Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/page/26/)
The book’s certainly as nostalgic as Tennyson’s Memoriam, and no less melancholic, but unlike legions of other books written on loss, a sweet irony pervades it and makes the work fittingly beautiful, if not hapless to explain the grief that Elise endures.
You enter the country next door from under the stone / Church of the Redeemer / subway exit. No Pork Chinese Restaurant / and Mr. Chicken, flank the avenue / both strictly halal.
Larry Rasmussen reviews Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters by Roger S. Gottlieb.
Wendy Elisheva Somerson reviews Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman.
“On a night with a new moon, owls/ called, back and forth, over the house.” A poem by Arthur Sze.
To reorient this country’s immigration policy toward generosity and compassion will require serious creativity and vision. Let’s look to art for inspiration!
I’m writing to YOU to urge you to either come with me on Sunday or go to a nearer African American church this Sunday and let the African American community in your neighborhood or town know that they are not alone, that we understand their fear and stand in solidarity with them. No matter where you came out on the Zimmerman trial, you can still stand in solidarity with African Americans, support them in their grief, and signal to them that they are not alone.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore describes decades of queer activism in her new memoir, which is often scarring, startling, and never easy. But Sycamore confronts the problems in her life with real feeling, showing that emotion—if genuine—can often break us out of the corporate-sponsored numbness which so inundates our culture.
Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah have a lot in common, not the least their ability to profoundly alter our mind-states and influence our actions. In his modern Guide for the Perplexed, renowned psychologist Michael Eigen breaks down the connections between psychoanalysis and Kabbalah, and how they might be used together for our benefit.
“Black coffee at noon with fellow sufferers. / The bleak cups squeak in our hands. So do the chairs…” A poem by Kenneth Fields.
The DSM-5 is full of labels and misconceptions. Avoid it, if you can. If you can’t, at least know how it manipulates medical information to turn various mind-states into “disorders” and “diseases” which must be “cured.” The truth is, psychiatry can be a wonderful and holistic discipline, when not in the clutches of Pharma and the often useless drugs that industry peddles.
That the corporate-driven “medium” overcomes almost any conceivable “message” is one of the clearest lessons of the election of 2012. A review of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney
Hollywood hasn’t been igniting many intellectual sparks lately, but imports and indies are stepping in to fill the void, if I can borrow the title of a current movie. They vary in quality but share an urge to get audiences thinking and discussing. At a time when serious journalism is in crisis, some observers see documentary film as the best hope for putting crucial information and unpopular points of view before the public eye.
Van Trotta’s film on Arendt and “the banality of evil” not only restores memory but also might remind us of contemporary violent conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian one. The narratives told on both sides promote an unremitting hostility that over the past century has stymied efforts to make peace. These narratives, combining personal memory with cultural tradition, have fostered distrust and demonization of the Other. As Rabbi Michael Lerner points out, both sides “embraced nationalist rhetoric …. Both sides were traumatized by their own history, and by outrageous acts of violence perpetrated by the other.”