The phenomena we embrace are embraced precisely because of their exuberance—justice, prosperity, and sustainability. Our failing is that we reach for them with tools that will never capture their essence, be they words, statistics, or dollars.
2015
Diversity is the Lifeline for the Future of the Climate Movement
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While climate change will negatively impact all of us, people of color and low-income communities will be hit the hardest and have the fewest resources to adapt to the challenges, such as extreme weather and poor air quality, that climate change will bring. Yet, these communities are often underrepresented, if not left out completely.
2015
Climate Change and the Right to Hope
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To what extent is a lack of hope to blame for our inaction on the climate?
2015
Love Is Stronger Than Stewardship: A Cosmic Christ Path to Planetary Survival
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“Stewardship” is a tired old idea. Let’s stop talking about duty and start talking about the sacredness of creation! The light of Christ is in all beings.
2015
Dharma and Ahimsa: A Hindu Take on Environmental Stewardship
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The dharmic concept of ahimsa (“not to injure”) demands that we take personal and political action to protect the environment.
2015
Looking to the Qur’an in an Age of Climate Disaster
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The Qur’an instructs us to live lightly on this earth. From Zanzibar to Indonesia, Islamic ethics are guiding new conservation efforts.
2015
A Bodhisattva’s Approach to Climate Activism
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Bodhisattvas commit daily to an impossible task: the liberation of all living beings. What can climate activists learn from their active nonattachment?
2015
Prayer as if the Earth Really Matters
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Climate prayer is powerful. Here’s how synagogues can breathe earth awareness into services and activists can make their actions prayerful.
Articles
Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders
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In 1975, I covered the trial of heiress Patty Hearst for the Berkeley Barb. She had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and was forced at gunpoint by her abductors to participate in their robbing a bank.
Articles
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Fantasy World
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Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years. The biggest fantasy: that we can coerce others through power over them to do what we consider in the best interests of the U.S. or Israel.
Articles
Esther Was Vegan Too: On Purim, Let’s Renew Our Struggle to End Factory Farming
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From saving water, to helping animals, to decreasing our carbon footprint, the single most effective change we can make is to eat a more plant-based diet. Just as Esther took action to save the Jews, so we can take action to save animals and our planet from extermination.
Activism
Boiling Point: Why Do We Let Big Oil Send Workers to Their Deaths?
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In exposing unsafe working conditions to the public, the refinery workers are raising not just contract demands, but a deeper challenge about the immorality of a profit-driven production system that simply monetizes the loss of human life on corporate spreadsheets.
Articles
The Disfigured Self: What Hannah Arendt Got Right
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The great question that lurks at the heart of all Holocaust study, it seems to me, is the question of the self: What would I have done if I had been there? Arendt is unique in making that question present for us, and while Strangneth professes to be in dialogue with Arendt’s book, she does not wrestle with its argument in more than a superficial way.
Analysis of Israel/Palestine
Bringing the Values of Open Hillel Into Postgraduate Life: An Open Letter
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Where will all the Open Hillelnikim go once they’ve left campus? What will become of this movement? How will you engage the Jewish community beyond campus? In short, how will you engage with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an American Jew?
Articles
The View from Palestine: American Jewish Journeys into the West Bank
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Extend programs are based on a simple belief that without understanding Palestinian perspectives, we are condemned to see the conflict as a matter of unequivocal good against unequivocal evil, instead of as a tragic cycle from which the overwhelmingly majority of Israelis and Palestinians want to break.