Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/38/)
It is time for progressives and others to shift the critique of Obama away from an exclusive focus on the policies and practices of his administration and instead develop a new language for politics—one with a longer historical purview and a deeper understanding of the ominous forces that now threaten any credible notion of the United States as an aspiring democracy.
Election year is different from all other years. The media will invite progressives into the fray. They’ll goad us, for ratings’ sake: Do you love Obama? Hate him? Are your politics pure?
Yes, Obama was moderate, and still the lofty sounding rhetoric made us feel that change really was possible. Hope was in the air. With time, we didn’t so much argue about the policies of his administration, many of which seemed fair and forward-looking. Rather, we took issue with the unwillingness to fight, the folding of the hand before the cards were played, the untoward interest in compromise with those who sought his political demise, and the combination of heady discourse with reliance on advisers peddling conventional economic wisdom geared toward the rich.
Feminists, facing an escalating “war on women” and recognizing the enormous political stakes, have been organizing with renewed energy. It’s time for progressives of every gender identity to join this bloc and follow our lead.
Edited by Kelly James Clark; Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler; written by Jennifer Howe Peace, Or Rose, and Gregory Mobley; and Mirabai Starr
by Michael J. Sandel; Thomas Frank; Christopher Hayes; and Chuck Collins
Four years ago we seemed to take a shortcut to some kind of national redemption. The same nation that enslaved African Americans until 1865 and imposed a vicious century-long regime of segregation and everyday abuse upon them elected an African American to its presidency. The same nation that elected twelve slave masters to its presidency elected a president whose wife was a descendant of American slaves. The same nation that never would have elected a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement to national office fulfilled some of the movement’s most idealistic hymnody.
The United States today should be engaged in a great debate, not so much over who the next president will be, or over the role of government in economic life, but over the very identity and future orientation of the country itself. On the one hand, powerful right-wing voices argue that America is an essentially conservative country. On the other hand, other voices, led by the president, argue that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America!” implying that we are an essentially centrist country.
One thing Abraham Joshua Heschel and Karl Marx had in common, aside from having both been spectacularly bearded Eastern European Jews, is the shared insight that time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. It is this insight about time—patently obvious but frequently forgotten—that makes keeping a Sabbath day both spiritually profound and politically radical.
Letters on restorative justice, pinkwashing, statism, and immigration from the Winter 2013 issue.
Letters on Israeli attacks, the Holocaust, and Jesus’ Jewish heritage from the Fall 2012 issue.
Letters on cultural constraints, safe-haven zionism, Che Guevara, Syria, racial profiling and the spiritual politics from the Summer 2012 issue.
Amid the blitz of campaign commercials, presidential debates, and political punditry, it can be hard to imagine life beyond the upcoming election.
Publishing an article that intensely criticizes an aspect of Christianity was a stretch for us here at Tikkun. Although we consider this magazine to be interfaith as well as Jewish—and have many Christian readers and writers—the idea of taking on something as sacred to the Christian world as the cross gave us pause. The last thing we want to do is convey disrespect to the Christian community and its complex internal debates. On the other hand, having already gotten ourselves into a huge amount of trouble by criticizing something sacred to many American Jews—namely Israel and its army—we thought it reasonable to take seriously our interfaith status by allowing a writer to take on a very controversial issue in the Christian world. We welcome sharp criticisms and alternative readings of the history discussed here.