The value of sharing and selflessness even gets a nod, as Peter struggles to balance personal obligations with his dawning sense of purpose as a crusading superhero. Go Spidey!
Articles
Our Progressive Traditions
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The source waters of the American religious imagination are larger than Christian orthodoxy—just as Jesus was an Orthodox Jew only more so, and St. Francis, a cosmic Christian whose love for his brethren included birds, donkeys, and the sun. Whatever the source of our common faith, it contains multitudes.
Articles
Comics and Jews
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A most unusual book by a most unusual author in the comics world, this small-sized, thick, square volume follows in many ways upon Fredrik Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics (2001). It also departs in so many other ways that the contrast is vastly illuminating.
Articles
Dark Days with the Dark Knight
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We are the beneficiaries of the most advanced audiovisual systems ever known, capable of moving our emotions, challenging our ideas, and opening our imaginations. Is it right that the most technologically sophisticated and financially expensive products of this system are entertainments like the Batman movies, designed to deliver their gratifications not to the mind but to the gut?
Articles
France Doubles Down on Honoring the Memory of Vichy’s Victims
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For the past few years, there have been voices of revisionism in France. It is very difficult, as everyone everywhere should recognize, to sustain sincere self-criticism regarding shameful national episodes. But President Francois Hollande has made clear that some issues must be addressed with intractability and not compromised.
Articles
Raising the Curtain on “Gandhi Centre Stage”
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I have never bothered to respond to Gandhi detractors because, like the Mahatma himself, I tend to think their pathetic writings are best left to die a natural death—the eventual fate of all untruth. Nevertheless, when Michael Lerner urged me to reply to “Gandhi Centre Stage,” the article by Perry Anderson that appeared in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, I assented.
Activism
Letter to Occupy
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Occupy is not over, but Stage Two has not yet come together. I will now, audaciously, suggest a Stage Two that I am convinced would rock the world.
Articles
American Mass Murder: A Toxic Cultural Brew
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Whatever psychological diagnosis ultimately gets pinned to him, Holmes and the act that will forever define him—as he hoped it would—were the products of a peculiarly American set of cultural experiences, values, and motivation, which hold the key to understanding how and the United States seems to produce such a disproportionate number of people who engage in acts of seemingly senseless mass murder.
Articles
Sociopaths Rule
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A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen.
Articles
Crossing Borders, Planting Olive Trees
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Joshua Davis has played music in South American rainforests, on the promenade in Havana, in old mining towns in Michigan, and beyond. But Tuwani, a village in the Palestinian West Bank, tested his comfort level perhaps more than any previous gig.
Articles
Languages of Liturgy and Occupation
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Living in Ramallah has meant that I must see my Judaism differently. It means I sometimes have to turn myself inside out. I see our religious symbols differently. I experience Hebrew differently. I hear Hebrew as the five million Palestinians who live here do: not as a spiritual language but a language of military occupation.
Articles
Exodus: An Allegorical Portrait of the Human Mind in its Relationship to God
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I would like to share a new and quite radical midrash regarding the story of Exodus, one that I have found extremely powerful.
Articles
SF Jewish Film Festival Opening–Go To It This Week
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What’s more Jewish than bagels, lox, and schmear? Film! At least, so says the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), which invited viewers into and beyond the stereotypes at its Opening Night festivities Thursday evening in San Francisco. A lively and boisterous crowd packed the Castro Theater, kicking off SFJFF’s thirty-second year with the world premiere screening of Roberta Grossman’s comic documentary Hava Nagila (the Movie).