Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/reviews/page/14/)
A look at some adventurous films that acknowledge the gap between art and actuality, and try to bridge it by allowing real people with authentic emotions and experiences into their stories. A review of TINY FURNITURE, IFC Films, 2010; PUTTY HILL, Cinema Guild, 2010; and ON THE BOWERY, Milestone Film and Video, 1957.
Like Kafka’s parables and the enigmatic, humane tales of Rabbi Nachman, Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books has an economical generosity that is thoroughly secular, deeply religious, and seriously joking.
UNTOLD: A HISTORY OF THE WIVES OF PROPHET MUHAMMAD by Tamam Kahn, Monkfish, 2010
THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER, WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES by Avraham Burg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
SECOND SUBURB: LEVITTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA, edited by Dianne Harris, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
AMERICAN WAR MACHINE: DEEP POLITICS, THE CIA, GLOBAL DRUG CONNECTION, AND THE ROAD TO AFGHANISTAN by Peter Dale Scott, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010
Reviews Highlights from the Tikkun Archive
The Tikkun print archive goes back twenty-five years. We are hugely grateful to a team of volunteers and interns who have been putting the archive online over the last two years, a task now near to completion. You can explore it here. In the next phase the team will create more pages like this selecting archived articles on particular themes. This one was created by one of our interns and doesn’t necessarily reflect official editorial choices: there will be time for that later, we hope!
GRACE PALEY: COLLECTED SHORTS, Lilly Rivlin Productions, 2010
For those of us who have, for many years, understood and struggled for tikkun olam, this question of meaning is the real and defining focus of the crisis of education. It calls into question the misguided concern for standardized testing, with its emphasis on uniformity, competition, and invidious comparison as the criteria of “effective learning.”
SURPRISINGLY HAPPY: AN ATYPICAL RELIGIOUS MEMOIR by Sheila Peltz Weinberg, White River Press, 2010
Education. Consumerism. Incarceration. Henry Giroux’s new book identifies these as three key forces in binding contemporary youth to the social structures of neoliberalism.
Jewish opposition to the State of Israel arises partly from the sense that Judaism is a religion of introspection rather than political action.
The search for an aesthetic and epistemological language of representation out of the shards of lives that were destroyed first by “progress” and then by two world wars becomes increasingly elusive and desperate. “Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz” by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer is one of the most eloquent culminations of that search and a powerful indicator of the physical and cultural traces that survive into the twenty-first century.
In his famous March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, then-candidate Obama asked us to move beyond a racial politics that demands a perpetrator and a victim and instead to begin to embrace the full complexity of race in this country. Yet, as we enter the winter of 2010, this rhetoric of hope and change has given way to an administration that has been disappointingly silent on race, as well as milquetoast in its policy prescriptions, even as multiple populist movements stir up white fear and anger.