Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/page/36/)
A review of Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture: Don’t let the title dissuade you from reading this provocative book. The poets and thinkers represented here, many of them groundbreakers in American literature and thought, don’t know what it means either. That’s the point — to define these terms so as to answer a question that has not yet been posed in American poetry: what is radical Jewish poetry and how is it related to secular Jewish culture?
Imagine the ancient artist, before the tribe has gathered, putting aside his charcoal crayon or horsehair brush, chewing lumps of an ochre-rich clay, and spitting it in bursts through a narrow reed, to create a fine mist of color capturing the silhouette of his hand against the wall. Was it a kind of signature?
When most people think of evolution, the first thing that comes to mind is either survival of the fittest or selfish genes. Yet the psychologist and system theorist David Loye argues this is a misreading of the gist of evolutionary theory and the intent of that theory’s founder. Moreover, misreading Charles Darwin has severe social consequences: it fosters the belief that the worst side of humanity is bound to win.
Outside of Simon’s office, the hum of angels’ wings moved the air like an evening breeze. The pair, one young and one old — ageless really — but one wise, one unknowing, innocent, rested on the air and waited.
In Sacred Trash, husband-and-wife co-authors Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman, who met while working on the editorial staff at Tikkun in the late 1980s, have produced a fascinating hybrid — part historical adventure, part bibliographical paper trail and scholarly prospectus, and part poetic meditation.
Professor Benny Morris — a key member of the group of Israeli scholars known as the “new historians”– devotes almost the entirety of his latest book to shooting down the case for both one state and two states in all their variations.
Phil Wolfson’s Noe describes the experience of a family facing the serious illness and eventual death of Noah, their sixteen-year-old son. This wasn’t an easy book for a bereaved father to write: “The memory of losing him still ignites the most intense feeling of emptiness and longing. It took me ten years after he died to complete the chapter on the last days of his life…. Even now, writing this is complete torment.”
Socialism, contrary to generations of conservative (often also, liberal) propagandizing, may not be un-American after all. A review of “The ‘S’ Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism” by John Nichols.
Community-building and tikkun-ing the world are two themes A Traveling Jewish Theatre has explored during its thirty-four years. After receiving the Tikkun Award, theater co-founder Naomi Newman told two stories. The first, excerpted from Coming from a Great Distance — the theater’s inaugural piece — emphasizes the importance of community and is based on the life and stories of the Baal Shem Tov. Her second story illustrates our ability and responsibility to heal our potentially perfect, yet imperfect world. Don’t miss her dramatic performance:
[youtube: video=”apoGSoKZbDc”]
My low opinion of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist values is even lower now that I’ve sat through Atlas Shrugged, an adventure in tedium that would surely have disappointed Rand, a lifelong movie fan.
Matthew Fox reviews Peter Kingsley’s “A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tiber and the Destiny of the Western World.” He writes that in this book Kingsley tells “An earth-shattering, history-breaking story. One that raises whole new possibilities of humans understanding other humans whom we imagine to be so different from ourselves.”
Or Rose reviews Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman’s new book, “Freedom Journeys: The Tale Of Exodus And Wilderness Across Millennia.”
Our readers are largely interfaith, sophisticated, and busy — so we need someone to find us fiction that is compelling or wildly humorous or deeply spiritual or in some other way touches our souls or our funny bone.
One of the biggest, long-lasting delusions of progressives is that people are moved mainly by rational arguments. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The time-honed debate about whether the Song of Songs is a celebration of sensual love or a depiction of the ever-changing, running-and-returning relationship of the Holy One and the People is put to rest in Rabbi Shefa Gold’s recent translation and commentary of the Song.