Gordon Fellman argues that Jewish assimilation has less to do with intermarriage and more to do with the Jewish right-wingers who “have abandoned the core ethics that have shaped Judaism from the beginning.”
Editorials & Actions
Unfashionable Fascism
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Unfashionable Fascism: Mainstream Politicians Switching Sides Under Trump’s Regime of Barbarism
Politics & Society
The Scourge of Solitary Confinement
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Stories of solitary confinement show the need for systemic change.
Articles
Class Dismissed: Class Conflict in Red State America
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{Editor’s note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing with Tikkun this important article about the larger significance of the teachers striking in Red states. RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com]
Class Dismissed
Class Conflict in Red State America
By Steve Fraser
Teachers in red-state America are hard at work teaching us all a lesson. The American mythos has always rested on a belief that this country was born out of a kind of immaculate conception, that the New World came into being and has forever after been preserved as a land without the class hierarchies and conflicts that so disfigured Europe. The strikes, rallies, and walkouts of public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, soon perhaps Arizona, and elsewhere are a stunning reminder that class has always mattered far more in our public and private lives than our origin story would allow. Insurgent teachers are instructing us all about a tale of denial for which we’ve paid a heavy price. Professionals or Proletarians?
Articles
Eyeless in Gaza
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{Editor’s Note: Uri Avnery is the leader of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom. Hundreds more were wounded today. Please send it out to everyone you know, also send it on Facebook and all social media, and post it on your website!–Rabbi Michael Lerner}
Uri Avnery
April 14, 2018 Eyeless in Gaza
WRITE DOWN: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief.We don’t belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race. IS MY government committing “war crimes” along the border of the Gaza Strip?
Editorials & Actions
A Tale of American Hubris
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A Tale of American Hubris
Or Five Lessons in the History of American Defeat
By Tom Engelhardt
The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington’s present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort. Still, just for the hell of it, let’s take a few moments to think about what some of the lessons of the last years of the previous century and the first years of this one might be for the world’s most exceptional and indispensable nation, the planet’s sole superpower, the globe’s only sheriff. Those were, of course, commonplace descriptions from the pre-Trump era and yet, in the age of MAGA, already as moldy and cold as the dust in some pharaonic tomb.
Editorials & Actions
War Is a Lie by David Swanson
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By David Swanson
In the park today I saw a teenager watching two little kids, one of whom apparently stole a piece of candy from the other. The teenager rushed up to the two of them, reprimanded one of them, and stole both of their bicycles. I felt like it was my turn to step in at that point, and I confronted the bicycle thief. “Excuse me,” I said, “what makes you think you can commit a larger crime just because you witnessed a smaller one? Who do you think you are?” He stared at me for a while, and replied: “the U.S. military.”
There is no crime larger than war.
Other Voices
The Hope We Create: An Activist’s Perspective
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Richard A. Bachmann reviews Ron Aronson’s new book, “We – Reviving Social Hope” and reminds us of the importance of collective action to sustain hope.
Editorials & Actions
Promised Land and Social Construct
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Promised Land and Social Construct
by David Giesen
Imagine a scramble up a mountain till after several false crests have been summited in fact the grand overlook is gained. Below stretches a vast and inviting . . . social construct.
Politics & Society
On the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassination
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On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Peter Gabel reflects on the history of racism in the U.S. and our failure to exist in mutual recognition of one another’s being.
Articles
“This Conversation Never Happened”
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by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
I was sitting in Rising Star Roasters in Ohio City, Cleveland, Ohio when two loud-mouthed millennials sat next to me. They filled the whole room with their discussion of a building they are making to house yoga, a workout room and other things. It was as if they couldn’t find their worth unless the whole room saw it reflected in their access to property and investment. I was reading and so mostly shut out the discussion that followed of skylights, boiler systems, and ducting -the latter two of which I often find really interesting, given that I love to think about how we can build homes intricately, solidly and sustainably. What if I had read out loud, very loud, my chapter, “Compassion: tragic predicaments” so that the whole room filled with the words of Martha Nussbaum? (I should do that sometime, the next time a person shouts into a cell phone -go up next to them and start reading REALLY LOUDLY.)
