You enter the country next door from under the stone / Church of the Redeemer / subway exit. No Pork Chinese Restaurant / and Mr. Chicken, flank the avenue / both strictly halal.
2013
Rethinking Immigration With Art
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To reorient this country’s immigration policy toward generosity and compassion will require serious creativity and vision. Let’s look to art for inspiration!
Articles
How to Stand in Solidarity with African Americans This Weekend
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I’m writing to YOU to urge you to either come with me on Sunday or go to a nearer African American church this Sunday and let the African American community in your neighborhood or town know that they are not alone, that we understand their fear and stand in solidarity with them. No matter where you came out on the Zimmerman trial, you can still stand in solidarity with African Americans, support them in their grief, and signal to them that they are not alone.
Articles
Therapist from the Depths: A Conversation with Michael Eigen
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Michael Eigen isn’t only one of the leading and most important psychoanalysts in the world, but also a poet of strong-expression who plays the piano, wanders in the forest, and seeks holiness through Chasidic studies and Kabbalah. I had a conversation with Eigen, the Jewish kid who became one of Wilfred Bion’s greatest students (“thanks to him I decided to get married”), on the occasion of the publishing of his book Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis. At that time he told me:
When I was a little boy I remember seeing a tree. Half of it was withered and dead and the other half was blooming. Then I realized that one could be dead and very much alive, concurrently. We are not monolithic, and can experience vitality and life on certain levels and on others total deadness.
Articles
With What Will I Fill the Space You Left Behind?
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Where Karen Bender’s A Town of Empty Rooms truly succeeds is not in the petty arguments that move the plot along, but in how we, as readers, can observe how invested these characters are in those arguments. What emerges, then, is a novel about the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the ways we talk past the dividing lines between us.
2013
A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California
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One of the most valuable functions of socially conscious art is its power to personalize and humanize what can easily become an abstraction. This power was evident again and again at BAILA con Duende, a recent Los Angeles exhibition featuring the works of seventy-four black artists.
2013
The Mondragón Cooperatives: An Inspiring Economic Hybrid
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Sixty years ago, the Basque region was the poorest area of Spain. Today, thanks to local cooperatives, it is the richest–and the wealth is shared.
2013
Envisioning a Thoughtful and Caring Child Welfare System
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Let’s build a foster care system that nurtures each child’s creativity, capacity for joy, and emotional wellness. Here’s how.
Articles
Songs for the End of the World
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On the other side of praise / it’s time to chop down the tall tree in the ear— / enough enough with the starlit promontories—/ a nervous condition traces itself/ in lightning in the clouds, / a little requiem rattles among Coke cans / and old vegetable tins
Articles
The Good, the Bad, and the Oscars
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The outcome of the recent Academy Awards sweepstakes was a very mixed bag. Argo, the winner of the best-picture prize, is a nice little movie with a timely theme, a feel-good ending, and reminiscences of the 1997 comedy-drama Wag the Dog. Yet while it’s ably directed by Ben Affleck and engagingly acted by a talented cast, it doesn’t have the artistic or emotional heft that distinguishes the best best-picture winners.
2013
The Path of the Parent: How Children Can Enrich Your Spiritual Life
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Children are naturally mindful. They always live fully in the present, and the world is a fantastically real and interesting place to them.
Art
Art and Science: A Marriage Made in Heaven?
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At the turn of the past century, Vienna—even more than Berlin, Paris, or London—stood out as the European city most friendly to radical innovation of every kind. Helping us to understand this era, which introduced the modern world that we inhabit today, is Eric Kandel’s book, The Age of Insight. Neuroscience, Kandel argues, can help to close the traditional gap between scientific and nonscientific forms of inquiry.
Articles
Restorative Justice: The Long Struggle
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Large, organized, collective interests are at odds with the future of restorative justice: unions of prison guards, economic benefits to communities from prisons, and then—perhaps the most difficult injustice of all—historical crimes whose legacies subject whole groups of people to continuing injustice.
Articles
Life Is A Master Class
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We live as artists of Torah in a place that contemporary culture has no room for. In the self-identified Torah-world, Torah living is no longer an art; it’s a sublimation. The question to ask ourselves is “How are we living our lives?”
Activism
Stop-and-Frisk in New York and the Politics of Crime in America
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To deny that race and class do not matter in contemporary America and its criminal justice system is to deny the most obvious political, scientific, and moral reality of our society.