Culture

Oh Crap! I’m Triggered Again, Part One

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Holding steady when the ground is moving is normally part of my stock-in-trade.People often ask me for something to help put their own fears into perspective. Usually I am willing and able to oblige. Mostly I try my best to see the bigger picture, and mostly that effort pays off. But not now. I was staying more or less centered until a few days ago when something caught me off-guard. In the middle of a conference call, I got a text message carrying information that turned out not to be true, that the Barcelona terrorist who mowed down 13 lives like grass had been heading for a kosher restaurant on Las Ramblas, hard by the assassin’s abandoned car.

General News

Anti-Semitism is Back … and Won't Go Away

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Since the election of Donald Trump there have been hundreds of incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions, 20 more on Monday February 27th, along with college campuses reporting a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic graffiti. President Trump is reported to have followed alt-Right conspiracy theorists in suggesting in an off-the-record briefing that these might be false flag operations coming from Jews who are seeking to build sympathy and reclaim our victim status.
Also see a response at the end from Miriam Menzel.

Judaism

AIPAC Cheered Trump, Now They Will Cheer Pence: We Won't Be Silent

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Justifying its actions by appealing to an imagined security — one that puts both Palestinian and Jewish lives in danger — AIPAC employs the undemocratic tools this “security” requires: occupation, force, and walls. And it is not alone. Though it has perhaps done more to further the Occupation than any other American Jewish institution, the majority of other establishment Jewish organizations have followed its lead. But we refuse to buy their fictions.

Judaism

Fordham Shows the Hypocrisy of its Values by Banning SJP, Silencing Students

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As a Jewish child growing up in Apartheid South Africa, I saw how many of those who opposed Apartheid were often silenced, shamed, banned, not allowed to organize, arrested, imprisoned and murdered. As a result, we all lived in fear of openly expressing our opinion and too many in my Jewish community and in other faith communities betrayed our faiths by not speaking up for justice and not challenging the denial of freedom of speech.

Judaism

​Reading the Megillah for Purim

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The only book of the Bible not to ever mention the name of God, the Book of Esther is the historically latest book to be included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible. People have been divided for ages how to read it. Is the book a satire? A mockery of political language and an incompetently run palace? Wishful thinking that Jews might possibly defeat an advisor who wishes to do them evil? Wish fulfillment about the fate of the Jews in a world where they are in exile without political power?

art

Hands Up, Herbie!: Bugsy Siegel and Uncle Shmatik

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This is an excerpt from the comic book, Hands Up,Herbie!, by Joey Perr. A unique documentary work drawn from an oral history of Herb Perr, art teacher and art activist, it also offers a Jewish family history less outside the norm than younger Tikkun readers might expect.

General News

A Response to Jane Eisner's Op-Ed in Forward on the Sanctuary Movement

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Eisner discourages synagogues from participating in the Sanctuary Movement because she believes that congregations that offer sanctuary will cause “further politicization of religious life.” This is terrible advice at a time we desperately need an intersectional, multifaith coalition that confronts racism as well as the root causes of what compels people to leave their homes in the first place.

art

Mary Tyler Moore, the Hollywood Reds, and the Rise of Social Television

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I was not watching much television at the high point of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but I should have suspected something when some of my good friends, TV watchers and veterans of the Women’s Liberation Movement, mourned its passing in 1977 and perhaps even more, the early cancellation of the spin-off, Rhoda, a seemingly Jewish career woman’s saga, a year later.