Fasting for Tom Zipper

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I sent a text to my rabbi, asking whether I would have to give up coffee for Yom Kippur — but my cell phone “corrected” my message, assuming that “Yom Kippur” was my typo-laden attempt to thumb-type “Tom Zipper.” My rabbi texted me back, asking (reasonably enough) why this Tom Zipper fellow would want me to give up coffee.

Coercive Environments

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Education. Consumerism. Incarceration. Henry Giroux’s new book identifies these as three key forces in binding contemporary youth to the social structures of neoliberalism.

Jewish Anti-Zionism

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Jewish opposition to the State of Israel arises partly from the sense that Judaism is a religion of introspection rather than political action.

A Great Yearning Fills Them All…

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The search for an aesthetic and epistemological language of representation out of the shards of lives that were destroyed first by “progress” and then by two world wars becomes increasingly elusive and desperate. “Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz” by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer is one of the most eloquent culminations of that search and a powerful indicator of the physical and cultural traces that survive into the twenty-first century.

Racial Justice: New Structures and New Selves

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In his famous March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, then-candidate Obama asked us to move beyond a racial politics that demands a perpetrator and a victim and instead to begin to embrace the full complexity of race in this country. Yet, as we enter the winter of 2010, this rhetoric of hope and change has given way to an administration that has been disappointingly silent on race, as well as milquetoast in its policy prescriptions, even as multiple populist movements stir up white fear and anger.

Latin America’s Rising Left

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Oliver Stone has provided a great antidote to mainstream U.S. media coverage of Latin America with his latest film, “South of the Border.”

Rilke’s America

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Tell us, poet, what you do—I praise / Only, instead, the grave rasp of Kohelet / praising the dead, which are already dead / more than the living, which are yet alive.

Strange Land, New World

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I am the first Jew to live in this cloistered Benedictine monastery. I don’t blend. I wear a kippah everywhere I go, and I observe the Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. I’m studying to become a rabbi, and I live here in this remote community of Catholic monks vowed to chastity and obedience.