Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/56/)
For the past few years, there have been voices of revisionism in France. It is very difficult, as everyone everywhere should recognize, to sustain sincere self-criticism regarding shameful national episodes. But President Francois Hollande has made clear that some issues must be addressed with intractability and not compromised.
I have never bothered to respond to Gandhi detractors because, like the Mahatma himself, I tend to think their pathetic writings are best left to die a natural death—the eventual fate of all untruth. Nevertheless, when Michael Lerner urged me to reply to “Gandhi Centre Stage,” the article by Perry Anderson that appeared in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, I assented.
Editor’s note: I have my doubts about parts of this analysis: 1. I doubt if the research he cites can be assumed to hold cross cultures, so I think his numbers are very exaggerated 2. I think there is a big danger in labeling people whose behavior we believe to be ethically offensives as “psychopaths” and 3. I dont know that this gives us much basis for a respectful inervention, but might increase the already strong elitism among many on the Left who now would have a psychologically reductive term to dismiss people with whom we disagree. Still, I think that this piece deserves our attention, even if only to use as a way of showing the limitations of dismissive discourses on the Left.
Occupy is not over, but Stage Two has not yet come together. I will now, audaciously, suggest a Stage Two that I am convinced would rock the world.
Whatever psychological diagnosis ultimately gets pinned to him, Holmes and the act that will forever define him—as he hoped it would—were the products of a peculiarly American set of cultural experiences, values, and motivation, which hold the key to understanding how and the United States seems to produce such a disproportionate number of people who engage in acts of seemingly senseless mass murder.
A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen.
Temperatures have been increasing every decade since the 1970s, producing increasingly severe storms, floods, wildfires, areas of drought, and other signs of climate change. Yet, an alarming percentage of Jews, especially among the Orthodox, still believe that climate change is nothing more than “liberal politics.”
What would it take to recruit students for a movement to build community, as Martin Luther King dreamed? A Christian minister reflects on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and how we might move from disengagement to social action.
The Jewish Community’s Drift Toward the Right
by Deborah Kaufman
An American Jewish Identity Crisis
by Alan Snitow
“Jewish life had its renaissance because Israel was born,” Rabbi Marvin Hier recently told my partner Deborah Kaufman and I during an interview for our documentary film Between Two Worlds.
In the absence of a visionary or even steadfastly progressive leadership, the Jewish community has become stuck in a vicious cycle of recriminations, while slowly shifting to the political right.
Mejdi is a tour company founded in 2010 by Dr. Marc Gopin, an orthodox rabbi. The idea behind Mejdi is that Arabs and Jews doing peace and coexistence work through NGOs are notoriously under-funded; hundreds of them are literally poor. They also spend a disproportionate amount of time writing grants and fundraising rather than doing their critical on-the-ground work. It’s an unsustainable model, and the Mejdi co-founders felt they could create a business for peace-building that was also self-sustaining.
When people working for a good cause turn in directions that aren’t good—or might even be bad—do their virtuous intentions outweigh the unintended side effects of their activities? How far can the ethical standards of activists and philanthropists be trusted when people worship capitalism as blindly as many Americans do today?
For me, there was no surprise. From the very first day, I was convinced that Yasser Arafat had been poisoned by Ariel Sharon. I even wrote about it several times.