Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/page/29/)
In Harry Potter, the wizarding world and the world of Muggles—the ordinary, boring, unmagical people—are at first kept separate, barely impacting one another. In Moriarty’s book, there aren’t two worlds, only one. Magic isn’t a counterculture. It is everyone’s folk culture.
The Israeli poet Admiel Kosman shifts his voice adroitly between ancient and modern, while never seeming quite settled in either. There is a persistent restlessness; nothing is ever straightforward or taken for granted. The poems wrestle with God, spiritual practice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the place of a poet’s work in society, the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and the baggage of tradition borne by the Hebrew language itself.
Army Cats
by Tom Sleigh
Graywolf Press, 2011
In Army Cats, American poet Tom Sleigh takes on the topic of the 2007 Lebanese Civil War not as an excuse for wanton journalistic rubbernecking, but as a catalyst for a series of troubled meditations on the nature of “force” within contemporary culture. Let me explain what I mean by force. To do so requires a look back at the groundbreaking work of philosopher and activist Simone Weil. Writing in the first year of World War II, in an effort to show that Hitler’s rise to power was not the anomaly that other intellectuals claimed it to be, Weil composed one of the most famous meditations on violence ever written, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force.”
Early in the essay, Weil defines what she means by “force”:
To define force—it is that x which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to its limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.
At the turn of the past century, Vienna—even more than Berlin, Paris, or London—stood out as the European city most friendly to radical innovation of every kind. Helping us to understand this era, which introduced the modern world that we inhabit today, is Eric Kandel’s book, The Age of Insight. Neuroscience, Kandel argues, can help to close the traditional gap between scientific and nonscientific forms of inquiry.
Lincoln comes from the cameras of Steven Spielberg, probably the most influential storyteller in modern cinema, and certainly one of the most vexing. But when the subjects aren’t pure make-believe, his movies tend to run aground on real-world complexities that flighty imagination can’t handle on its own.
Alison Greengard and Carol Racklin-Siegel’s series of Bible stories is a thoughtfully laid-out reading experience, but one that also comes with limitations. In contrast, The Bedtime Sh’ma: A Good Night Book and Modeh Ani: A Good Morning Book, both adapted by Sarah Gershman with illustrations by Kristina Swarner and also published by EKS, are lyrical and engaging books for both the youngest listeners and early readers.
Large, organized, collective interests are at odds with the future of restorative justice: unions of prison guards, economic benefits to communities from prisons, and then—perhaps the most difficult injustice of all—historical crimes whose legacies subject whole groups of people to continuing injustice.
We live as artists of Torah in a place that contemporary culture has no room for. In the self-identified Torah-world, Torah living is no longer an art; it’s a sublimation. The question to ask ourselves is “How are we living our lives?”
To deny that race and class do not matter in contemporary America and its criminal justice system is to deny the most obvious political, scientific, and moral reality of our society.
The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land. In this sense, black people are Christ-figures, not because they wanted to suffer but because they had no choice. Just as Jesus had no choice in his journey to Calvary, so black people had no choice about being lynched. The evil forces of the Roman State and white supremacy in America willed it. Yet, God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope “beyond tragedy.”
Feminist and black womanist reflection have long held that one’s personal experience always has political and universal implications. In light of this claim, the womanist lens that guides my approach to The Obama Question is especially intrigued by Gary Dorrien’s attempt to debunk and redirect racially politicized assumptions that undergird some progressive and leftist perspectives.
If Obama can re-establish the fundamental moral priority for the nation of the public or common good to what the founders originally held dear and what the biblical tradition teaches, he might have a fulcrum by which to pry the American moral spirit free from the prison into which the Tea Party and severely conservative Republicans have confined it.
I and my imaginary lover hover
above the roofs of the Jewish village. Above the courtyards, dairy barns, animal pens. Above the awnings of the chicken coops. Amid smells and clucking, cold air and wind
muss her imaginary hair, soft, colorful, flapping like cards. My love is not Jewish, she’s an urban girl, from the city of Tel Aviv,
giggling a pleasant and liberating laugh.
It took James H. Cone four weeks to write his first book, Black Theology and Black Power, a work surging with revolutionary expectation. It took him six years to write his latest work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, a book of haunting sorrow and beauty.
I am writing this by the bedside of my ninety-eight-year old mother, watching the life forces slowly ebb. It is a strange privilege, the fear of the inevitable and the sorrow of anticipated loss mingled with gratitude for so many years of presence and a minimum of pain in this twilight time. On the table beside the hospital bed on which Mom lies, rests Eitan Fishbane’s Shadows in Winter: a Memoir of Love and Loss. Eitan is my nephew and Mom’s grandson. In 2007, his wife, Leah, was two months pregnant when she died suddenly at the age of thirty-two of an undetected brain tumor, leaving her husband and a four-year-old daughter.