Tikkun Recommends

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If you want to taste some of the diversity and complexity in Jewish thought, these four books offer a wonderful way in. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Geraldine Brooks brings the reader into the mind of Natan, one of Judaism’s earliest prophets, as he tries to make sense of his own life as a collaborator and spiritual guide to a murderous King David who managed to conquer and then create Jerusalem as the Jewish people’s fantasized “eternal capital.” Unlike many of the prophets who eventually had a book written by or about them in the Bible, Natan shows up only in the stories about King David, most significantly when he challenges David for having stolen Batsheva by sending her husband, a commander in David’s army, to a mission designed to be certain death.

32.3 Summer

Readers Respond

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A NOTE ON LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
We welcome your responses to our articles. Send letters to the editor toletters@tikkun.org. Please remember, however, not to attribute to Tikkun views other than those expressed in our editorials. We email, post, and print many articles with which we have strong disagreements because that is what makes Tikkun a location for a true diversity of ideas. Tikkun reserves the right to edit your letters to fit available space in the magazine.

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.

32.3 Summer

The Winter of Trump

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But when he is shown the impeachment door, his rabid evangelical successor seems almost sure to sharpen the testicular knives. These are moderate concerns of the dreams that visit me at 3AM.

Articles

The Psychopathology of the 2016 Election

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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. In his presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders addressed some of these economic inequalities by advocating for New Deal-type reforms, but he shied away from any systematic critique of the capitalist order itself.

2017

Forget Solutions, We Are the Problem

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ON THE FIFTEENTH DAY of Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, the United States Department of Defense agreed to resupply the Israeli military with 120 mm mortar rounds and 40 mm grenades. Israel’s own stock had presumably been depleted in the offensive, which at that point had taken almost 700 Palestinian lives. The transfer required the approval of the American president and likely occurred swiftly: the U.S. stores a billion dollars worth of munitions inside Israel for such “emergencies.” By the war’s end, one month and three days later, 2,251 Palestinians had died, nearly two-thirds of them civilians, nearly a quarter of them children. As awful as they are, these numbers bear repeating. “It is not up to us in the U.S. to “solve” this “problem.” We are the problem.”

The text above was just an excerpt.