Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/uncategorized/page/14/)
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There are few Jewish figures in the contemporary Jewish imaginary as seemingly irredeemable as Meir Kahane. In 1986 the Israeli Parliament passed “The Racism Law” specifically targeting Kahane and his KACH party that eventually removed him from the Knesset. Even though the law could arguably have been applied to others in subsequent Israeli Parliaments (even some who openly espouse allegiance to Kahane) it never has been and likely never will. It was a law legislated to invalidate one individual. In America, The Jewish Defense League he founded in 1968 has long been discredited, even as it still exists, and his vision of the diaspora, Jews, race, and ethno-absolutism is an embarrassment to much of the American Jewish public.
Donald Trump and Yiddish Theater? An unlikely duo. But, in 1970, as a wannabe Broadway producer, Trump did back “Paris Is Out!,” a comedy featuring American-born Molly Picon, the iconic actress of the Yiddish stage whose slim, agile physique often resulted in gender-bending, with her playing young boys, though, she always was revealed as a woman and got her man. While Trump’s Broadway backing was a flop, one of many failed ventures, Picon was very much a star, beloved by Yiddish speaking audiences who first crowded the theaters in the Bowery and later, after moving uptown, theaters in the Jewish Rialto, the Second Avenue Entertainment Center, to see plays that were written here about there. A new exhibit up at the Museum of the City of New York, New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway, guest curated by Edna Nahshon, an author and Professor of Jewish Theatre and Drama at The Jewish Theological Seminary, tells this story in an engaging way, relying on both a chronological and thematic design. “Yiddish theater is an immigrant theater, where playwrights construct a conversation with their memories,” Nahshon explained as she walked through the show.
My answer is yes, even in the face of despair by many who deeply love and care about Israel. The question arises because a short time ago one of Israel’s passionate defenders in the U.S., Rabbi David Gordis, finally gave up hope. Rabbi Gordis served as vice-president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles (now American Jewish University). He also served as Executive Vice President of the American Jewish Committee and was the founding director of the Foundation for Masorti Judaism in Israel. He founded and directed the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies which became the National Center for Jewish Policy Studies.
The 2016 presidential election will be the first to unfold against the backdrop of the national Black Lives Matter movement. Even as the movement remains most active in local campaigns and continues to have a fractured national character, its imprint is all over the Democratic Party’s primary process. This is, of course, of little consequence to the Republican Party, but matters greatly in the Democratic Party race where the two leading candidates for the party’s nomination—for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—attempt to position themselves as heirs to Barack Obama’s historically high Black voter turnout in 2008 and 2012. From the earliest moments of the 2016 campaign season, Democratic Party candidates have been racing to keep up with the movement. For example, Clinton reluctantly declared in a public setting “black lives matter,” in December of 2014 as Black protests erupted nationally after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who choked Eric Garner to death. Those protests boiled over into the spring, fueled by the brutal murder of Walter Scott in South Carolina by officer Michael Slaeger that was captured on video. Indeed, the frustrations with perceptions of police lawlessness erupted into open rebellion in Baltimore, Maryland, in April when young Freddie Gray died of injuries sustained while in police custody. The struggle in Baltimore not only applied pressure on sitting politicians to reign in the police, but it also pressured those candidates vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.
If an image is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth? Especially when it’s of young children and their mothers fighting a heavily armed soldier—grabbing, punching, and biting him—as he detains one of the kids, a kid whose arm is already in a cast from an injury caused by soldiers the week before? Apparently, the video is worth 100,000 hits its first day on YouTube. And over 3 million by the third day, and so on. The incident took place on a hill belonging to the West Bank Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, about 12 miles northwest of Ramallah.
Editor’s note: can you believe this? Some Israeli and Jewish forces around the world and in the U.S. are succeeding in making it illegal to criticize the Occupation of the West Bank or to advocate for BDS (boycotts, sanctions and divestment from firms that help make the Occupation possible or firms that do business with settlers. While we at Tikkun do not support BDS against Israel as a whole (for example, the attempts to boycott Israeli academic or cultural institutions) we do support BDS against the settlers and their institutions and those corporations that are assisting Israel to displace Palestinians, bulldoze Palestinian homes, and implement a brutal Occupation. Saying what we said in the last sentence is becoming illegal in some states and in some countries around the world, and on some campuses saying this is being labeled as “antiSemitism” and therefore made a reason to punish or suspend students or faculty. This is the most insidious assault on free speech yet, and if it succeeds it is likely to have 3 horrific consequences: 1.
Ari Bloomekatz is the managing editor of Tikkun. Before moving to Berkeley in 2016, Ari served as a creative writing coach for middle school students in Cleveland and worked as a daily journalist with news organizations across the country. Ari has been a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and Voice of San Diego, and has also worked for The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, the Cincinnati Enquirer and The Tennessean, in Nashville, among other publications. Ari also supports student journalism through the Bridget O’Brien Scholarship Foundation. Sometimes he teaches.
The last thing America needs is another “realist” or liberal compromiser as President. You never know what is possible until you fight for what is desirable. The realists are almost always wrong.
Loy, Buddhist philosopher and Zen master, suggests that recent Buddhist encounters with the West—and vice versa—have opened up new horizons and possibilities that are profoundly transformative for both cultures. A New Buddhist Path charts out some of these directions, outlining key features of a contemporary Buddhism that is both “faithful to its most important traditional teachings and also compatible with modernity.”
Over the past ten years, Detroit has become a symbol both of the American financial collapse and of the ensuing narrative of recovery, the story of how a great city began to rebuild itself after crisis. For Marge Piercy—former poetry editor of Tikkun and author of nineteen poetry collections, seventeen novels, a book of short stories, and the critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats—Detroit is a locus of memory.
How hard it is to keep Shabbat, to stop what crams days, evenings like a hoarder’s house and to thrust every worry, duty, command,
— Karl Marx writing “The Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.”
It was the time when children scrubbed
inside chimneys, or crawled
the methane swamps of the coal mines,
lit by iridescent fish. Mud streets and snuff and muck slops,
horsehair beds, grindwheel and harrow. The time when to show your mettle
meant showing the flint chips
stuck in your arm; when
to fire a worker meant, burn down his house. ~
Time was, Karl Marx sat rubbing his back
(no bristling beard yet; no doctrines),
sat studying so long
he couldn’t sit; the doctor said he’d gotten
Weaver’s Bottom, new ailment
of the kitchen-industrial age. Marx frowns at his Hegel.
Non-subscribers: This forum is available as featured open-access content on our publisher’s website. Every four years liberals and progressives are faced with the same conundrum: whether they should support the Democratic candidate for president, and in many instances, the candidates fielded in local congressional and gubernatorial elections; support the Green candidates; or simply abstain from voting altogether. On the issues that matter most, rank-and-file Democratic candidates are almost always far from supporting a liberal or progressive agenda, much less a spiritual-progressive agenda. Faced with the increasing extremism of the right, progressives have tended to stick with the lesser-evil candidate. The reasons are compelling: if right-wingers win the presidency and more senatorial or congressional seats, the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary could be filled with judges committed to serving the 1 percent and the reactionary social agenda of right-wing evangelicals.