Editorials & Actions

The Torah heading of Noach from Rabbi Zalman Kastel

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Seeing and not seeing  (through the prism of  Noah and the Ark) Reflections on my trip to family in New York – Noach
 
I’m sitting on a flight back home from New York with my young son. Last night both of us danced the night away at the wedding of my niece. I am still savouring the joy of being with family, and observing the delight of my young child. Yet, my tradition, turns our attention to sadness amid joy. A glass is broken during the Jewish marriage ceremony to remind us of loss 1).  Oddly, this sombre gesture is not honoured by a reflective silence, on the contrary, immediately after the crashing noise everyone erupts into joyous exclamations of Mazal Tov!

Editorials & Actions

Are Jewish Students Facing Anti-Semitism or Intimidation on College Campuses?

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A new study published by Stanford University reveals that Jewish students feel safer on university campuses when they refuse to conflate their Jewish identities with unequivocal support for the State of Israel. By Oren Kroll-Zeldin

Members of Students for Justice in Palestine hold a ‘die-in’ on campus in solidarity with the people of Gaza during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, March 3, 2014 (photo: SJP at UC Berkeley)

 

In recent years numerous studies have created the impression that university campuses across the United States are a hotbed of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment. These studies describe Jewish student experiences on campus, painting an alarming portrait of a politically unsafe climate for Jewish students who are ill equipped to deal with these challenges. Related stories

The ‘Jewish tent’ just became even smaller
By Rebecca Arian | September 25, 2017

 
Why young Jews don’t trust what their institutions say about Israel
By Eliana Fishman | September 14, 2017

 
Dear Jewish community, let’s stop being scared of the Palestinian flag
By Rob Abrams | August 2, 2017

 
The lie at the heart of the Jewish American consensus
By Edo Konrad | June 30, 2017

A new study published by Stanford University Graduate School of Education contests these beliefs, arguing not only that campuses are a safe place for Jewish students, but also that students are alienated by the very nature of the debate on anti-Semitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. This groundbreaking new qualitative study, called “Safe and on the Sidelines,” is based on a 10-month study of Jewish students on five campuses across California, and highlights the subtleties of the experiences of Jewish students and emphasizes student voices to uncover a far more complex picture of Jewish life on campus – particularly regarding the complexities of the political debate they face on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Editorials & Actions

Israel, Stop Selling Arms to Myanamar

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Editor’s Note: While we agree strongly with the author of the letter to us below that it is tragedy that Israel continues to supply arms to Myanamar, we disagree with the premise that Israel is a “democratic country” as long as it refuses to grant equal voting rights to the millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli rule either directly or indirectly. And Israel is NOT the only non-democratic country to be selling arms to Myanamar, and joins that group of ethically reprehensible countries in this respect. We at Tikkun condemn all of those countries for their immoral behavior, including Israel! Letter to Tikkun:

Israel is the ONLY democratic country in the world that continues to
sell munitions to Myanmar, in spite of the fact that it is being used
for ethnic cleansing. While there are a number of global organizations that have related to
this terrible fact, the Israeli government and many (and perhaps a
great majority) of the Jews in Israel have tuned out those
organizations as being anti-Zionist and antisemitic (the first may be
true, the second is not, for the most part).

Articles

The World Needs Repentance

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Notes from the Jewish tradition that may be helpful to people in every tradition and to people who need to connect to ancient spiritual wisdom

WHAT MAKES THE Jewish approach to repentance and atonement relevant to North American and global politics is that it does not focus only on the ways we as individuals “sinned,” (actually, the real meaning of the word sin is to miss the mark; not some sense of being drenched in evil, but just getting off course) but rather recognizes us as part of a community for which we must take collective responsibility. North Americans are so used to the extreme individualism promoted by capitalist values that we rarely think of ourselves as having responsibility for each other. But that is precisely what is needed. So we at Tikkun, the interfaith and secular-humanist-and-atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives, and Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls, have developed a set of confessions in the form of “we have sinned when . .

32.3 Summer

Trump’s Evil Policies, Democrats Aligning with the Deep State, and the Left in Shaming and Blaming

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This Summer 2017 edition of Tikkun has several articles focusing on the trauma that the Trump presidency has generated. While many liberals and progressives responded to this trauma and horror in the earlier months with mass demonstrations and a commitment to resistance, it soon became clear that, as important as they were for reviving the spirit of people on the left,  the demonstrations did not make much of a dent in the consciousness of the tens of millions of people who voted for Trump. Moreover, the liberal and progressive forces continue to demean, shame and blame all those who did not vote for Democrats in the 2016 election. This takes the form of suggesting that all of these tens of millions of people who voted “the wrong way” did so because they are racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, coarse, bullies or just ignorant. These characterizations do not fit everyone that voted Trump, though they may describe some of his supporters, and a large number of the people he has appointed to key positions in his Administration.

Articles

Merkel Clobbered While Rightists Threat Grows

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[Editor’s note: the rise of the racist Right in Germany in the Sept. 2017 election once again demonstrates the weakness of a centrist politics whose only holy principle is compromise in order to get or hold power. Just as in Brexit in England and in the Trump victory in the U.S., the centrists continue to believe that “more of the same” will satisfy people whose lives are filled with pain and frustration. Sadly, the European left, like the American left, has little to offer beyond rational economic programs–unable to understand the psycho-spiritual pain generated by the competitive market place and hence unable to speak to the depth of frustration many experience in their daily lives. We at Tikkun have analyzed these dynamics in The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco) and in our analyses of the 2016 election https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/we-cant-transform-american-politics-till-we-understand-the-psychodynamics-at-play .

