Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/38/)
I write this letter for the Jewish girl who was afraid to put her name to this letter for fear of being deemed too controversial to be hired within the American Jewish community. I write this letter for the Jewish girl who debates the news schizophrenically with herself inside her head. I write this letter for the Jewish girl who was told that her politics went wrong when she let a few experiences with “good Arabs” distract her from the bigger picture.
I am both Arab and Jewish, and I enjoy resisting those binaries through the performance of my own unique identity. But identifying with both my Arab and Jewish heritage garners mixed results. So long as Hillel is in the business of defining people’s Jewishness for them, they will continue to marginalize Jewish voices.
Heal and Transform the World INTERNSHIP with Tikkun Magazine and the NSP interfaith and secular-humanist and atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives a few blocks from the UC Berkeley Campus.
Are you worried about climate change and upset about how the destruction of our environment is threatening our collective future? Are you outraged by the amount of power that corporations and the top 1% of wealthy people have over U.S. politics and our lives? Do you want to build a future in which “homeland security” is achieved through ending global poverty rather than through the military invasion of other countries? If so, come intern with Tikkun magazine’s Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), an interfaith organization that is also welcoming to “spiritual but not religious” atheists and agnostics.
In order to alleviate mass suffering, there is a spiritual urgency for the interfaith community in the United States to bring attention and public awareness to this global issue of debt crisis and jubilee.
My approach and Somerson’s should be two examples of dueling alternatives on the American Jewish Left, hopefully beyond the Left, in search of both a correction (tikkun) and a conclusion (siyum) to the injustices of one people dominating another.
In the face of economic instability, we need to consider creative solutions—like jubilee, public banking policies, and currency reform—that take into account the complexity of the environment, the nature of money itself, and the possibility for social innovation.
Including Heschel would not diminish the film’s emphasis on the centrality of African Americans in the civil rights struggle, but it would have lent the film more historical accuracy, not simply about one man but as a representative of the role Jews played in the freedom struggle and as a reflection of the Civil Rights movement’s inclusiveness.
Inside Syria
Reese Erlich
Prometheus Books, 2014
The Darker Side of Western Modernity
Walter D. Mignolo
Duke University Press, 2011
To many Westerners, the Middle East seems more confounding each day. How could the killings get any worse, the struggles more irrational? When the rebellion of Syria’s people against the oppressive Assad dictatorship suddenly turned into a civil war, thus giving strength to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the confusion only worsened. Reese Erlich, a prominent independent journalist, begins to unpack some of our questions. Setting the current struggles in the context of the world powers that created Syria, Erlich demonstrates how the histories and dynamics of international struggles are indispensible for understanding the current realities.
by Michael Edwards, Jonathan Brandow, Brian D. McLaren
It’s time to create an alternative to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—a global bank that prioritizes sustainability, not growth.
Packed with right-wing demagogues, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has started using its authority to suppress legitimate criticisms of Israel.
Undoubtedly, the present economic order is marred by social and economic injustice among and within nations and by the overexploitation and destruction of natural resources. Scripture is not concerned with designing an economic system, but rather with prescribing how to implement justice and compassion within any given system.
Once we expand the definition of debt beyond material considerations, the idea of Jubilee becomes more than just debt cancellation—it becomes a broader push to institutionalize the fulfillment of our debts to humanity and Mother Earth.
What would it mean to take seriously the Torah’s call for the cancellation of all debts and the equal redistribution of property every fifty years?
How might we update the Bible’s call for the periodic redistribution of wealth? Could we use estate taxes to create a trust fund for every child?