Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/19/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
Donald Trump and Yiddish Theater? An unlikely duo. But, in 1970, as a wannabe Broadway producer, Trump did back “Paris Is Out!,” a comedy featuring American-born Molly Picon, the iconic actress of the Yiddish stage whose slim, agile physique often resulted in gender-bending, with her playing young boys, though, she always was revealed as a woman and got her man.
There was silence in the chapel. The light was streaming in through the large cathedral windows. The light came in as rays of golden possibilities in an impossible situation. The inmates were sitting on pews and around the table where we were studying in the back of the chapel. Nobody raised their hands. I asked myself, what would it take to generate interest and excitement in the topic of miracles; any kind of response-something? Was the lack of responses due to the oppressive and suppressive after-effects of long term incarceration? Or was there a lack of experience among these inmates? Maybe no one experienced a miracle?
The first time I heard that groups thrive on dissent, I didn’t like the idea. This assumption didn’t change overnight. It was a slow process of seeing, again and again, how individuals and groups find creative paths forward when they surface disagreements and engage with conflicts.
The candidacies of David Duke and Patrick Buchanan for the Republican presidential nomination are likely to give new publicity and respectability to only barely disguised racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic ideas in American politics. Right-wing extremists are creating a poisonous tendency in American political discourse, as they seek to establish a pseudo-community among the white middle class by mobilizing anger against the poor, the homeless, welfare recipients, immigrants, Blacks, gays, Jews, or the Japanese, and by rallying around talk about “America first” (the slogan of the pro-Nazi isolationists in the 1930s).
In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the Internet is replacing the “real,” material world, as theory asks us to question the very notion of reality. Yet that virtual world turns out to rely heavily on some distinctly old systems and realities, including the physical labor of those who produce, care for, and provide the goods and services for the post-industrial information economy.
No city is immune from the American epidemic of police killings that has only recently begun to gain wide attention — not even a liberal bastion like San Francisco. In her latest post, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, whose new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, will be published in April, takes a look at officer-involved killings in the “City of Love.”
In this post, I look at how experimenting with the full gift economy can only take place from a position of privilege, and what, ultimately, we can do to begin and continue these experiments in a sustainable way.
We crafted the essay below from personal and historical experiences for a series of talks on Jewish radicalism in the United States. Rather than survey a growing literature on labor and leftwing politics we chose to write about four Jewish radicals representing different twentieth century moments. Our thought was to glean insights(and perhaps inspiration) from reflections upon these four lives. Subsequent to the lectures given and the article drafts written, Senator Bernie Sanders, a New York/Vermont Jewish progressive, and a socialist,from an immigrant family background has surfaced as a viable candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for president. In many wayshis backgroundand political visionisnot dissimilarfrom that of Hannah Shapiro, Jack Spiegel, Herb March, and Jay Schaffner even though the paths taken by these four differed from Sanders.
This incident was one of the many egregious attacks on Palestinians that we, two Jewish American women, witnessed while we were spending time in Hebron working with activists at the YAS Center and documenting the daily human rights violations that they face.
With the Democratic presidential candidates taking aim at the lead poisoning in Flint and with the ongoing revelations about Republican Governor Rick Synder’s role in the disaster, one might form the impression that environmental racism has a partisan divide, but those involved in the protests in California know a different story. The Rev. Laurie Manning of Skyline Community Church UCC in Oakland has been active in struggles against both fracking and the proposed coal terminal. In November, she joined an interfaith coalition to deliver a letter to Brown that called for a halt to fracking. On Tuesday of last week, Manning addressed a rally outside Oakland’s City Hall in seeking to delay consultant work that could bring the city closer to having a coal terminal. In her remarks, Manning spoke of the pride she felt about Governor Brown’s environmental leadership in Paris, but then asked, “Why would we want to be complicit in prolonging and accelerating this environmental and humanitarian health crisis?”