Lilly Rivlin is a New York-based filmmaker who tirelessly works against the odds to create documentary films that illuminate her passions for women’s rights, peace, and a secure, progressive Israel. She combined these concerns several years ago in a work narrated by Debra Winger, Can You Hear Me? Israeli and Palestinian Women Fight for Peace. (I know Lilly from Meretz USA, which she continues to serve, after taking her turn as president a few years ago.)
In The Tribe (1983), she documented a reunion of 2500 members of her enormous extended family in Jerusalem, where many have lived for generations. She, herself, was born in pre-State Jerusalem.
Does the “Real Housewives” franchise have anything to tell us about American politics today? I have been pondering this question for a while, but my thoughts began to congeal this morning in a bit of a circuitous way. It all started as I was perusing the Christian Right websites, thinking about what to write for my weekly post covering the Christian Right beat. While every newspaper is covering the uprising in Egypt, that was not even mentioned on any of the websites I checked. Instead, opposition to the health care bill and abortion were featured on almost all the sites, including Concerned Women for America, The Susan B. Anthony List, Traditional Values Coalition, Focus on the Family’s Citizen Link, and the Family Research Council, as well as the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property.
As a very young person, the access that I was given to highly classified information was an awesome sign of trust and came with an awesome amount of responsibility. It also came with a lot of training, restrictions from accessing information unless I had a “need to know” and a lot of discussion about “what ifs.” It would have taken an unfathomable “what if” for me to even consider disclosing information to which I had access to the public, as PFC Bradley Manning is accused of having done. If guilty, he will face severe punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Until he is tried, he deserves to be treated like any other prisoner facing trial, yet reports from his lawyer indicate that his treatment is anything but normal.
Jim Wallis, at Sojourners, walks a tightrope that gains him many critics. He is probably the best known “left” evangelical Christian in America, and yet he eschews the term “left.” He prefers to use the word “moral” and wants to see a moral politics, a moral federal budget, moral business, etc. And when he says “moral” he means primarily following the Bible’s injunctions to help the poor, the prisoner, the sick. What’s not to like about that?
The US appears to shy away from talk about democracy in Middle East, despite historic anti-government rallies in ally Egypt. It’s incredible, really. The president of the United States can’t bring himself to talk about democracy in the Middle East. He can dance around it, use euphemisms, throw out words like “freedom” and “tolerance” and “non-violent” and especially “reform,” but he can’t say the one word that really matters: democracy. How did this happen?
I’ve been thinking a lot about President Obama’s State of the Union address this week. Personally, I found it wholly uninspiring and was very surprised at the good reviews it received in the mainstream media, even on MSNBC. In my view, the speech was completely lacking in vision. Simply cobbling together a little of this and a little of that from both sides of the aisle, even when the demands are contradictory — investing in infrastructure and freezing spending — does not constitute a vision. It does not even constitute a plan.
“Hogwash, Mr. President,” Robert Scheer’s critique of President Obama’s State of the Union talk last night, is worth reading. Both that and my own analysis of the State of the Spirit in the Winter 2011 issue of Tikkun, written over a month ago, have important elements of truth. My approach, if applied to Obama’s talk last night, would agree with many of Scheer’s points, yet take a more compassionate approach, balancing Scheer’s correct righteous indignation with a larger view of the crisis facing the human race. Our NSP point of view would address what was even worse about the Obama talk: the reiteration of the dominant values of the capitalist order — such as that the real goal of society should be to enhance our capacities to compete with each other, that what we need is a return to economic nationalism in which the U.S. is number one, that education should be primarily in science and technology in order to make sure that we can beat the other countries of the world and retain our previous position as the most powerful force in the world, and that to do that we must build our military might and make our education focused on getting more power. As the writers of Tikkun magazine have repeatedly stressed, these ideas generate a world in which there is a struggle of all against all to “make it,” and a world of endless warfare in which our resources are aimed not at satisfying human needs but at achieving dominance.
What I originally took to be WikiLeaks were actually internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera by dissident Palestinians to embarrass Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership who attempted (apparently in good faith) to negotiate a two-state solution with the Kadima-led Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. What the Guardian and Al Jazeera are blasting as a betrayal of Palestinian rights was precisely the kind of deal that could work for both parties in bringing this conflict to an end. In agreeing to a very limited return of refugees to what is now Israel, plus a monetary compensation package, the parties would finally have ended the material ordeal of this population that the world has mired in a disgraceful refugee status as political pawns for generations. Israel may not expect better conditions in Jerusalem than its retention of long-established Jewish neighborhoods over the Green Line in East Jerusalem plus shared sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy sites. At the cost of Israel giving up its relatively recent settlement community of Har Homa, built to close off East Jerusalem from the West Bank to its east, this would be a bargain for Israel, and a way in which the Palestinians could claim most of East Jerusalem as its capital.
Rabbi Lerner, in his recent post, alerted readers of Tikkun Daily to two pieces of policy legislation introduced in Congress this week: the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment and the Global Marshall Plan. Both aim at creating a more caring society. In direct contrast to the humanitarian agenda of the interfaith Religious Left articulated in those initiatives stands the exclusionary and divisive agenda of the specifically Christian Right, as exemplified by the Manhattan Declaration (2009). The authors of the Declaration describe themselves as a coalition of “Christian leaders known for their public witness on behalf of justice, human rights, and the common good,” yet they are motivated by what they see as “growing efforts to marginalize the Christian voice in the public square, to redefine marriage, and to move away from the biblical view of the sanctity of life.” While the “sanctity of human life,” “marriage,” and “religious liberty” are ideals that most people support, an exclusionary and anti-democratic political agenda clearly underlies the Manhattan Declaration.
We had an email last week from an American physician and writer who is volunteering in rural Borneo. She wrote asking for an online subscription to Tikkun because Michael Lerner’s book “Jewish Renewal is one of the few precious books I carried here in my suitcase, and it is truly invigorating to me, a passionate religious liberal who is hungry for Yiddishkeit yet disappointed by much of the thinking that goes on in modern synagogues.” I asked her if she might be interested in writing some of her experiences for this blog and she sent this wise post about the problems of giving without an adequate understanding of what is needed. She blogs regularly at lowresourcemedicine.blogspot, where, to minimize potential problems for both herself and her NGO, she goes by Dr. Jenny. The road to hell and the privilege of volunteering
By Dr. Jenny
An odd little encounter in our rural Indonesian nonprofit clinic yesterday made me think more about the consequences of volunteering.
