Tikkun author Gregory Baum was a powerful Catholic force for reconciliation and care between Catholics and Jews. We at Tikkun mourn his death.
Articles
Eduardo Galeano: A Visit to Heaven and Hell
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Tikkun is proud to share with our community excepts from Eduardo Galeano’s last book (Hunter of Stories). Galeano was widely recognized as one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers. A Visit to Heaven and Hell
Mapping Planet Earth
By Eduardo Galeano
[The following passages are excerpted from Hunter of Stories, the last book by Eduardo Galeano, who died in 2015. Thanks for its use go to his literary agent, Susan Bergholz, and Nation Books, which is publishing it next week.]
Free
By day, the sun guides them. By night, the stars. Paying no fare, they travel without passports and without forms for customs or immigration.
Articles
On Balfour’s 100th Anniversary, Time for a New Definition of Sovereignty, Independence and the Nation-State
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On Balfour’s 100th Anniversary, Time
for a New Definition of Sovereignty, Independence and
the Nation-State
by Mark LeVine and Mathias Mossberg
November 2nd marks the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the letter from Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur James Balfour to British Jewish leader Walter Rothschild in which the British Government promised Jews a “national home” in Palestine should they win the war, while offering only to safeguard the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.”
Most “non-Jews”–i.e., Palestinian Arabs–joined by key members of Palestine’s existing Arab Jewish population and some Diaspora Jewish figures, understood that Balfour’s promise would lead to permanent hostility between the two emerging nationalist communities. Some local Jewish leaders even put forward an alternative to the Balfour Declaration, declaring that peace in the Holy Land would only be possible if “both sides… develop their national homes in the same land, which is destined to be one state.”
It’s tragic but fitting that on the Balfour Declaration’s centenary the most right-wing government in Israel’s history is pushing to annex large swaths of the West Bank to Jerusalem, permanently foreclosing the possibility of a second state being created on the territory of Palestine/Israel, and returning the conflict to its roots as a zero-sum territorial struggle between Jews and Palestinians.
Of course, Palestinians are not unique in being on the losing end of the Post-World War I nation-state order. Catalans and Kurds are only the most recent and newsworthy examples of how states established on territories with more than one ethnonational community—never mind established after the conquest and occupation of territories with large indigenous populations—have failed to provide equal political, economic and social rights to all inhabitants.
Articles
The Significance of Martin Luther
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Editor’s Note: We at Tikkun wish to join our allies in the Lutheran Church and other Protestants who are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant reformation which began with Martin Luther. At the same time, we are aware of the hateful teachings of Luther about Jews and about Muslims. These issues are discussed fully in the Summer 2017 issue of Tikkun in “Luther Against the Jews” by Craig L. Nessan (professor of Education and the Renewal of the Church at Warburg Theological Seminary), and in “Deconstructing Historical Prejudice: Luther’s Treatment of the Turks (Muslims)w by Charles Amjad-Ali professor of Justice and Christian Community at Luther Seminary). You can read these important articles by subscribing to Tikkun www.tikkun.org/subscribe (and then emailing chris.tikkun@gmail.com and asking him to send you a copy of that issue after you’ve subscribed. Susannah Heschel in the pages of Tikkun has demonstrated that during, and then after, the Holocaust, some of these prejudices have never fully been understood by some contemporary Lutherans, even as we in Tikkun also know that there are many Lutherans in the U.S. who have a sincere commitment to overcome and repent for this legacy. And as you’ll see by reading the interview below, there are important spiritual insights that contemporary Lutherans can bring to the Christian world which deserve respect and appreciation.
Editorials & Actions
Tom Engelhardt on Osama bin Laden’s America
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Osama Bin Laden’s America
Niger, 9/11, and Apocalyptic Humiliation
By Tom Engelhardt
Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body wasconsigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald Trump recently offered aides and former campaign officials for their legal troubles in the Russia investigation (on which he’s unlikely to deliver) — a mere $400,000 to $500,000 — bin Laden managed to launch the American war on terror. He did so with little but a clever game plan, a few fanatical followers, and a remarkably intuitive sense of how this country works. He had those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, a scattering of supporters elsewhere in the world, and the “training camps” in Afghanistan, but his was a ragged and understaffed movement. And keep in mind that his sworn enemy was the country that then prided itself on being the last superpower, the final winner of the imperial sweepstakes that had gone on for five centuries until, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded. The question was: With such limited resources, what kind of self-destructive behavior could he goad a triumphalist Washington into?
