The Bnai Brith statement below, like that of the American Jewish Congress and other mainstream Jewish organizations, should remind you of why it is so important to have Tikkun in the public arena. When the UN voted overwhelmingly on Thursday, Dec.
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The Scholar as Poet: Remembering Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016)
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Morris Dickstein reflects on the life of Geoffrey Hartman, whose poems––not as well known as his scholarly work––reveal a more personal side of Hartman “wrestling with Judaism and the Bible in ways that surfaced only much later in his critical prose.”
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THE SCHOLAR AS POET: Remembering Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016)
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YOMA a previously unpublished poem by Geoffrey Hartman
Rain in the autumn, rain in the spring let it rain poetry, dear God, midrashic parables, rabbinic cliches, or, better still, the comfort of Psalms.
I kmow those traps, those enemies, Lord, ·help me in my old age, my distress: this day I stand contrite before you, eyes, broken images, ears, dimmed by unceasing sighs. Where is comfort to be found? No longer in the lai-lai-lai of prayersong. In all your holy mountain what survives not stained by cries for blood? Where now the numinous Jordan, the pure Helicon?
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Chanukah and Christmas: Don’t Let the Light Go Out
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Don’t Despair. Hope is the Chanukah and Christmas Message…so don’t let the light go out!!! A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner
Honestly, do you know anyone who has not been struggling with some form of pessimism, despair, or even Trump-caused-depression? Sad truth: there are lots of reasons to be upset! The Trump Administration has at times looked like it is heading toward nuclear war. It has promised to underfund Obamacare and make it collapse so that it can then step in with the Republican alternative, in the process cutting off care for 24 million people.
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Trump’s Arrogant Recognition of Jerusalem as Capital of Israel
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Rabbi Michael Lerner’s insightful critique of Trump’s arrogant recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
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Gangster Capitalism and Nostalgic Authoritarianism
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Gangster capitalism and nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America
by HENRY A. GIROUX
Just one year into the Donald Trump presidency, not only have the failures of American democracy become clear, but many of the darkest elements of its history have been catapulted to the center of power. A dystopian ideology, a kind of nostalgic yearning for older authoritarian relations of power, now shapes and legitimates a mode of governance that generates obscene levels of inequality, expands the ranks of corrupt legislators, places white supremacists and zealous ideologues in positions of power, threatens to jail its opponents, and sanctions an expanding network of state violence both at home and abroad. Trump has accelerated a culture of cruelty, a machinery of terminal exclusion and social abandonment that wages a war on undocumented immigrants, poor minorities of color and young people. He uses the power of the presidency to peddle misinformation,erode any sense of shared citizenship, ridicule critical media and celebrate right-wing “disimagination machines” such as Fox News and Breitbart News. Under his “brand of reality TV politics,” lying has become normalized, truthfulness is viewed as a liability, ignorance is propagated at the highest levels of government and the corporate controlled media, and fear-soaked cyclones of distraction and destruction immunize the American public to the cost of human suffering and misery. Under the Trump administration, culture has been weaponized and is used as a powerful tool of power, misinformation and indoctrination. James Baldwin, in a 1979 New York Times essay titled “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” wrote, “People evolve a language …
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Who Gets to Speak about Anti-Semitism? “Anti-Semitism and the Struggle for Justice” at the New School for Social Research
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These panelists have right to talk about anti-Semitism the same way they have a right to talk about gender disparity, and racism, and police brutality, and poverty. Because in all of those, and more, they are in the streets fighting every day.
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Reflections on a Panel on anti-Semitism
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Editor’s note: Shaul Magid answers below a set of criticisms being published in other Jewish publications about a forum on anti-Semitism sponsored by JVP, the leading Jewish organization supporting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) in the Jewish world. Tikkun has not endorsed BDS, and our readers have a wide variety of different opinions about its wisdom as a strategy to achieve what we do endorse–peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians–but we do support the right of others to support those versions of BDS that do not seek to end the existence of the State of Israel. We plan to have a fuller discussion of BDS in a forthcoming Tikkun focused mostly on its wisdom as a strategy. –Rabbi Michael Lerner
Who Gets to Speak about Anti-Semitism? “Anti-Semitism and the Struggle for Justice” at the New School for Social Research
By Shaul Magid
On the evening of November 28th, 2017 the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, an institution long devoted to progressive politics and cultural critique, held an event entitled “Anti-Semitism and the Struggle for Justice.” It was in part a celebration of the book On Anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice published in 2017 by Haymarket Books sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace. There were four panelists in attendance; Lou Ferguson who works for Jewish for Racial and Economic Justice, Lina Moralis a Chicago-based Latinx-Ashkenazi Jewish activist who identifies as bi-racial and who is openly anti-Zionist, Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of JVP, a progressive Jewish organization that supports BDS against Israel, and Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour.
