Gun Violence as State Sponsored Domestic Terrorism

By |

Editor’s Note:  In a society which has never acknowledged its violent foundation from the genocide of Native peoples, to slavery, to the violent overthrow of governments around the world in order to impose regimes that favor U.S. corporate interests, its brutal war against the Vietnamese people, its recruitment of young people into a pre-army ROTC, and its romanticization in movies and t.v. of super weapons and violence, it is no surprise that it is easy to convince men that “real men” use weapons and violence to get their way in the world. Even Obama, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, spent every Tuesday morning approving targets for drone attacks that killed far more innocent people than school shootings in the same period have.

Articles

A Pentagon Style Trip Down Memory Lane

By |

You can read this online at :https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/a-pentagon-style-trip-down-memory-lane

The Light at the End of the Corner 
A Trip Down Memory Lane, Pentagon-Style 
By Tom Engelhardt   We thank Engelhardt and his TomDispatch.com, our media ally, for sharing this article with Tikkun readers. If you’re in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we’re at it, thinking a little about America’s wars? Nothing particularly ambitious, mind you, just — if you’re up for it — a stroll to the corner. Now, admittedly, there’s a small catch here. Where exactly is that corner?  I think the first time I heard about it might have been back in January 2004 and it was located somewhere in Iraq.

Articles

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat: God in Exile, School Shootings, and the Mishkan (Sanctuary)

By |

 Rabbi . Rachel Barenblat a.k.a. The Velveteen Rabbi .   This appeared first at the website of the Velveteen Rabbi and is reprinted here with her permission

God in exile, school shootings, and building the mishkan together
February 17, 2018 .  In this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, we read וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם / “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I might dwell within them.” (Or “among them.”) The word “I might dwell” is שכנתי / shachanti — the same as the root of the name Shechinah, our mystics’ name for the Divine Presence that dwells with us, within us, among us. Jewish tradition teaches that God is both transcendent (far away and inconceivable) and immanent (indwelling and accessible).

Articles

Report from Berlin by Victor Grossman

By |

MAKING EVERYONE HAPPY
Victor Grossman   Tikkun’s Berlin Correspondent   February 12 2018

Thanks be to God! – Gottseidank! That, on Wednesday, was surely the reaction of millions of even nonbelieving Germans! After four and a half months of haggling and recrimination and, four days past the deadline, an all-night session, the three parties had finally settled on a coalition government program – 179 pages long. With a collective sigh of relief there could now be a return to normality.

Articles

Israel’s Refugee Crisis

By |

URGENT APPEAL TO THE READERS OF TIKKUN from Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

 

There are times when one confronts a non-negotiable moral duty. This is one of those times.  

I suspect that most readers of Tikkun in Israel, in America and in Europe, have worn out several pairs of shoes over the decades protesting injustices carried out by their own governments. Something more is demanded of us now. For those of us in Israel, that may mean a serious disruption of our personal lives.

Articles

At the Circus with Donald Trump

By |

 

[Editor’s Note: We are grateful to our media ally Tom Englehardt and his TomDispatch.com for sharing this and other writings with Tikkun. In this article, he has begun to unravel the seemingly impossible to understand fascination with Trump that perplexes many liberals and progressives: his revealing the horrendous aspect of American power that is normally kept out of sight. What I want to add here is that many people have unconsciously felt that they were being lied to by the media and the dominant mythology of American society. But they couldn’t put their finger on exactly how or why. For some of them, the appeal of Trump was the flip side of Bernie Sanders: both began to challenge the lies, Sanders in a polite way, Trump in a more vicious and hateful way.

Articles

The Destructive Power of Nationalism: Eric Weitz reviews Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide and Bartov Responds

By |

The Destructive Power of Nationalism
Eric D. Weitz

A review of:

Anatomy of a Genocide:

The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz

by Omer Bartov

Simon & Schuster, 2018

“Human life is cheap” in Casablanca, says Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) to Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in the renowned film. In Buczacz, human life was cheap, and then some —  expendable, worthless, targeted for obliteration. As Omer Bartov shows in his extraordinary new book, Buczacz, an isolated, backwater town in what is today western Ukraine, was crisscrossed by all the pathologies of twentieth-century political movements. The consequences were  devastating for the inhabitants, Jews especially, but Ukrainians and Poles as well. Not that they were the passive victims of abstract political forces or of the actions of the major powers, Habsburg Austria, Imperial and Nazi Germany, and Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, that variously dominated the town and region.

