Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/justice-for-all/activism/page/10/)
Working in political isolation from most of his artistic colleagues in Alaska, Mariano Gonzales continues a noble tradition of critical visual consciousness that goes back many centuries and that thrives in the early decades of the twenty-first century. His politically and socially charged images challenge his audiences to think about the major issues of their times.
Occupy is not over, but Stage Two has not yet come together. I will now, audaciously, suggest a Stage Two that I am convinced would rock the world.
What would it take to recruit students for a movement to build community, as Martin Luther King dreamed? A Christian minister reflects on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and how we might move from disengagement to social action.
An Inconvenient Truth: The Myths of Pinkwashing
by Arthur Slepian
Responses to Arthur Slepian:
The Greater Context of the Pinkwashing Debate
by Katherine Franke
Revealing the Truth Behind the Rainbow: Seattle’s Anti-Pinkwashing Success
by Wendy Elisheva Somerson
Pinkwashing, Brainwashing, and Queer-Palestinian solidarity
by Uri Horesh
Israeli Occupation and LGBT Rights: Inextricably Intertwined
by Richard Silverstein
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Related articles published previously in Tikkun:
Boycotting Equality Forum’s Israeli Sponsorship
by Rebecca Alpert and Katherine Franke
U.S. Gay Rights Activists: Stop Pinkwashing Palestinian Suffering! by Richard Silverstein
Mejdi is a tour company founded in 2010 by Dr. Marc Gopin, an orthodox rabbi. The idea behind Mejdi is that Arabs and Jews doing peace and coexistence work through NGOs are notoriously under-funded; hundreds of them are literally poor. They also spend a disproportionate amount of time writing grants and fundraising rather than doing their critical on-the-ground work. It’s an unsustainable model, and the Mejdi co-founders felt they could create a business for peace-building that was also self-sustaining.
As a queer anti-Occupation Jew living in Seattle, I was part of the coalition that worked to get the Seattle LGBT commission to cancel the pinkwashing event, “Rainbow Generations: Building New LGBTQ Pride & Inclusion in Israel,” sponsored by Arthur Slepian’s organization, A Wider Bridge. In response to Slepian’s article, “An Inconvenient Truth: The Myths of Pinkwashing,” I want to clarify why we worked to cancel the event and counter his misinformation about pinkwashing.
It is utterly impossible to truly be simultaneously queer and Zionist. The following has been said thousands of times, but it deserves to be repeated until it sinks in: a “Jewish and democratic state” is a horrific, racist contradiction in terms, especially considering upwards of twenty percent of Israel’s population who are not Jewish. By the same token, as long as the LGBT community in Israel struggles only for the rights of the LGBT community, showing near total disregard for other groups that are oppressed—arguably more oppressed than we—our struggle loses a great deal of its legitimacy.
The fundamental problem with anti-pinkwashing rhetoric is that it proceeds from imagined motives to imagined outcomes, projecting invented intentions onto Israeli and American Jewish and LGBT leaders.
Too many liberals and progressives blame voter support for reactionary and ultra-conservative politics on the supposed mean-spiritedness, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or stupidity of those who vote the other way. By slipping into this easy mindset, we fail to perceive the real yearning so many of us have for a life filled with love, caring, and generosity.
We are looking for a full-time personal assistant to Rabbi Michael Lerner, involved in helping to build the community of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls in Berkeley, who would also be the organizer/outreach person for the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) and do editorial work at Tikkun magazine and possibly become Assistant Editor. (The Network of Spiritual Progressives is the activist arm of Tikkun.) This one-year activist opportunity involves full immersion in the activities of our small yet high-powered non-profit. It includes regular night and weekend work, in addition to standard 9-6pm working hours with an hour for lunch. Our Assistant to the Editor works from our office in lovely downtown Berkeley, across the Bay from San Francisco, and enjoys all the benefits of living in beautiful northern California (3-4 hours ride to Yosemite or to Big Sur). Beyt Tikkun is Rabbi Lerner’s shteebel/shul– a small group of people who meet either Friday night or Saturday morning each Shabbat for Jewish prayer and Torah study.
The time is ripe to inform our current struggles with a look back at the labor unionists and relatively wealthy social reformers of the Progressive Era who helped save America from those who sought to corrupt the democratic system to their own ends. I’d like to share the story of an especially inspirational figure—Rose Pastor.
What’s next, and how do we make it happen? This special section explores all sorts of topics that spring from the Occupy Movement.
During a plenary session at last week’s third annual J Street conference, Raleb Majadele, a Palestinian Israeli member of the Knesset from the Labor party, may have broken an Israeli law. Responding to a question about whether he supports boycotts against Israeli settlements, Majadele said first that he was “against all boycotts in principle.” This prompted a round of applause from a minority of the more than 2,000 people in the audience. But a few sentences later, Majadele switched course and described settlement-only boycott in a positive light, describing it as “a pin-pointed boycott against the obstacle for peace.” A much larger portion of the audience then erupted in applause. (It remains to be seen whether Majadele will be prosecuted for this statement, as a new Israeli law makes it illegal for Israeli citizens to promote boycott against Israel or Israeli settlements.)
The notion of boycotting Israeli settlements was raised frequently throughout the plenary sessions and workshops of the three-day conference—and often to hearty applause. Peter Beinart, author of a recent New York Times op-ed that coined the phrase “Zionist boycott” (i.e., a pro-Israel boycott aimed at saving “democratic Israel” from its “undemocratic,” peace-destroying settlements) was a featured speaker and launched his book, The Crisis of Zionism, at the conference.
We aren’t merely calling for a paradigm shift—we’re calling for an unsettling of the constant haze of distraction, dissatisfaction, and depression in our hearts and minds that denigrates our relationships with one another, the earth, and our most authentic selves.
The question of whether Occupy should adopt a code of nonviolence has stirred contentious debates among activists since the movement began.