Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/page/20/)
Jewish Vegetarians of North America is spearheading a coalition of groups that is making an audacious proposal: that the ancient Jewish New Year for animals, a day originally involved with the tithing of animals for sacrifices, be restored and transformed.
Today we continue a series of sermons on great matters of American culture and practice in which millions of people are stuck in painful or unjust relations, and no movement toward solution is coming through our collective will. Our theme today is the food system in America. It seems hardly to bear repeating, but let it be heard again that this, the world’s richest nation, has the largest proportion of poor people, when compared with other industrialized nations. How is that possible, except that somehow our wings are broken. Unlike gun control or our criminal justice system, which no politician will discuss, hunger and poverty have sometimes mattered to elected leaders.
Stephen Zunes is a Contributing Editor to Tikkun Magazine and professor of political science at the University of San Francisco. His article, “Divesting from All Occupations” comes very, very close to articulating the position on BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions) held by Tikkun Magazine. We differ only in the following respects:
1. We do not agree that the criterion of what counts as an “Occupation” should be determined in the legalistic way that Zunes derives from international law. The Occupation of Tibet by China and of Chechnya by Russia should count, and there may be other such (India in Kashmir, perhaps?).
Few Americans understand that “the Occupation” by Israel of the Palestinian people translates into regular violent assaults by Jewish settlers on Palestinian civilians. This story from Ha’aretz by widely respected journalist Amira Hass gives us part of the picture.
The current leadership in Iran is awful and we hope it is overthrown by its own people, but they are not self-destructive: they want an Islamic society and understand that it would be bombed into smithereens should it ever start a nuclear war. So Israel and the U.S. should take a peace-and-generosity oriented strategy which will undermine the Iranian regime’s hold on its own people, whereas a military assault will force all Iranians to back its repressive government in the name of national pride and solidarity.
What should we be doing if not working in the Obama campaign? The most important thing right now is to clarify our identity as a Left.
We now live in a Fourth-Amendment-gutted surveillance state, whereby some citizens of this nation actually make their livelihoods from spying on other citizens. We now live in a state of perpetual war, with an even larger number of Americans getting their livelihoods from the military-industrial complex.
By providing a bay window for the American people into the ugly realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Pfc. Manning has given us an opportunity to reform and evolve a U.S. military culture into one that prizes the sanctity of all human life – not one that merely seeks to minimize “collateral damage.”
This is how life is. Birth and death. Flowering and decay. They all happen at once. I want to enjoy in full and mindfully the good times, and to accept and savor the bad times.
Upon learning of Gore Vidal’s passing, I immediately thought of this highbrow celebrity’s flirtation with antisemitism. But an illuminating article in The Forward gave me pause about seeing him as fundamentally antisemitic. It mentioned that his live-in companion from 1950 to 2003, Howard Austen, was Jewish and that he assisted him to overcome the antisemitism of the advertising industry that had excluded him from a job in the 1950s. Vidal’s suggestion to change his Jewish-sounding family name of “Auster” to the WASP-y sounding “Austen” got him hired at a prominent firm. The NY Times obit did not mention his Jewish controversies, but rather covered his remarkable record as a novelist, playwright, essayist and acerbic wit, often featured on late-night television talk shows.