An Exchange on Best Path To Peace for Israel/Palestine (Jeff Warner & Yossi Khen & response by Richard Falk)

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[Editor’s Note: Neither of these positions below represent Tikkun’s position.  We call for a focus on healing the PTSD on both sides while simultaneously calling for a campaign for “One Person/One Vote” in an Israel/Palestine with a new constitution that would guarantee without possibility of change through any future democratic process that both Jews and Palestinians would forever have the Right of Return in this new entity. And while we think that formulating it that way might reassure both peoples that their concerns are heard, we put it forward also with the hopes that Israelis would find that growing support for that alternative might produce an Israeli majority for the 2 state solution which we think the best path but politically distant in 2018.

Articles

No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments a Review of Ana Levy-Lyons Book

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No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments

by Ana Levy-Lyons

Published by  Center Street/ Hachette 2018

Reviewed by Natan Margalit

{Editor’s Note: You are invited to a NYC book launch of Ana Levy-Lyons new book at Book Culture (Columbus Ave. & 82nd St.) on Wednesday, March 7 at 6:30pm.More info at her website (www.analevylyons.com) Ana Levy-Lyons is a member of the Tikkun inner-editorial board and her articles in Tikkun have inspired many of our readers.–Rabbi Michael Lerner }

It is evident from the first page that this book is swimming against the current in our contemporary political and spiritual landscape. Author Ana Levy-Lyons tells a story in her preface about how one of her teachers back in high school liked to entertain the kids by listing oxymorons: pretty ugly, jumbo shrimp, etc, and he sometimes included: “liberal religion.”  The laughs that he got demonstrated the underlying assumption in our culture: liberal and religious don’t go together.  The task that the author takes on is to prove that assumption wrong. She does a very good job. The book is structured around Ana Levy-Lyons’ modern commentary on the ten commandments.

Editorials & Actions

Shootings are the Symptoms, Violence Is the Disease

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Shootings are the Symptoms, Violence is the Diseas

By Simon Mont

A gun problem, a shooter problem, a racism problem, a mental health problem, a human problem.  

A violence problem.  

Violence. It’s not just a bullet or a knife. It’s an infection

That permeates through people, relationships and society.

Articles

Gun Violence as State Sponsored Domestic Terrorism

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Editor’s Note:  In a society which has never acknowledged its violent foundation from the genocide of Native peoples, to slavery, to the violent overthrow of governments around the world in order to impose regimes that favor U.S. corporate interests, its brutal war against the Vietnamese people, its recruitment of young people into a pre-army ROTC, and its romanticization in movies and t.v. of super weapons and violence, it is no surprise that it is easy to convince men that “real men” use weapons and violence to get their way in the world. Even Obama, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, spent every Tuesday morning approving targets for drone attacks that killed far more innocent people than school shootings in the same period have. Patriarchal and class-based societies have always used violence to establish and maintain their rule, and the advent and mass availability of super-powered weapons makes the violence that used to be the special privilege of the powerful elites is now also available to the masses. Of course, these weapons should be banned, though the powerful interests of the gun lobby and the military-industrial complex is going to make that very difficult. Nonetheless, applaud the students who refuse to listen to the voices that tell them to be realistic and that they cannot change the world. Yet the pervasive fear generated by a competitive marketplace, with its message that everyone is against you and you have to protect yourself from others who would dominate you or take advantage of you if they could, provides the fodder that the NRA and its supporters need to valorize unlimited access to guns.

Articles

A Pentagon Style Trip Down Memory Lane

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You can read this online at :https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/a-pentagon-style-trip-down-memory-lane

The Light at the End of the Corner 
A Trip Down Memory Lane, Pentagon-Style 
By Tom Engelhardt   We thank Engelhardt and his TomDispatch.com, our media ally, for sharing this article with Tikkun readers. If you’re in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we’re at it, thinking a little about America’s wars? Nothing particularly ambitious, mind you, just — if you’re up for it — a stroll to the corner. Now, admittedly, there’s a small catch here. Where exactly is that corner?  I think the first time I heard about it might have been back in January 2004 and it was located somewhere in Iraq.

