe my ears when staff members at Tikkun told me that Pete Seeger had just called to ask if he could perform at the first national Tikkun conference in New York City in 1988. I had raised my son on Seeger’s music, and had myself been moved by some of his radical songs. He was already a legend, and I was already a fan when I was in high school.
Books
Building the New Economy
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Rethinking the new economy will take a prophetic imagination. In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz calls us to reimagine our life together.
2014
To Know Us, Study Our Arguments
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Edmond H. Weiss reviews Judaism’s Great Debates: Timeless Controversies from Abraham to Herzl by Barry L. Schwartz.
2014
Winter Commute
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Dear friend, asleep / upright in a seat / when I boarded the train / goat-stepping over / your legs outstretched / why didn’t I wake you / but instead watched / you sleep. A poem by Joshua Weiner.
2014
Three Books Responding to the Repercussions of Slavery
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by Frederick Douglas, Byron Williams, and Jeannine Bell