Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/47/)
Spring 2011 Table of Contents
Volume 26, Issue 2
Letters to the Editor
Editorials
Tunisia, Egypt, and Israel
U.S. policy in the Middle East keeps opting for stability over morality—and so ends up with neither. A Progressive Strategy for 2011-2012
Primaries are the one way we the people can still bring our concerns into national politics.
Just as the state should never criminalize abortion, it should never criminalize circumcision.
A real spur to the peace process would be the hope that might emerge from Palestinian membership in the UN. Let us embrace this path and bring that hope into the world!
The founding mothers of the Women’s Liberation Movement were socialists. We were activists who came from committees against the war in Vietnam. We believed that since we were at the bottom of the wage scale, if we demanded an equal chance for all women, we would rise and bring everyone with us to create an America with full equality for all. Instead, we helped to create near equality for women within a system of ever greater class inequality. A new kind of movement is clearly needed to re-energize our struggles for equality and for a society that values the happiness of all over the power or profits of a few.
The United States of America is the biggest and worst terrorist nation of the world. And most Americans approve enthusiastically. Those two statements need careful corroboration. They need a careful reading of history.
by Richard Zimler, Howard Jacobson, Amos Oz
Volume 26, Issue 3
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Letters to the Editor
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Editorials
Recognize Palestine and Give It UN Membership
No to the Proposed Legal Ban on Circumcision
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Politics and Society
The Pursuit of Happiness: 2011
by HARRIET FRAAD with help from GRETCHEN VAN DYCK
Under assault from U.S. corporate elites and the rich, many Americans are responding in a dysfunctional personal way rather than through collective action. Here’s a strategy to change that. A Climate for Wisdom? by TIMOTHY B. LEDUC
Environmentalists have already provided the rational arguments for major societal transformations. What we need now is the wisdom for the prerequisite cultural transformations.
There’s no accounting for the chemistry of friendship. Sometimes it’s the shared experience of being young together, or military service, or a function of family — the coincidence of neighborhood or parenthood. So I was unprepared for my friendship with Dr. Norman Wall, which began when the retired cardiologist was in his mid-nineties, more than thirty years my senior. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Why don’t researchers ever ask us about wisdom?” Almost a year after I began talking with Jaypeetee Arnakak about Inuit ways of thinking about northern warming, he asked me this question. From his position as an Inuit policy worker and philosopher, Arnakak stressed to me that wisdom, or “silatuniq” in Inuktitut, should be of central importance to anyone concerned with climate change.
The psychology of optimism and self-reliance among many Palestinians is a fragile movement. It will be sensitive to events on the ground, to the changing landscape of the negotiation process and to the economy. But the dynamism of hope and optimism among the young of Palestine is one that could potentially withstand the moment.
A journey into spiritual experience and trauma may seem disorienting, like entering an ancient labyrinth. We push ahead into the twists and turns, concentrating so much on where we are going that we don’t notice the walls we are passing or the marks left on them by the generations who traveled before us. Even if we did stop, we might not be able to read and understand the markings. They may seem like remnants of a lost language, or one that we remember only through faint impressions. Perhaps many of the references in the main story of “A Journey of Passion” are familiar to you; others might sound remote, mixed with childhood associations or relatively meaningless to our modern lives.