Articles
How America Spreads Global Chaos
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Editor’s Note: The day before Haloween it’s traditional to focus on witches and goblins and walking skeletons and other scary things. None of those things can compare with the scare we can get by looking at the role the U.S. has played and plays today in the world–and how much worse it may soon get if the Trump Administration follows through on its threats. Yet there is also a more nuanced story to tell. As we often say, Tikkun sends out articles and prints articles that we think have important perspectives that are rarely available in the mainstream media–even if we do not necessarily agree with them. Nicholaw Davies (article below) has a lot important facts to bolster his case, and if we look at the US government and its actions, they come out looking rather shabby, brutal, hurtful and destructive.
Articles
The (still) Hidden Injuries of Class
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The (still) Hidden Injuries of Class
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
IT’S NO SECRET that the past several decades have witnessed growing economic inequality and deepening economic insecurity for a very large section of working people both in the U.S. and other capitalist countries around the world. Yet the Democrats and their supporters in the liberal and progressive social change movements are living in fantasy land if they think that the way the Trumpites are exacerbating that inequality gap will be sufficient to win them control of the Congress and the presidency by 2021. What most progressive and liberal politicians and movements miss are the hidden injuries of class that become dramatically intensified when the underlying psychological and spiritual dysfunction of global capitalism interact with economic insecurity. Right-wing, ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist, and/or racist movements gain support as more people begin to lose faith in the efficacy of democratic governments and liberal/left politics focused on providing economic entitlements and political rights to those who had been previously disenfranchised while seeming to ignore or even dismiss as “white privilege” or “male privilege” the ways that many people are in pain. For many, the fact that people of color are more likely to get killed by police than whites or that women face outrageous sexual harassment does not register as a “privilege” to those who have their own forms of suffering, both economic and psychological, which make them feel frustrated with their lives and misunderstood and angry at those who tell them that they are the beneficiaries of a racist and sexist system (which they did not create and which they often feel powerless to change). Sadly, many turn to authoritarian leaders in the hope that their own fears and pain can be alleviated, in part because the liberal and progressive world makes them feel “less than” and disrespected.
Articles
Questioning Everything
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Editor’s Note: We at Tikkun are committed to building a world of love, kindness, generosity, environmental sanity, economic and political justice, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe. Yet we know how easy it is for people to fall into narrow frames of thought when trying to develop strategies and tactics in our efforts to build such a world. So we present here some thoughts on why it is very important to keep open to questioning everything, even though we do not really question the value of seeking these goals: The Caring World: Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth. We are also aware of how the important injunction to “question everything” can become a way of excusing passivity at a time when action on behalf of tikkun (healing, repair and transformation of our world) is so badly needed. So we have to also question the validity of questioning everything–because that too can become a paralyzing ideology that leads to conformity, passivity, and ethical breakdown.
Editorials & Actions
In France,another distortion of Islam:anti-Semitism and Family Violence
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Editor’s note: though stories of this sort are used to foster Islamophobia, Tikkun insists that our readers be aware of the ongoing racism against Jews that is fostered by some in the name of Islam just as we insist that they be aware of the ongoing racism against Muslims, Arabs, and others by some Jews in the name of their version of Judaism.And both of these developments has a lot to do with Western imperialism and Christian hatred of both Muslims and Jews which is explored in the Summer 2017 issue of Tikkun magazine (which is available online or in print but by subscription only www.tikkun.org/subscribe or comes for free when you donate $50 or more at www.tikkun.org/donate). “Burning hatred against France and against Jews, and an orgy of domestic violence. That was how Anne Chenevat, a major witness, described the Merah family – a divorced mother, three sons and two daughters – to the Special Criminal Court of Paris last Tuesday. Mohamed Merah, the youngest of the family’s sons, killed seven people – including three Jewish children shot at point-blank range – and maimed six others in the southern French towns of Montauban and Toulouse between March 11 and March 19, 2012. He was himself killed by security forces three days later.
Articles
Corporate Tax Cut Propaganda …. by Jeffrey Sachs
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Corporate tax cut propaganda
Jeffrey D. Sachs October 20, 2017
The White House is selling a tax cut designed for the rich as a boost for the working class. Cut taxes on capital, the White House claims, and investors will raise investment, hire more workers, and bid up wages — a.k.a. trickle-down economics. If the real goal is to use tax cuts to boost low wages, then do it directly, for example by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit. Of course, there is a basic problem with tax cuts now. They will lead to larger budget deficits even before they lead to more growth.
