Politics & Society

The Religious Crisis of American Liberalism

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Here’s an excellent analysis from across the Atlantic. British theologian Theo Hobson understands a great deal more about why Obama won the election and why there is no continuing populist movement on the left than anyone I have read in the pages of the Nation, Mother Jones or the Progressive, let alone the Atlantic, New Yorker etc. (not that I read them exhaustively at all). You’d most likely have to read Tikkun or possibly the Christian Century to get a piece as good as this. It’s a pleasure to see it from a different country’s perspective.

Healing Israel/Palestine

The Campaign for Al-Arakib and Justice for Bedouins in Israel

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Our guest post Where Are The Jewish Greens? by Devorah Brous has been widely read in Israel as well as the US. The organization she is with, Bedouin-Jewish Justice, has just sent us this update on the campaign that Tikkun and the NSP have joined. Please sign the petitions to Netanyahu and the Jewish National Fund below. 18 Israeli and American Jewish groups:

Strongly oppose Beer Sheva District Court’s failure to grant a permanent injunction preventing Israeli Government and Jewish National Fund (JNF) bulldozers from resuming work to plant a JNF forest over Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib
Welcome the court’s recommendation that the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and JNF refrain from planting trees in Al-Arakib and irreversibly altering the status of the land
Strongly object to Israeli Government and JNF for 9th & 10th Demolitions of Al-Arakib and to ILA announcement yesterday of their intent to ignore Israeli court recommendations in their rush to eliminate the village of Al-Arakib forever
Call on all who care about Israel to join the over 7,500 who have already signed our two petitions of protest to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Lieberman, Leaders of the Israel Land Administration and JNF Leaders in Israel and the US

January 25, 2011 – The Beer Sheva District Court, which issued a temporary injunction a week ago stopping all further work by the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in the Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib, decided on Sunday, Jan.

Politics & Society

Politics is not at bottom about the struggle for power

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At one time in my life I taught sociology to both young undergrads and older social work students. I had a great time with the older students, some of whom had been working for many years already and really wanted to understand and change the world. But the younger, middle class students, many of them from Catholic high schools and homes where obedience had been taught more than curiosity and argument, needed a showman, an entertainer, to wake them up, and someone brilliant with ideas to give them something deep to think about once awake. That person did exist in our department: Bruce Luske. He was way to the left of most others at the college, but was able to put radical ideas across in highly popular classes.

Culture

The Honorable Scars of the McCarthy Era

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We haven’t done guest-written book reviews on Tikkun Daily before but here’s a nice one to start with:
Review by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum
It has been over fifty years since the end of the McCarthy era, but the impact of the blacklist has not gone away. Julie Gilgoff’s compelling memoir (at right, published by Allbook Books, 2010) about her grandfather Max Gilgoff, a Brooklyn, New York high school teacher, gives us a highly personal, insider’s view of that “Scoundrel Time” and its aftermath. Max Gilgoff wasn’t famous, like the Hollywood Ten. But in his community, he was a revered French teacher, a poet, an intellectual, and a man who fought for the powerless. When Henry Fields, a local, young black father of four was shot to death by a policeman for a minor traffic infraction, Gilgoff helped organize a peaceful protest that channeled his community’s anger.

Health

Biologically Inherited PTSD?

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It should be impossible, shouldn’t it? But now it’s looking possible and some researchers think they have found evidence of it. A major milestone in the development of evolutionary science was the defeat of the idea held by evolution’s first great theorist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829), that offspring could inherit the characteristics that their parents had acquired during their lifetimes. This was before it was worked out that biological inheritance works through genes and the language of DNA. While your DNA can be damaged, there is nothing you and your mate can do to otherwise change the genes you pass on to your biological kids.

Healing Israel/Palestine

What an Israel/Palestine Peace Treaty Could Look Like Now

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Our editor Rabbi Lerner wrote these prophetic words in early September for the Nov/Dec issue of Tikkun. Now that they have come true, it’s worth reading this article and paying especial attention to his recommendations in the last part of the editorial. Middle East Peace Negotiations? By Rabbi Michael Lerner

Until the populations of Israel and Palestine really want peace, the peace negotiations will be nothing but a slightly sad sideshow, unless the Obama administration, momentarily freed from its own electoral concerns, is prepared to put forward a substantive peace plan of its own. It used to be that the elites in both societies would tell you that once they worked out a deal, their relatively excitable populations would embrace it.

Christianity

Bringing Real Christmas to the Mall

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I haven’t been able to post for a while because we are up to our necks in creating a new website for Tikkun and getting out a bumper 25th Anniversary issue for January 1. That goes to press Wednesday and we are working through the weekend. It lifted my whole day to come into work this morning and find an email from my sister with a link to this video. “On Nov.13 2010 unsuspecting shoppers got a big surprise while enjoying their lunch:”

The Economy--Wealth & Poverty

Two important things to do during your Thanksgiving holiday to help fight world hunger

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Thanks to our friend Dave Kane at the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns for sending us this:
Two urgent situations require quick action from those who are concerned about world hunger. Your action can help counteract the massive presence of banking lobbyists in Washington. At a time when we give thanks for food on our plates, let’s help make sure that is a reality for people across the U.S. and around the world. In 2008, price bubbles in food and energy prices led to $4 gasoline in the U.S. and, according to the UN, forced over 130 million people around the world to go hungry. A significant factor behind those price bubbles was excessive speculation in food and energy commodity markets.

Culture

Security and Community

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This is a response to Miki Kashtan’s post on Privilege and Needs. Miki, I respond to this kind of large scale analysis very much. I want to respond about one of your binaries: Security/Community. I have a longing for a community that will give me security, and many fears also. And some degree of hope that those fears can be addressed, along with awareness of what a huge and central task that is for us.

Politics & Society

Some morning-after personal thoughts and dilemmas around the election

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I am writing here as a rank-and-file member, not a leader, in the political struggle. My internal monologues may or may not speak to others who, like me, are highly attracted to Michael Lerner’s vision but are not so adept at carrying it out. Like many of us I have a love-hate relationship with electoral politics. Love the people who fought tooth and nail for us to have votes and political rights. [br]
Aware that the power elites fought those heroes and lost some major battles to them.