2015

Human Evil

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Evil must be understood as the inability to see the humanity of others. Americans often justify our violence toward others by emphasizing their evil while ignoring our own.

2015

Reforming Money and Banking: Keys to Debt and Jubilee

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In the face of economic instability, we need to consider creative solutions—like jubilee, public banking policies, and currency reform—that take into account the complexity of the environment, the nature of money itself, and the possibility for social innovation.

2015

Debtors All: Facing, and Embracing, Our Ecological Indebtedness

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In our ecological age, our most common narratives of debt, which conflate salvation with independence from debt, fail to capture the counterintuitive dynamics of our indebtedness to nature and to recognize that our real salvation is in an intelligent and deeply felt interdependence with natural systems.

2015

Colonial Dynamics in the Middle East

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Inside Syria

Reese Erlich
Prometheus Books, 2014

The Darker Side of Western Modernity

Walter D. Mignolo
Duke University Press, 2011

 

To many Westerners, the Middle East seems more confounding each day. How could the killings get any worse, the struggles more irrational? When the rebellion of Syria’s people against the oppressive Assad dictatorship suddenly turned into a civil war, thus giving strength to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the confusion only worsened. Reese Erlich, a prominent independent journalist, begins to unpack some of our questions. Setting the current struggles in the context of the world powers that created Syria, Erlich demonstrates how the histories and dynamics of international struggles are indispensible for understanding the current realities.

2015

Romance in the Torah

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The Books of Jonathan: Four Men, One God
Gary Levinson
Self-Published, 2014

If you are itching to get away from the contemporary world, here’s a fun and steamy route: a hot gay love story based in part on an imaginative reconstruction of the relationship between Jonathan (the eldest son of King Saul) and Saul’s antagonist, David, who eventually overthrows Saul and becomes the founder of the dynasty that by legend is destined ultimately to produce the Messiah. Author Gary Levinson explores questions of faith and nationhood in a historical novel that provides a fun escape from the frustrations of the present even as it smashes any romanticization of the past.

2015

Hope in Israel/Palestine

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Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story

R.F. Georgy
Parthenon Books, 2014

The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust

Noam Chayut
Verso, 2013

 

In the wake of Israel’s bloody struggle in Gaza, it may be healing to read Absolution—a Palestinian Israeli love story by R.F. Georgy that rehumanizes what media reports reduce to political sloganeering. Here you can reconnect with the human spirit, transcending the normal boundaries of political positions to momentarily rekindle your belief in love. Another story that offers hope in this moment is Israeli Noam Chayut’s memoir of his life as a young soldier on the front line of Operation Defensive Shield, a devastating offensive against Gaza by Israel. Chayut’s memoir takes you into the inner life of a principled and caring soldier whose acceptance of the standard narrative of the Holocaust initially allows him to believe that Israel’s wars are necessary and just. His views start to change when his encounter with a Palestinian village shatters his certainty and he comes to question the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the necessity of the Occupation.

2015

Hope in Israel/Palestine

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Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story by R. F. Georgy

The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust by Noam Chayut

 

In the wake of Israel’s bloody struggle in Gaza, it may be healing to read Absolution—a Palestinian Israeli love story by R.F. Georgy that rehumanizes what media reports reduce to political sloganeering. Here you can reconnect with the human spirit, transcending the normal boundaries of political positions to momentarily rekindle your belief in love. Another story that offers hope in this moment is Israeli Noam Chayut’s memoir of his life as a young soldier on the front line of Operation Defensive Shield, a devastating offensive against Gaza by Israel. Chayut’s memoir takes you into the inner life of a principled and caring soldier whose acceptance of the standard narrative of the Holocaust initially allows him to believe that Israel’s wars are necessary and just.

2015

Poems for the High Holiday Season

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The Days Between

Marcia Falk
Brandeis University Press, 2014

Marcia Falk’s collection of blessings, poems, and “directions of the heart” for the Jewish High Holiday season is another gem by this inspired poet, whose Book of Blessings was an inspiration to a generation of feminists and their allies. With matching pages of Hebrew and English, Falk has captured some of the rich wisdom of Jewish spirituality that permeates the High Holiday prayer book (machzor), translating it into a language accessible even to resolute atheists.