Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/36/)
I had come to the General Assembly to listen and participate in a discussion and vote on the place of nonviolence in Occupy Seattle but found myself disoriented by my neighbor’s assertion that “religious” values had no place in the movement’s dialogue. I felt muted by the insinuation that my spirituality, which is at the core of my identity, was unwelcome.
Ariel Dorfman is one of our era’s many citizens of nowhere, and Feeding on Dreams is the story of his exile from Chile. It was an accident, a gift of destiny, or a curse, that he was not at La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, on September 11, 1973, the day of the coup by General Augusto Pinochet. That day, Salvador Allende died and Dorfman received a permanent enemy to orient him in his disoriented life.
It was forty-seven years ago that I climbed down a rope from the second floor of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, where we in the Free Speech Movement were holding a sit-in. How exciting for me to watch a new generation beginning to open their minds to the possibility that they might take the reins and become tikkunistas—healers and transformers of our world. It’s also important to note, however, that there are struggles in this young Occupy movement whose outcome will determine its long-term significance.
When I spent time at my grandparents’ Brighton Beach apartment, I searched for Holocaust clues. “Grandma, tell me about the camps?” I begged between slurps of chicken soup.
“Not now. Eat tatehla. Eat.” Food had two functions in Grandma’s apartment: It was a symbol of freedom from Nazi oppression and served as a tasty muzzle for my invasive curiosity.
Adventurers have come to the field of consciousness studies bringing a variety of skills, ideologies, and intelligence types, and they have come for many reasons. To enter the field is to step into an explanatory turf-war between science and spirituality.
An exploration of consciousness confirms that no matter how different the trappings of culture, language, costume, or beliefs, we are the same sort of beings, we want the same things, and we are subject to the same disappointments and joys. In short, an exploration of consciousness has great power to illuminate and inform efforts at tikkun olam.
Diffuse cultural values shape our choices in layered, contingent ways. This is especially true in the context of shocking human behavior, like we saw in Tucson. Attempts to account for specific human actions via sociology are, by definition, “half-baked,” but the patterns are not random.
Why would the Union for Reform Judaism give a right-wing Jewish leader a prominent platform from which to make hurtful, dehumanizing, and simplistic comments about Palestinian “culture”? Does inviting such a speaker honor the Reform movement’s history of moral certitude against injustice and discrimination?
For those of us who hoped that President Barack Obama would usher in a new era supporting international law, the United Nations, and Israeli-Palestinian peace, 2011 proved to be a profoundly disappointing year. In order for his policies to change, he needs to be pressured.
The current Republican primary campaigns have repeatedly raised class issues, offering an opportunity to examine how the two main competing political ideologies in American politics—defined here as corporate liberalism and Reaganomics—respond to class-consciousness and address class interests.
Ethan J. Leib and Rebecca Subar offer opposing takes on safe-haven Zionism.
Israel’s expansionism relies on the Zionism of Desire. Indeed, the building of settlements—and worse, the continued expansion and building of settlements in Palestinian territory in light of the current situation—is essentially unimaginable without it. A Zionism of Fear is a political philosophy that takes as its point of departure the credible threat of cruelty against individual Jews because of their Jewishness. It is the Zionism of Desire that fuels Hamas and Hezbollah—but is it also the reality of Hamas and Hezbollah that fuels a more palatable Zionism of Fear.
The social-emotional-intellectual conundrum of reconciling universalist allegiances and Jewish safety leads to a sequence of challenges to safe-haven political Zionism that our intellectual and moral integrity require us to consider. Fear is an appropriate response to danger. But what lack of imagination would permit us as a progressive American Jewish polity to be driven solely by our fears, to limit ourselves to solutions that destroy the agency of non-Jews and the self-determination of a non-Jewish nation, in order to protect ourselves from possible danger?
In addition to being Jewish, I am a member of a definable gender minority that has been conspicuous throughout history. I am a eunuch. Angels in the Torah are the Lord’s trusted messengers; the word angel comes from the Greek word angelos (messenger). In a similar way, eunuchs of biblical times were the emperors’ messengers and guardians. In gender-segregated cultures, our in-betweenness allows us to be able to transgress both worlds.
In Darkness, Poland’s nominee and a finalist for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, immediately plunges the viewer into an unrelenting world of thuggery and mass murder in Nazi-occupied Poland.