You Can Help Stop America’s March to the Right

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I call this Love’s Rebellion—a refusal to accept the ethos of materialism and selfishness as the ultimate truth of our lives, an insistence on seeing the goodness in others, and a determination to replace “power over” with caring for each other and the earth! It’s time now to give Love’s Rebellion a political platform. And to make that happen, we need your help to push these issues into the public sphere. The most effective way to help introduce a spiritual progressive voice is for you to build a caucus in your union, professional organization, church, synagogue, mosque, political party, or run for some sort of office.

Articles

Nelson Mandela: A Jewish Perspective

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Jews love and loved Nelson Mandela. He inspired us with his insistence that the old regime of apartheid would crumble more quickly and fully when faced with revolutionary love and compassion than when faced with anger and violence. Mandela also challenged us to think deeply about whether the current situation in Israel/Palestine reflects the ethic of compassion that is so central to Judaism.

Fiction

The Lady in Bonesweep

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The longer she read, the longer the effect seemed to last. One lamp. One bed. One smooth flat sky-blue pillow beneath her head. Inside a single cage of ribs, her heart stood still.

2013

The Original Rainbow Coalition: An Example of Universal Identity Politics

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Are identity and class-based politics necessarily at odds? Jakobi Williams answers with a resounding no, recalling a historic period when identity and class-based politics were dynamically entwined: the moment when the original Rainbow Coalition came into being. Set up by the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, the Rainbow Coalition offers an inspiring example of how identity politics can result in cross-class and interracial solidarity, rather than a fragmentation of the Left.

Activism

Not Yet

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“I have six months to live, maybe less. Jack Miller needs to be punished. He has been a very bad man.”

2013

Gay Men in the Locker Room of the World – Big Whoop

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NBA player Jason Collins is the first active player in the four major U.S. sports to declare himself gay since Glenn Burke in the 1970s. For a nation that remains contemptuous of nonconforming notions of masculinity, the Collins event is not a question of tolerance for gays, but of masculine identity itself: can a man who falls in love with other men be integrated into the American ideal of manhood?

2013

Sikh Ethics and Political Engagement

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Built into Sikh tradition is a firm ethic of adhering to a truthful and just process—the idea that the ends do not justify the means. As a result, simply stating that attacks upon Sikhs in a post-9/11 context are “mistaken” or “misdirected” because they should be directed toward another group, Muslims, is an untenable deflection. Instead, American Sikhs walk a thin rhetorical line between declaring what we are—a group that aims to elevate the consciousness of all people to appreciate our common divinity—and declaring what we are not in order to avoid the short-term consequences of popular confusion.

2013

Shifting U.S. Demographics Demand New Cross-Racial Coalitions

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Obama won by appealing to a broad swath of voters—the young, ethnically diverse, and non-affluent—who typically aren’t a part of the traditional political calculus. But he failed to garner much support among older, whiter Americans. If our political fights pit one group, one generation, or one race against all the multicultural “others,” then we all will surely lose.

2013

Online Exclusives: Identity Politics, Class Politics, and Spiritual Politics

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The online exclusives below are freely accessible articles that are part of an ongoing special series associated with Tikkun’s Fall 2013 print issue, Identity Politics, Class Politics, and Spiritual Politics: How Do We Build World-Transforming Coalitions? Many of our most provocative articles on this topic appeared in that print issue, which is only accessible to subscribers. Subscribe now to read the subscriber-only print articles on the web (explore the table of contents to see what you’re missing!). If you appreciate the free web-only articles below, please do enable us to keep up this important work by becoming a print subscriber or offering a donation. We will continue to update this page as new web articles in this series come out.

2013

Revolutionary Suicide: Risking Everything to Transform Society and Live Fully

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We need to commit revolutionary suicide. By this I mean not the killing of our bodies but the destruction of our attachments to security, status, wealth, and power. These attachments prevent us from becoming spiritually and politically alive. They prevent us from changing the violent structure of the society in which we live. When Huey Percy Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party, called us to “revolutionary suicide,” it appears that he was making the same appeal as Jesus of Nazareth, who admonished, “Those who seek to save their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for the sake of [the planet] will save them.” Essentially, both movement founders are saying the same thing. Salvation is not an individual matter.

2013

Once Out of Nature: Life Beyond the Gender Binary

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To truly include transgender people within Abrahamic religious traditions, we have to shatter the idol of the gender binary and face the truth that trans people embody—the truth that the gender binary represents neither the nature of nature, nor the nature of humanity, nor the nature of God.

2013

Race, Class, and the Neoliberal Scourge

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Neoliberalism, the broad set of ideas positing the market and market-centered values as the ultimate “civilizing” agent at home and abroad, has now structured our society for forty years. Ever since it began its gradual ascendance in 1973, we have experienced a marked increase in income inequality, witnessed the slow death of the labor union movement, and keenly felt a growing sense of anxiety. The task of the American Left has never been simpler and clearer—it’s to reconstitute the very idea of the public, in the hope that this reconstitution will generate a large-scale movement against neoliberalism.