Boycotting Equality Forum’s Israeli Sponsorship

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Palestinian gays and lesbians have urged the gay community in the United States to become more aware of how we have become an unwitting partner in Israel’s efforts to improve its much-criticized human rights record—especially with respect to the Palestinians. Through a policy that some have called “pinkwashing,” Israel has self-consciously sought to rebrand itself as less religious, less militaristic and less hostile, and in so doing wants to deflect attention from the International Court of Justice and UN Human Rights Council’s findings that many of Israel’s policies with respect to the Palestinians violate international law.

Art

Correcting the Canon: The African American Feminist Art of Meta Fuller

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In 2012, the gap between the rhetoric of inclusion and the reality of exclusion remains huge. Renée Ater’s new book, Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller, goes a long way in correcting the glaring omission of one of the key African-American woman artists of the twentieth century. Learn how Meta Fuller went from making her art in the evenings after finishing her domestic chores to creating one of the most remarkable Pan-African artworks of that era.

Articles

Prisoner of the Deep

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The Leviathan may look to us like a cautionary tale about the peril to traditional provincial folk of entering the modern world. But interwar-period author Joseph Roth was no traditionalist at all but a cosmopolitan committed to the an imperial ideal. Perhaps The Leviathan should be seen as Roth’s farewell to the continent. Meet the protagonist of the story—a Jewish coral merchant living in a small town in the Ukrainian region of Volhynia who loves his merchandise a bit too well—and meet Roth at the same time.

Articles

How Come We Exist?

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We meet in these pages eloquent summaries of how the evolution of the human mind may be the greatest mystery of all. Generations ago, modern physicists and astronomers informed us that “one of the stranger things about our universe is that we are present in it.”

Activism

Rose Pastor: A Progressive-Era Hero of the 99 Percent

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The time is ripe to inform our current struggles with a look back at the labor unionists and relatively wealthy social reformers of the Progressive Era who helped save America from those who sought to corrupt the democratic system to their own ends. I’d like to share the story of an especially inspirational figure—Rose Pastor.

Activism

The Makings of a Center-Left Alliance For Israeli Settlement Boycotts?

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During a plenary session at last week’s third annual J Street conference, Raleb Majadele, a Palestinian Israeli member of the Knesset from the Labor party, may have broken an Israeli law. Responding to a question about whether he supports boycotts against Israeli settlements, Majadele said first that he was “against all boycotts in principle.” This prompted a round of applause from a minority of the more than 2,000 people in the audience. But a few sentences later, Majadele switched course and described settlement-only boycott in a positive light, describing it as “a pin-pointed boycott against the obstacle for peace.” A much larger portion of the audience then erupted in applause. (It remains to be seen whether Majadele will be prosecuted for this statement, as a new Israeli law makes it illegal for Israeli citizens to promote boycott against Israel or Israeli settlements.)

The notion of boycotting Israeli settlements was raised frequently throughout the plenary sessions and workshops of the three-day conference—and often to hearty applause. Peter Beinart, author of a recent New York Times op-ed that coined the phrase “Zionist boycott” (i.e., a pro-Israel boycott aimed at saving “democratic Israel” from its “undemocratic,” peace-destroying settlements) was a featured speaker and launched his book, The Crisis of Zionism, at the conference.

27.2 Spring

A Conversation with Jeremy Rifkin on His New Book The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

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The sun shines everywhere on the world, every day. The wind blows around the planet every day. Everywhere we check there is a geothermal core of energy, heat energy underneath the ground. And in the rural areas, we have agricultural foraging waste that can be converted to energy. On the coastal areas, the ocean tides and waves come in every day for energy. Wherever we have garbage, it can be bioconverted back to energy. So these are energies that are found literally in every square inch of the world in some frequency or proportion, enough to provide us till kingdom come.

2012

Localization: The Economics of Happiness

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One of the most destructive effects of globalization is that it eliminates diversity. In order to grow and to provide the “economies of scale” that huge transnational corporations require, whole populations are induced to want the same consumer goods. Economic localization has been described as the economics of happiness.

2012

Sustaining the Occupy Movement

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The Occupy encampments took on feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, albeit in tents, demonstrating an interdependent way of living. What if the Occupy movement called on all of us to take back access to our most basic human needs that are now primarily in the hands of very large institutions?

2012

What’s Next for Occupy

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Occupy has unseated the pragmatic from its throne and replaced it with a mighty emptiness. That emptiness is as pregnant as any womb before fertilization, any wound before its healing, any glass before its filling.