Despite the many books and endless discussions on the Holocaust, Zimler offers a fresh voice, one that has endured anger and terror to offer us optimism.
2012
How Super Is Superhero Justice?
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To be sure, there are times when superheroes question the justice systems they supposedly serve, and it is precisely such exceptions that provide meaningful commentary on our own justice systems.
2012
Educating for Wisdom
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What Wilhelm and Novak have to say represents a light in dark times. They have written a book that is at once a sophisticated philosophical treatise on education and a radical guide for those who teach kids in the classroom.
2012
Socialism in Civil Society
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In this project Wright seeks to document, in a manner intelligible to a broad audience, the main problems of capitalism and the realistic possibilities for overcoming them.
Articles
A Hope for Empathy
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On 9/11 we had the brief fortifying message from folk around the planet, “We are all Americans now.” Not blessed with a president who knew how wisely to respond to that world outpouring of empathy, we catapulted into a “war” against terror from which we have scarcely recovered.
Articles
No Drawing: Art, Politics, and Gaza
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A CHILD’S VIEW FROM GAZA
Edited by Howard Levine
Pacific View Press, 2011
Back in 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote her famous essay “The Personal Is Political” in response to the criticism that feminist consciousness-raising efforts were just “therapy.” In 2011, an exhibit of art by Palestinian children was faced with the inverse criticism: accusations that the art, which came out of a therapy program, had an inherent political agenda. In the resulting controversy, many have lost sight of the deeply personal process that led to the art’s creation. A new book on the planned exhibit at Oakland’s Museum of Children’s Art, A Child’s View From Gaza, chronicles the art project’s trajectory from personal to political, from healing to struggle. The Gazan students whose works make up A Child’s View From Gaza were not part of a political protest or advocacy group. Nor did they even have an intended audience for their work.
Articles
Strategy and Memory for Progressive Believers
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Gary Dorrien’s latest book, Economy, Difference, Empire, is an indictment of imperialist fantasies, enormous suffering visited on others, and the “shredding” of America’s reputation in “the war on terror.”
Articles
The Rhetoric of Family in U.S. Politics
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No Direction Home is a powerful and compelling piece of cultural and political history that fundamentally reframes the history of the modern American family. Whether you lived through the 1970s or not, you will not be able to think about that decade and those that followed the same way again after reading this remarkable book.
Articles
Lamenter-in-Chief
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Let us hope that Pinsky’s new Selected Poems will help to dispel the more jaded views of his accomplishments. For Pinsky is an important figure. He is also, as Tony Hoagland has rightly observed, “a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged.”
Activism
A Palestinian Peacemaker’s Story
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Jundi’s coming-of-age story is chronicled in the illuminating book, The Hour of Sunlight, co-authored by him and his friend, former colleague and author/documentary filmmaker/playwright Jen Marlowe. The title derives from Mahmoud Darwish’s stunning poem, “On This Earth.” Like Darwish’s poetry, Jundi’s life is a tale of dislocation, of yearning, of delight in the details and a reverence for the written word.
2011
Sword and Plowshare in Jewish Thought
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Eisen’s book is written as a series of dialogues between two voices: one that believes Judaism accepts and affirms the use of violence, and one that believes Judaism much more strongly seeks and urges peace. This pattern is useful but could be a lot more useful, were it not for two baffling failings in this review of the multimillennial literature.
2011
The Work of Healing
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Mary Jane Nealon’s gorgeous memoir works along that revelatory thread, examining the physical and metaphysical life of a person who became both a nurse and a writer.
Activism
Early Days of the New Student Revolt
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Springtime is a very good and very timely volume, even if so much has changed since last fall, when the final pieces were completed, that things look rather different. The outcomes remain in doubt, of course. The crises in education, mirroring the crises in society at large, make Education Under Fire (soon to be an MR Press book) useful in a complementary fashion, setting the structure and some of the backstory in place.
Articles
Counterculture Hasidism
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Holy Beggars is a page-turner that reads like a memoir and weaves together journalism, history, deep Jewish teaching, rollicking storytelling, and poetic tribute. It paints a cinematic panorama of the 1960s in San Francisco, explores the impact of the era of “tune in, turn on, drop out,” and describes Rabbi Carlebach’s expansive musical career.
Articles
Turning to the Past to Envision a Different Future: Family Accountability in Eliaichi Kimaro’s “A Lot Like You”
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When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s documentary A Lot Like You premier at the Seattle International Film Festival this year, one of my first responses to this moving and complex film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. The film brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.