By Manu Bhagavan.
2013
Our Issues Entwine: LGBTQ Aging and Economic Justice
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The aging and LGBTQ advocacy fields often propose policy solutions that are too narrow to address the complexity of how all marginalized people—including heterosexual people of color such as my parents, members of the LGBTQ community, and more—experience the process of aging. We need social transformations that address the intersecting forms of oppression that older people face.
2013
The Caring Majority: Building a Coalition Around Domestic Workers’ Rights
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In my work, care has emerged as the connective tissue to encompass all identities and enable us to transcend to the level of values, ethics, even spirituality. We must become a nation that values care—a caring America.
2013
Where Is Home? A Revolution in Our Personal Lives
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Harriet Fraad reviews books by Eric Klinenberg, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Hannah Rosin, and Charles Murray.
2013
Identity Politics is Not Enough: Why the Left Needs Universalism to Survive
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We need identity politics: we need voices that speak for the pain of particular experiences and situations, and for the absences in pretended universals. But let us not mistake those voices for the kind of comprehensive understanding that alone can contest the illegitimate and often destructive power that rules this country and much of the globe.
2013
Intersectional Politics: Recovering Our Interdependent Wholeness
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In today’s world, our lives are systematically fragmented and our relationships are transactional. When we try to put the pieces back together, we call it an intersectional analysis. However, the heart of the matter involves more than identifying intersections between different forms of oppression: it involves healing a broken vision and recovering our wholeness.
2013
In Defense of Identity Politics
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The great promise of identity politics is its ability to raise powerful consciousness among oppressed groups of people and also build bridges among those groups. When that occurs, the results have the power to create more permanent alliances that challenge the egregious injustices that still pervade American society and politics.
2013
Identity Politics, Class Politics, Spiritual Politics: The Need For a More Universalist Vision
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To really transform our society and liberate ourselves from the capitalist ethos and transnational corporate rule that structure all of our lives, we need to listen harder and learn from those on the left who have found ways to combine identity politics with class politics and a call for a deep spiritual transformation of our society.
Articles
The Psychodynamics of the Tea Party’s Success – and How to Beat It
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After many years as a psychotherapist studying the psychodynamics leading Americans to move to the Right, (before I became a rabbi and editor of Tikkun), I began to understand why a fringe and extremist group could be so successful in gathering support that would eventually lead to its ability to shut down the functioning of the government.
Economy/Poverty/Wealth
Fear, Safety, Control, and Resistance: Shifting the Dialogue on Policing
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Recent events have stirred up new conversations about policing, crime, and violence among white people not targeted by policing. I hope that we can use this moment to examine our beliefs and negotiate how we can participate in eliminating police harassment and violence to begin building safer communities. To facilitate this, I have listed five common remarks that I have heard from other white people, followed by a response.
2013
Migration and Institutional Innovation at the Edge of the State
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The movement of people in and out of national spaces should challenge societies to think continually about how these spaces are organized. One idea is to establish an international regime for multiple citizenship. Another is to allow migrants to pass through national borders anonymously.
2013
Immigration Reform and Faith Values: The Agenda of the Lamb
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Comprehensive immigration reform is about the right thing to do. To really see how the Bible looks at the issue of immigration, and how we should deal with the 11 million undocumented immigrants that reside in our country, one must continue reading Romans 13, which states, “ … owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”
2013
Pragmatic Compromises Will Never Yield the World We Seek
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The Democratic Party is constantly compromising to placate the Right but almost never seeks to placate the Left. To break free of this cycle, liberals need to question a capitalist assumption that too often finds support in the liberal world: that material well-being is the primary key to happiness.
2013
Boycott Hyatt and Patronize Union Hotels: A Jewish Obligation of the Union for Reform Judaism
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The rabbinic arm of the Reform movement has emphasized the importance of collective bargaining for decades. So why have so many recent Reform conferences taken place at union-boycotted hotels?
2013
Sleeping in the Dust at Burning Man
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If “sabbath, sunshine, and sexual intercourse” offer a foretaste of the world-that-is-coming, as the Talmud suggests, then could the Burning Man festival be understood as a taste of this messianic future?