Tikkun Magazine Archive 1994 - 2018 (https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/2010/11/page/2/)
Through all this long history of the succession of nations, one nation in the world trailed in the wake, Israel by name. Time after time it was cast about and driven from one country to another. Its rucksack, always ready at hand, was filled largely with books — books for the study of the Torah.
Why be Jewish? Why join temples? Why bother to introduce our children to Jewish ideas and practices? Answers to these questions vary from person to person and from age to age, but the questions persist. The questions seem as perpetual as the Jewish people itself.
In the United States as in Israel, much of the hawkish fearmongering against Iran comes from the Right. How can the moral panic theory explain that? Moreover, the same kinds of fears now directed toward theocratic Iran were aimed, just a few years ago, at the secular government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
On the same day that millions of people watched Lebron James announce he was going to Miami, twelve jurors in Oscar Grant’s case decided that, unless he can put a ball through a hoop, a black man’s life is worth little in America. Two decisions — both resulting from five hundred years of white supremacy.
Why has President Obama let us down? How come he lied to us? Why has he not kept his campaign promises? These are questions I frequently hear from people who attend my speeches and book signings.
The best way to honor John F. Kennedy’s legacy is to muster the courage to walk again through the “dark history” associated with his short but consequential presidency, in order to learn its lessons and discover its hope. Jim Douglass’s “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters,” which Touchstone is reissuing this month as a trade paperback, is a reliable guide for that demanding task.
The military-industrial complex, more powerful today than ever, imprisons the president. When he accepts the power to kill everyone, the president becomes a prisoner morally and politically to the demands of our national security state. Once the president accepts nuclear power over the world, his permissible movement is confined to a very tight space — tighter than we as citizens might imagine.
At $708 billion, the Pentagon gets nearly 60 percent of our discretionary budget (the money Congress is free to allocate). Meanwhile our schools are in crisis, lacking the money for teachers and books, and social welfare programs are weakening, depriving the most vulnerable members of our community of vital support and health care.
Ad hominem attack is not new in Jewish politics. Intimidation of critics of Israeli policy is as old as the modern State of Israel itself. Hannah Arendt’s experience in the 1960s offers an early example of repressive strategies for the punishment and repression of dissent.
Perhaps no field of biology evokes the fear of loss of the sacred more than neuroscience, the biology of the brain. Yet sacredness and meaning pervade the musings of many neuroscientists. How do we understand the brain in a way that promotes enchantment, and not disenchantment, in day-to-day life?