Sodomites in our own time

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Rabbi Rothbaum presents a humorous yet actually very serious account of what it means to be a Sodomite today. Though we in the liberal and progressive world might immediately identify his description with the policies of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party, with considerable justice in so doing, we ought to also acknowledge that when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, their efforts to end homelessness and hunger in the U.S. (much less around the world) were feeble when compared to the spending that they did for the U.S. military.

Editorials & Actions

Watch this video of Rabbi Lerner at Brooklyn College

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The President of Medgar Evers College invited Rabbi Lerner, editor of Tikkun, to speak to their faculty and students about the struggle for social justice. And the President of Brooklyn College invited Rabbi Lerner to speak to the faculty and student body about his analysis of how best to challenge the hate-filled, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islmaophobic and antiSemitic direction American (and, to some extent, world) society has been moving. While Lerner sees how these tendencies have dramatically accelerated since Donald Trump emerged in the past, his analysis is not narrowly restricted to this moment. You can watch a video that presents some selections from his talk at Brooklyn college by going to John Jay College’s faculty member Jim Vrettos’ media show where he introduces the talk and then gives you an unedited (pardon Lerner’s “um”s) selection at: https://youtu.be/8GHA3AKgr8. 

Lerner recognizes that even before Trump, right wing forces have dominated the U.S. Congress and a majority of the state legislatures for much of the past 40 years, and that Democrats have often sought to accommodate them rather than to articulate a fundamentally different worldview. We at Tikkun invite you to listen to a selection from his talk: https://youtu.be/8GHA3AKgr8k. If you find his analysis insightful, please help us get his analysis out into the world by sending this talk to everyone you know and pasting it onto your Facebook or other social media pages, donating to Tikkun at www.tikkun.org/donate, or joining our interfaith and secular-humanist-and-atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives (no, you don’t have to be religious or believe in God to be a spiritual progressive–you only have to want our society to be governed by a New Bottom Line of love, generosity, environmental responsibiity and awe and wonder at our wonderous universe).

Articles

North Korea: A Logical Path to Peace

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Jonathan Granoff,
President Global Security Institute, UN Representative of the World Summits of Nobel Peace Laureates, and Ambassador for Peace, Security and Nuclear Disarmament of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Chair of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Nuclear Nonproliferation and a member of Tikkun Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. NORTH KOREA: A LOGICAL PATH TO PEACE

11/05/2017 09:40 pm ET
 

(Ambassador Susan Burk, Jonathan Granoff, Ambassador Douglas Roche, President Jimmy Carter)

President Carter dignified America while in office, started no wars, and since leaving office has exemplified dignity and character and is an expert in dealing with North Korea, successfully. He has offered his help. At each news cycle we hear President Trump reiterate dangerous provocations toward North Korea, only increasing the risk of crisis leading to miscalculation resulting in war and the possibility of nuclear catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It is shocking to reflect on how extreme his expressions on behalf of our nation actually are. He threatened to “destroy North Korea” in his recent UN speech before the General Assembly thereby defying the laws of war, which require military actions to be proportionate and discriminate between combatants and civilians, thus threatening a crime against humanity, a genocide against over 25 million people. America is a nation based on the rule of law, degrading international law degrades America.

Editorials & Actions

Christian Theologian Gregory Baum 1923-2017 z’l –a great friend of the Jewish people

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Tikkun author Gregory Baum was a powerful Catholic force for reconciliation and care between Catholics and Jews. We at Tikkun mourn his death. When the rabbis of the Mishnah wrote that the righteous of all people and all religions have a place in the world to come, they could have been thinking of people like Baum. –Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun magazine

Gregory Baum, who as a theological expert at the Second Vatican Council was one of the drafters of the conciliar document Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, which repudiated anti-Semitism, died Oct. 18 in Montreal at the age of 94.

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.