Rabbi Lerner’s comment: Who do you trust more, Iran’s new President Rouhani or Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu? Please read the article by my former friend John Judis.
Articles
The Psychodynamics of the Tea Party’s Success – and How to Beat It
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After many years as a psychotherapist studying the psychodynamics leading Americans to move to the Right, (before I became a rabbi and editor of Tikkun), I began to understand why a fringe and extremist group could be so successful in gathering support that would eventually lead to its ability to shut down the functioning of the government.
Editorials & Actions
Responding to Iran’s President Rouhani–by Uri Avnery
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Uri Avnery
September 28, 2013
The Real Bomb
YEARS AGO I disclosed one of the biggest secrets about Iran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an agent of the Mossad.
Suddenly, all the curious details of his behavior made sense. His public fantasies about the disappearance of Israel. His denial of the Holocaust, which until then had been typical only of a lunatic fringe. His boasting about Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Editorials & Actions
Syria: What Obama Should Do
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Sept. 9, 2013
Dear Fellow Tikkunistas (those committed to tikkun olam–the healing and transforming of our world),
Aryeh Cohen, a professor of Rabbinics at the American Jewish University (and a member of the Tikkun Editorial Board) and I, wrote an op-ed on what should happen in Syria. Please read it below. And then as chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, I participated in an outreach to Congress together with 40 “faith leaders.” I urge you to send both of these (see below) to your elected representatives and to anyone else.
Books
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?
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When Mohammad Odeh, the terrorist who tried to kill David Harris-Gershon wife, said he was sorry, Harris-Gershon decided to travel to Israel/Palestine to see if Odeh was speaking the truth.
Articles
Toward a Non-Binary Discussion of Race: Thoughts on Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
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The killing of Trayvon Martin moved me, like so many other Black people, to my core. Americans talk a lot about “race” but are bound up in a highly specious construction of it. We need to have real discussion about our changing ethnoracial order, including religious division, color, class, and imperialism, if we are to survive as a society.
Articles
Responses to the Prosecution of Whistle Blowers
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NPR, mistakenly still identified as a liberal news source when in fact for the past decade at least it has been so worried about losing its funding that it has bent over backwards to accommodate governmental and corporate spins on the news, did a focus on Manning that sought to reduce his courageous acts to personal psychopathology. This is typical of the way the lamestream media–in bed with the military, the homeland security and spying teams, the government, and the corporate elite–either ignores or demeans acts of resistance to the American economic, political and cultural empire. That way of dealing with the opposition to the path of the elites has been very effective, though it is also immoral, intellectually dishonest, and pathetic. Tikkun and the NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives’ response was to buy an ad in the New York Times to allow ordinary citizens to call upon President Obama to stop prosecuting whistle blowers. It’s not too late to sign and donate so we can buy space in other media to let our fellow countrymen know that there is a way to stand up publicly against all this.
2013
Why Alabama’s Immigration Law is an Assault on Religious Values
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Alabama’s HB 56 criminalizes the ability of faithful people to provide sanctuary, transportation to needed services, and the basic care that the despicable Samaritan offered to one injured by society. This law needs to be repealed (not sections reinstated), so people of faith can bring everyone out of the shadows and truly be whole and upright living in the noonday light of love.
2013
No Borders: Struggling for a Global Commons
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What distinguishes a No Borders politics from other immigrant-rights approaches is their refusal to settle for “fairer” immigration laws (higher numbers, access to legal statuses, and so on). Within a No Borders politics, it is understood that the border-control practices of national states not only reflect people’s unequal rights (e.g., whose movements are deemed to be legitimate and whose are not) but also produce this inequality. Thus, their signal demand is for every person to have the freedom to move and, in this era of massive dispossession and displacement, the concomitant freedom to not be moved (i.e., to stay).
2013
Migration and Institutional Innovation at the Edge of the State
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The movement of people in and out of national spaces should challenge societies to think continually about how these spaces are organized. One idea is to establish an international regime for multiple citizenship. Another is to allow migrants to pass through national borders anonymously.
2013
Immigration Reform and Faith Values: The Agenda of the Lamb
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Comprehensive immigration reform is about the right thing to do. To really see how the Bible looks at the issue of immigration, and how we should deal with the 11 million undocumented immigrants that reside in our country, one must continue reading Romans 13, which states, “ … owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”
2013
Pragmatic Compromises Will Never Yield the World We Seek
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The Democratic Party is constantly compromising to placate the Right but almost never seeks to placate the Left. To break free of this cycle, liberals need to question a capitalist assumption that too often finds support in the liberal world: that material well-being is the primary key to happiness.
2013
Boycott Hyatt and Patronize Union Hotels: A Jewish Obligation of the Union for Reform Judaism
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The rabbinic arm of the Reform movement has emphasized the importance of collective bargaining for decades. So why have so many recent Reform conferences taken place at union-boycotted hotels?
2013
Away With All Borders: The Immigration Mess
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National reforms are not enough. To end the fear and heartbreak of the current system will require the implementation of a Global Marshall Plan and a basic challenge to our notions of land ownership and the nation-state.
2013
Immigration: A Difficult Love Story
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During economic booms, migrants are recruited as much-needed workers. During downturns, they are demonized and deported. It’s a tumultuous affair wrought with hypocrisy, injustice, and cruelty.