Articles

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat: God in Exile, School Shootings, and the Mishkan (Sanctuary)

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 Rabbi . Rachel Barenblat a.k.a. The Velveteen Rabbi .   This appeared first at the website of the Velveteen Rabbi and is reprinted here with her permission

God in exile, school shootings, and building the mishkan together
February 17, 2018 .  In this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, we read וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם / “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I might dwell within them.” (Or “among them.”) The word “I might dwell” is שכנתי / shachanti — the same as the root of the name Shechinah, our mystics’ name for the Divine Presence that dwells with us, within us, among us. Jewish tradition teaches that God is both transcendent (far away and inconceivable) and immanent (indwelling and accessible).

Editorials & Actions

Henry A. Giroux | The Ghost of Fascism in the Age of Trump

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In the age of Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears. Memory has been hijacked. This is especially troubling when the “mobilizing passions” of a fascist past now emerge in the unceasing stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated and reproduced at the highest levels of government and in powerful conservative media, such as Fox News, Breitbart News, conservative talk radio stations and alt-right social media. Power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. This mix of old media and new digitally driven systems of production and consumption are not merely systems, but ecologies that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and modes of agency with unprecedented power and influence.

Articles

Report from Berlin by Victor Grossman

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MAKING EVERYONE HAPPY
Victor Grossman   Tikkun’s Berlin Correspondent   February 12 2018

Thanks be to God! – Gottseidank! That, on Wednesday, was surely the reaction of millions of even nonbelieving Germans! After four and a half months of haggling and recrimination and, four days past the deadline, an all-night session, the three parties had finally settled on a coalition government program – 179 pages long. With a collective sigh of relief there could now be a return to normality.

Editorials & Actions

Countdown to Zero by Marisa Handler

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Marisa Handler, a native Capetonian, reflects on the water crisis in Capetown, which is on the verge of becoming the first major city to exhaust its water supply: “it’s a dire parable about the convergence of climate change, inept governance, and collective denial.”

Editorials & Actions

Has Trump Unwittingly Doomed The Israeli State?

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Has Trump Unwittingly Doomed The Israeli State? By Henry Siegman
Trump’s move on Jerusalem achieved what years of Israel’s settlements failed to do—shatter the illusion of a two-state outcome. The question whether “liberal Zionism” can survive the far right trends that now dominate Israel’s political life was raised forcefully in the New York Times by its columnist Michelle Goldberg. It was prompted by Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which Goldberg described correctly as “another nail in the coffin of ‘liberal Zionism’.”

While the reactions to Trump’s initiative have not yet fully played out, much is already evident. To begin with, they have exposed the stunning level of ignorance and misinformation that exists on this subject.

Editorials & Actions

Victor Grossman on Politics in Germany

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Editor’s Note: Victor Grossman is Tikkun’s correspondent in Berlin. Here he reports on the struggle inside the socialist party about whether it should join the government of Angela Merkel, primarily out of fear that a new election might give the rapidly growing fascist an even larger representation in the German parliament (Bundestag). GROKO OR NO GROKO
Victor Grossman

Berlin Bulletin No. 139, January 27 2018

 

It happened in Bonn last Sunday, on January 21st. There were close to 650 delegates, the gallery in the congress hall was also packed with observers.

Articles

Israel’s Refugee Crisis

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URGENT APPEAL TO THE READERS OF TIKKUN from Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

 

There are times when one confronts a non-negotiable moral duty. This is one of those times.  

I suspect that most readers of Tikkun in Israel, in America and in Europe, have worn out several pairs of shoes over the decades protesting injustices carried out by their own governments. Something more is demanded of us now. For those of us in Israel, that may mean a serious disruption of our personal lives.

Articles

At the Circus with Donald Trump

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[Editor’s Note: We are grateful to our media ally Tom Englehardt and his TomDispatch.com for sharing this and other writings with Tikkun. In this article, he has begun to unravel the seemingly impossible to understand fascination with Trump that perplexes many liberals and progressives: his revealing the horrendous aspect of American power that is normally kept out of sight. What I want to add here is that many people have unconsciously felt that they were being lied to by the media and the dominant mythology of American society. But they couldn’t put their finger on exactly how or why. For some of them, the appeal of Trump was the flip side of Bernie Sanders: both began to challenge the lies, Sanders in a polite way, Trump in a more vicious and hateful way.