Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/page/38/)
Reviews Highlights from the Tikkun Archive
The Tikkun print archive goes back twenty-five years. We are hugely grateful to a team of volunteers and interns who have been putting the archive online over the last two years, a task now near to completion.
Poetry & Fiction Highlights from the Tikkun Archive
The Tikkun print archive goes back twenty-five years. We are hugely grateful to a team of volunteers and interns who have been putting the archive online over the last two years, a task now near to completion. You can explore it here. In the next phase the team will create more pages like this selecting archived articles on particular themes. This one was created by one of our interns and doesn’t necessarily reflect official editorial choices: there will be time for that later, we hope!
The cultural politics of casino capitalism has numbed our sense of social and moral responsibility. Against this moral coma, with its theater of cruelty and legalized irresponsibility, we need to recast the language of politics.
So why is evil so sexy, and so profoundly glamorous? And why does virtue seem so boring? Why is it that when I told my thirteen-year-old son I was writing a book on evil, he replied “Wicked!”?
Without intending to reify, or circumscribe, I will present a taxonomy of experience that reflects my personal history and observations over forty-seven years, since I and a small group of new friends just commencing medical school in New York City dropped acid (LSD).
GRACE PALEY: COLLECTED SHORTS, Lilly Rivlin Productions, 2010
While barriers to understanding and implementing human rights are the biggest challenge facing the community from within, particularly in the international context, from without, Islamophobia is a huge problem. The Danish cartoon controversy is a prominent case in which there was a marked failure of communication.
For those of us who have, for many years, understood and struggled for tikkun olam, this question of meaning is the real and defining focus of the crisis of education. It calls into question the misguided concern for standardized testing, with its emphasis on uniformity, competition, and invidious comparison as the criteria of “effective learning.”
It was the culminating act of tikkun olam, repairing the world, in my twenty-five years in the rabbinate. Not because our world changed forever; Camden remains the poorest city in the country. But we had moved a mountain. We had shown what was possible. We restored hope.
I almost always write for the people who don’t agree with me, and I would like to see more writer-activists reach out. For me, that practice began at the old Village Voice when my editor became increasingly conservative. In discussions with him I tried to understand his objections and fears. My story was then shaped to answer his concerns.
Tenured humanists are an endangered species, possibly the last of a dying breed. Even now, adjunct instructors and graduate assistants teach most of the courses. Further, the ubiquitous presence of for-profit and online universities has increased pressure on brick-and-mortar universities to offer students more options for taking courses via the computer screen.
Babi Yar where are you, no signs that will bring me there,
Hid behind a sickled fist, the savior of the mortified,
Crushing leaves on walking by,
Trees renewed by the black lake of forty-one.