Articles
Discrimination Against Black Workers
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Los Angeles Black Worker Center
October 5, 2017
Discrimination has created a crisis in the Black community. Although the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act forbids racial discrimination in the workplace, black workers continue to face higher rates of discrimination in the workforce than white workers do. ‘Whether working full-time or part-time, Black workers earn only three-quarters of what white workers earn,’ as stated in the introduction of the brief. , ,
Dear Friends and Allies:The Los Angeles Black Worker Center (LABWC) and National Employment Law Project (NELP) demonstrates the need for California to explore expanded anti-employment discrimination to better protect workers in the era of Trump. You can download the white paper HERE
You can view the white paper HERE
Los Angeles, California, October 5, 2017 – The National Employment Law Project and the Los Angeles Black Worker Center released a white paper today that offers analysis on why anti-discrimination laws must be strengthened to protect communities of color in the workforce as national civil rights enforcement agencies are threatened with cuts and elimination. The report is published as a broad coalition of unemployed, underemployed and union workers call on Governor Brown to sign Senate Bill SB 491- The California Anti-Employment Discrimination Action of 2017- a bill that would begin the process of expanding anti-discrimination enforcement authority to local governments to fill the enforcement gap.
Articles
Islam and anti-Semitism?
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Muslims must address ancient texts usurped for anti-Semitism
by Dr. Junaid Jahangir
I came across a swastika and a “Death to Israel” sign in my latest visit to Pakistan. This is not news to me, as I have heard Friday sermons depicting the yahud (Jews) as our enemies. I have also witnessed online comments by some Pakistanis that Hitler did not complete his job.
I was reminded of these observations as I read the Toronto Star article on the Toronto Imam, Ayman Elkasrawy, who was accused of preaching hate against Jews. The article shows that Elkasrawy’s Arabic prayer was mistranslated and that he did not intend for the annihilation of the Jewish community.
Editorials & Actions
The Torah heading of Noach from Rabbi Zalman Kastel
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Seeing and not seeing (through the prism of Noah and the Ark) Reflections on my trip to family in New York – Noach
I’m sitting on a flight back home from New York with my young son. Last night both of us danced the night away at the wedding of my niece. I am still savouring the joy of being with family, and observing the delight of my young child. Yet, my tradition, turns our attention to sadness amid joy. A glass is broken during the Jewish marriage ceremony to remind us of loss 1). Oddly, this sombre gesture is not honoured by a reflective silence, on the contrary, immediately after the crashing noise everyone erupts into joyous exclamations of Mazal Tov!
Editorials & Actions
Live in NYC or Rockland County? You’re invited!
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You are invited a series of events when Rabbi Lerner speaks in NYC and Rockland County! The President of Brooklyn College has invited him to make a major address Thursday Oct 19 in the series she set up in response to the growth of hate in U.S. politics. That morning he will speak on a panel at Medgar Evers College. And then on Friday night and Saturday he will be the scholar-in-residence at a synagogue in north Nyack in Rockland County where on Friday night he will address “Developing Empathy for BOTH Israel and Palestine” and on Saturday morning he will address the Torah reading (about Noah) and the theme of “Environment and How it is Impacted by Ethics and America’s Spiritual Crisis.”
All of these events are free. Details are below:
1. Brooklyn College. 3:40-5:00 pm on October 19, in the Gold Room of the Student Center. A reception in the Penthouse of the Student Center immediately follows the lecture. Rabbi Lerner’s topic: “Strategies to Combat Racism and Anti-Semitism: The Psychodynamics of American Politics.”
He will discuss the psychopathology in American life that creates the climate in which racism against African Americans and Anti-Semitism grow and strategies to take the country in a different direction. Dinner reception for guests in attendance immediately following in the Student Center Penthouse.
Editorials & Actions
Are Jewish Students Facing Anti-Semitism or Intimidation on College Campuses?
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A new study published by Stanford University reveals that Jewish students feel safer on university campuses when they refuse to conflate their Jewish identities with unequivocal support for the State of Israel. By Oren Kroll-Zeldin
Members of Students for Justice in Palestine hold a ‘die-in’ on campus in solidarity with the people of Gaza during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, March 3, 2014 (photo: SJP at UC Berkeley)
In recent years numerous studies have created the impression that university campuses across the United States are a hotbed of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment. These studies describe Jewish student experiences on campus, painting an alarming portrait of a politically unsafe climate for Jewish students who are ill equipped to deal with these challenges. Related stories
The ‘Jewish tent’ just became even smaller
By Rebecca Arian | September 25, 2017
Why young Jews don’t trust what their institutions say about Israel
By Eliana Fishman | September 14, 2017
Dear Jewish community, let’s stop being scared of the Palestinian flag
By Rob Abrams | August 2, 2017
The lie at the heart of the Jewish American consensus
By Edo Konrad | June 30, 2017
A new study published by Stanford University Graduate School of Education contests these beliefs, arguing not only that campuses are a safe place for Jewish students, but also that students are alienated by the very nature of the debate on anti-Semitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. This groundbreaking new qualitative study, called “Safe and on the Sidelines,” is based on a 10-month study of Jewish students on five campuses across California, and highlights the subtleties of the experiences of Jewish students and emphasizes student voices to uncover a far more complex picture of Jewish life on campus – particularly regarding the complexities of the political debate they face on the Israel-Palestine conflict.