Articles

Israel, Palestine and the Kurds

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I cannot remember saying anything positive about Netanyahu in the past few decades, but in the case of the Kurds, I must acknowledge that he is finally doing something decent by supporting Kurdish independence. Yes, it may be for the wrong reasons as a NY Times story on Saturday Sept. 23rd suggested when it mentioned the possibility that a Kurdish state on a border with Iran might provide Israel with a military launching place for a future struggle with Iran. But Lincoln might have freed the slaves for bad reasons also. So what?

Editorials & Actions

Many Americans Know Little About Constitutional Rights

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(Editor’s note: All too often, people in the liberal and progressive world scorn those Americans who know little about their Constitutional rights or the rights of others. But actually it is more appropriate to respond with outrage at an educational system that has failed to inform them of these rights and how they work. Similarly, many Americans really know little about the actual history and workings of racism or anti-Semitism in this society. But if you have not been exposed to it directly, have never seen the t.v. series “Roots” or been given a mandatory course on racism,  and been taught in your church or school about the way Christianity popularized anti-Semitism for 1700 years, and your family didn’t really understand how these hateful ideas are infused in popular culture, how would you know how pernicious they are? Rather than look down on those who don’t know, the society should be asking “How do we now engage in a massive educational venture for adults as well as for high school students to help them understand about racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and, very important, classism and age-ism?”

Editorials & Actions

A 99% Manifesto in honor or the Anniversary of the Occupy Movement

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A 99% Manifesto

Dan Brook

 

 

A specter is haunting America and the world; the specter of gross inequality. The inequality is economic, to be sure, but also social, political, racial, sexual, educational, medical, occupational, gastronomical, geographical, and otherwise.  

Directly inspired by the massive protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, Israel, India, Chile, Wisconsin, and elsewhere in 2011 as well as the hactivism of Anonymous and the shout out by Adbusters and other activists over that summer, Occupy Wall Street started on September 17th, 2011 as a reaction to the corpocracy — the big, powerful, wealthy corporations and their financial system with its limitless greed and disproportionate influence on our government and in our society, symbolized by Wall Street.  

After being publicly maligned and forcefully suppressed, as well as internally divided and somewhat rudderless, the decentralized Occupy movement, now several years on, catalyzed many different local individuals and groups continuing the struggle in their own quieter and dispersed ways. To occupy is to make a bad situation better by seeking policies, situations, and systems that benefit the 99%, not simply the 1%.

Articles

Israel Update mid September 2017

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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

An enemy image is a vital munition of war

1) A shooting in Hebron shakes the Israeli society

The following article is due to be published in German by Internationaler Versoehnungsbund, the Austrian branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). On March 24, 2016, a young Palestinian named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif tried to stab the soldiers guarding an enclave of extreme-right Israeli settlers in the heart of the city of Hebron on the West Bank. The soldiers shot and severely wounded him. Eleven minutes later, another Israeli soldier arrived on the spot, named Elior Azaria. A medic by training, Azaria did not try to give medical help to the severely wounded man lying on the ground.

Articles

The U.S. Military Role in the World

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(Editor’s Note: This article, coming to us from our media ally TomDispatch.com, should give us some perspective on the U.S. military role in the world. Perhaps it might even awaken us to another important question: why exactly are we risking nuclear war with North Korea in order to achieve what end? –Rabbi Michael Lerner  rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com)

Worth Dying For? 
When It Comes to the War in the Greater Middle East, Maybe We’re the Bad Guys 
By Danny Sjursen
I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas.  And I’m still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011.

Editorials & Actions

Ralph Nader on the Republicans and Dems

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[Editor’s Note: I still wish Nader had taken my advice in 2000 and told his voters in states where the election was close to not vote for him but vote instead for Nader. I also urged him to introduce spiritual progressive ideas and discourse into his public talks, but he didn’t, perhaps could not because it would take him so far from the narrow economism that is his worldview. But with all his limitations, he often speaks deeper truths than one hears even from some of the most “progressive” of liberal Democrats, and it is in that spirit that I invite you to read his latest thinking. –Rabbi Michael Lerner ]

Photo: Stephen Voss/Redux

RALPH NADER: THE DEMOCRATS ARE UNABLE TO DEFEND THE U.S. FROM THE “MOST VICIOUS” REPUBLICAN PARTY IN HISTORY

From TheIntercept.comJune 25 2017, 8:17 a.m.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is at its lowest ebb in the memory of everyone now alive. It’s lost the White House and both houses of Congress.

Articles

We can’t transform American politics till we understand the psychodynamics at play

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I’m republishing this article I wrote a few months before the 2016 election because it contains an analysis which is absolutely essential for anyone who wishes to participate in transforming American political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual reality. Some of it might feel a bit dated, but most of it is as true now as it will be in years to come until liberal and progressive forces really absorb its message and make fundamental changes in the cultural and political assumptions that limit their effectiveness.–Rabbi Michael Lerner

IT’S NO SECRET that the past several decades have witnessed growing economic inequality and deepening economic insecurity for a very large section of working people both in the U.S. and other capitalist countries around the world. Yet what most analysts miss are the hidden injuries of class that become dramatically intensified when the underlying psychological and spiritual dysfunction of global capitalism interacts with economic insecurity. Right-wing, ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist, and/or racist movements gain support as more people begin to lose faith in the efficacy of democratic governments and turn to authoritarian leaders in the hope that their own fears and pain can be alleviated. This has been happening around the world, not just in the U.S. As a nonprofit we are prohibited from endorsing any political candidate or party, so the reflections here are not meant to influence your voting in 2016, but to shape an agenda for how to build a healthier and more just society in the coming decades.