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Walden on the Rocks
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Editor’s note: Ariel Dorfman is one of the greatest living writers. Read and enjoy his reflections, inspired in part by the 200th anniversary of the birth of Thoreau. Walden on the Rocks
Ariel Dorfman
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/Bridgeman Images
J.M.W. Turner: Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, 1834
THE bodies are strewn everywhere along the beach. Burials are complicated because nobody knows the names of the dead—mostly women and children fleeing famine and poverty, trying to reach the land of plenty that has been promised to them but finding, instead, an early end in turbulent waters. Spectators gape at the debris from the recent shipwreck “cracked up like an eggshell on the rocks,” while others go about their business.
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The Republican Tax Cuts Could Bankrupt Our Country
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Dear senators: Don’t bankrupt our country
Jeffrey Sachs || November 20, 2017 || CNN
Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. Dear Sens. Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Ron Johnson, John McCain and Lisa Murkowski:
I fear for the future of our country. I know that you do as well.
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Thanksgiving Mythology and Reality
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The Thanksgiving Myth
by Cliff DuRand
[This talk was given at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship of San Miguel of Allende, November 23, 2008]
In many ways the Thanksgiving celebration is a unique festivity. As harvest festivals go it’s not particularly unusual: families gathering for a special meal to enjoy the bounty of nature and the fruit of the growing season’s labor. Most societies in the temperate zones of the earth have such harvest festivals. In the more northerly latitudes of Canada it comes in October as it does also in north China at the time of the harvest moon. At the latitudes of the United States Thanksgiving comes in late November, after the harvests are in.
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A Note From Germany
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FROM GENDER TO JAMAICA
by Victor Grossman, Tikkun’s Berlin Correspondant
It didn’t affect many people directly, but even small victories are welcome these days. Germany’s Constitutional Court just ruled that no-one should be forced to declare themselves officially male or female. It thus created a third open category anyone can opt for (or be opted by parents when still a child). I think everyone can approve this step toward getting along together in the world and join in quiet applause. The Bundestag was given a year to conform to the decision with new laws, reprinting questionnaires and probably some signs.
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Sodomites in our own time
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Rabbi Rothbaum presents a humorous yet actually very serious account of what it means to be a Sodomite today. Though we in the liberal and progressive world might immediately identify his description with the policies of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party, with considerable justice in so doing, we ought to also acknowledge that when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, their efforts to end homelessness and hunger in the U.S. (much less around the world) were feeble when compared to the spending that they did for the U.S. military. And when inheriting the economic crisis in 2009, the Dems funded a massive bailout of….no, not the people losing their homes because of deceitful or misleading mortgage practices of the banks and investment companies, but rather the large corporations and the investment companies, without getting in return any serious lasting commitment to change their destructive policies. So we are all implicated in the Sodomite sins of our government until we elect candidates who are unequivocally giving priority to ending the suffering of the most vulnerable in our society and around the world (e.g. through Tikkun’s proposed Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp –Rabbi Michael Lerner
How to become a Sodomite in five easy steps! BY RABBI MICHAEL ROTHBAUM | JULY 7, 2017
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been approached by people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, all asking me the same thing: “Rabbi, I’d like to be a Sodomite, but I just don’t know how to start.”
Believe me, I understand.
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North Korea: A Logical Path to Peace
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Jonathan Granoff,
President Global Security Institute, UN Representative of the World Summits of Nobel Peace Laureates, and Ambassador for Peace, Security and Nuclear Disarmament of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Chair of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Nuclear Nonproliferation and a member of Tikkun Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. NORTH KOREA: A LOGICAL PATH TO PEACE
11/05/2017 09:40 pm ET
(Ambassador Susan Burk, Jonathan Granoff, Ambassador Douglas Roche, President Jimmy Carter)
President Carter dignified America while in office, started no wars, and since leaving office has exemplified dignity and character and is an expert in dealing with North Korea, successfully. He has offered his help. At each news cycle we hear President Trump reiterate dangerous provocations toward North Korea, only increasing the risk of crisis leading to miscalculation resulting in war and the possibility of nuclear catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It is shocking to reflect on how extreme his expressions on behalf of our nation actually are. He threatened to “destroy North Korea” in his recent UN speech before the General Assembly thereby defying the laws of war, which require military actions to be proportionate and discriminate between combatants and civilians, thus threatening a crime against humanity, a genocide against over 25 million people. America is a nation based on the rule of law, degrading international law degrades America.
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Eduardo Galeano: A Visit to Heaven and Hell
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Tikkun is proud to share with our community excepts from Eduardo Galeano’s last book (Hunter of Stories). Galeano was widely recognized as one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers. A Visit to Heaven and Hell
Mapping Planet Earth
By Eduardo Galeano
[The following passages are excerpted from Hunter of Stories, the last book by Eduardo Galeano, who died in 2015. Thanks for its use go to his literary agent, Susan Bergholz, and Nation Books, which is publishing it next week.]
Free
By day, the sun guides them. By night, the stars. Paying no fare, they travel without passports and without forms for customs or immigration.