Articles

Stop the Edging Toward War With North Korea

By |

Being Edged Toward War With North Korea
by David McReynolds

 

One feels a bit helpless trying to deal with Trump and his push toward war – who is listening? If you think the points I’m making should be shared, by all means share them widely.  

There are three essential points, and many secondary ones.  

First, Trump has made a major issue of the fact that North Korean missiles could carry nuclear weapons that could strike the continental US. That is true, but somehow missing from this effort at panic, is the fact that both China and Russia have long had nuclear tipped missiles that can hit any point in the US with great accuracy.

Articles

Martin Luther King Marches On

By |

[Editor’s note: I was there at MLKjr.’s speech in D.C. in the summer of 1963 and that March on Washington changed my life. When I met personally with MLKjr. in 1968, a month before he was murdered, as a representative of the Peace and Freedom Party,  I tried to convince him to run for President that year.  There is a chance that had he accepted he might have had Secret Service protection, though others believe that there were elements of our government that would not have wanted that protection to be too effective. We at Tikkun continue our commitment to the nonviolence that King preached, and to the goal of ending poverty and inequality and racism in all its forms. So it an honor for us to print this piece from another great fighter for peace and justice, Ariel Dorfman.–Rabbi Michael Lerner   rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com ]
MARTIN LUTHER KING MARCHES ON
by Ariel Dorfman

Faraway, I was faraway from Washington D.C. that hot day in August of 1963 when Martin Luther King delivered his famous words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was faraway in Chile. Twenty-one years old at the time and entangled, like so many of my generation, in the struggle to liberate Latin America, the speech by King that was to influence my life so deeply did not even register with me, I cannot even recall having noticed its existence. What I can remember with ferocious precision, however, is the place and the date, and even the hour, when many years later I had occasion to listen for the first time to those “I have a dream” words, heard that melodious baritone, those incantations, that emotional certainty of victory.

Articles

Learning to Be Sick

By |

This article was first published by the New York Times, under the title “In My Chronic Illness,  I found Meaning” on Jan 10, 2018. It did not include the prayer on able-ism. Learning to Be Sick

Elliot Kukla

 

I became disabled overnight in a car accident. The car accident was a dream, but the disability was real.  

I dreamed I was driving through the ravaged streets of Oakland at the end of the world.

Articles

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro: Israel is NOT the “capital of the Jewish People”

By |

[Tikkun Introductory note: As is true of all articles published or emailed out from Tikkun, the positions articulated are not those of Tikkun magazine unless they come as editorials from Rabbi Michael Lerner. Our desire is to provide a large tent for liberals and progressives, Jewish and interfaith and secular humanists and militant atheists to engage in presenting their views on politics, culture, social theory, environment,  literature, philosophy, psychology, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (and other religions including scientism, Marxism, empiricism) and strategies to bring environmental sanity,  peace and social justice and heal, repair and transform our world (this is the meaning of the Hebrew word tikkun). Israel/Palestine is, Of all the topics that cause division and discord, one of the most prominent. Subscribers and donors have left us in the past either because we published articles or took position that were too critical of Israel or too challenging of some of the strategies and discourse used against it, too critical of the Palestinian posiitons or too supportive of them. We have never identified ourselves as a pro-Zionist publication or an anti-Zionist publication.

Articles

A Letter to the People of the U.S. from former Honduras President Jose’ Manuel Zelaya Rosales

By |

 

Manuel Zelaya: An Open Letter to the American People

December 22, 2017By José Manuel Zelaya RosalesPeople of the United States:For the past century, the owners of the fruit companies called our country “Banana Republic” and characterized our politicians as “cheaper than a mule” (as in the infamous Rolston letter). Honduras, a dignified nation, has had the misfortune of having a ruling class lacking in ethical principles that kowtows to U.S. transnational corporations, condemning our country to backwardness and extreme poverty. We have been subject to horrible dictatorships that have enjoyed U.S. support, under the premise that an outlaw is good for us if he serves transnational interests well. We have reached the point that today we are treated as less than a colony to which the U.S. government does not even deign to appoint an ambassador. Your government has installed a dictatorship in the person of Mr. Hernández, who acts as a provincial governor–spineless and obedient toward transnational companies, but a tyrant who uses terror tactics to oppress his own people.