But there came a point where my mind told me I should be listening. The builder said to the client, back-pedaling from some difficulty the client faced and which would possibly cause moral problems for the builder: “This conversation never happened.” He implied that they can just act as if he had never heard the difficulty. The problem is, the conversation did happen. That’s the truth. The builder went on blithely through the remaining minutes. I couldn’t figure out what had been avoided, but he seemed happy. The client went to the bathroom, and the builder bounced around the place with a CAVS hat on until they both left. No problem. The conversation happened, and they will suppress it if accountability ever arises. Need I say that this is our society now? “This conversation never happened” is a cliché you can speak loudly in public space while you are trying to vacuum some money away from people’s pockets. We live in an arbitrary society. Our president is an arbitrarian –he is accountable to no rule. Major “news” sources are increasingly arbitrarian -they drive people who have served our country to leave in protest due to their disregard of truth. Even good educational institutions will say that they value X in education -say, “ethics”- but unintentionally omit structured ethical learning and moral education across the university educational experience. Mission statements seem to be mere fluff, and the faculty that should have helped create them irrelevant -the space of the university, then: arbitrary.
Editorials & Actions
The Colors of our Future
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The Colors of Our Future
by Ellie Lyla Lerner
Where the pot of gold used to lie is now a vortex of gasoline,
a gloss, floating on the water we hold most dear. This rainbow is not the fairy tale book ambassador. This rainbow is not the refraction of colors, arching over a reborn world. No longer will crystal clear water droplets fill storybooks and poems with multicolored hope. For this rainbow is a story of muddy water, dirty streets and songs of smog.
Articles
Nate Terani: Donald Trump’s America– Already Hell Enough for this Muslim-American
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[Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing this article by Nate Terani. The introduction is from Tom Engelhardt who edits Tom Dispatch]
Who could possibly keep up with the discordant version of musical chairs now being played out in Washington? When it comes to Donald Trump’s White House, the old sports phrase about needing a scorecard to keep track of the players pops to mind (though you would need a new one every day or maybe every few hours). The turnover rate of top White House staffers was already at 43%, a record for any administration in little more than its first year in office, before the latest round of exits even began. Recently, the president nominated Gina Haspel (“Bloody Gina”) to head the CIA. She had, in fact, been responsible for running one of the Bush administration’s earliest and most brutal “black sites” and had a significant hand as well in destroying evidence of what CIA torturers had done there and elsewhere.
Editorials & Actions
We Never Needed to Use an Atomic Bomb–not in WWII, NEVER
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By Anthony Gronowicz
This entire race to mutual destruction began with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were militarily unnecessary:
President Truman misled the American people into thinking that Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were military targets. The reason for the bombing is that the Soviet Union had acceded to an Anglo-American request to enter the war against Japan the very day that Nagasaki was bombed. The bomb’s successful testing in July 1945 made Soviet participation unnecessary. One year earlier, the head of the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic bomb, General Leslie Groves, had told Nobel Prize winner Joseph Rotblat that “the main purpose of the bomb was `to subdue the Russians.’”[1]
Most Americans are unaware of the anti-nuclear bomb perspective of World War II’s Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, Five-Star Fleet Admiral of the U.S. Navy and Chief of Staff to the President William D. Leahy, and Commanding General of the United States Army Air Force Henry H. Arnold—among others. Eisenhower wrote, “… I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him [Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” Leahy concluded, “… [T] he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan … [I]n being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.
Editorials & Actions
A note from Keith Ellison about Farrakhan and hatred
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Rep. Keith EllisonFollow
Member of Congress from Minnesota’s Fifth District. Vice-Chair, @USProgressives
Mar 18
[ Editor’s Note: When you read this, it becomes even more striking and upsetting that the leaders of the Women’s March could not be equally explicit in condemning Farrakhan’s hatred of Jews and GLBQ and publicly distancing from him and his ideas. ]
E
I Have Fought Against Hate My Entire Career
Standing together when those who have never been on our side seek to divide us
I ran for Congress more than a decade ago because I imagined a more inclusive, tolerant, and welcoming America and I’ve used my seat in Congress to try to make that vision a reality. I’ve voted to strengthen hate crime laws. I’ve introduced legislation to ensure that refugees fleeing war and persecution are safe and welcome in the United States.