by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
2012
Occupy’s Message to the Food Movement: Bridge the Class Divides
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The food landscape and its correlation to class is complicated and rife with contradiction. This is partly because our modern-day American food system is brand new—it’s only been in existence for about sixty years.
2012
Horizontalidad and Territory in the Occupy Movements
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The word horizontalidad was first heard in the days after the popular rebellion in Argentina in 2001. Horizontal social relationships and the creation of new territory through the use of geographic space are the most generalized and innovative of the experiences of the Occupy movements.
2012
Sustaining the Occupy Movement
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The Occupy encampments took on feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, albeit in tents, demonstrating an interdependent way of living. What if the Occupy movement called on all of us to take back access to our most basic human needs that are now primarily in the hands of very large institutions?
2012
What’s Next for Occupy
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Occupy has unseated the pragmatic from its throne and replaced it with a mighty emptiness. That emptiness is as pregnant as any womb before fertilization, any wound before its healing, any glass before its filling.
2012
Loving and Supporting Occupy
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It was forty-seven years ago that I climbed down a rope from the second floor of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, where we in the Free Speech Movement were holding a sit-in. How exciting for me to watch a new generation beginning to open their minds to the possibility that they might take the reins and become tikkunistas—healers and transformers of our world. It’s also important to note, however, that there are struggles in this young Occupy movement whose outcome will determine its long-term significance.
Editorials & Actions
Tikkun’s NY Times full page ad against first strike on Iran appeared on March 7, 2012
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Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Today, our ad saying “No” to a first strike (preemptive attack) by either Israel or the U.S. on Iran, appeared in the New York Times (in the National Edition it is on page A19). The media has distorted what has been going on between Obama and Netanyahu, representing it as Obama standing up to Netanyahu and being a hero for peace. But actually what happened is that Obama legitimated a first strike and preemptive attack on Iran, arguing with Netanyahu about the timing of such an attack, seeking to allow coercive economic sanctions to work first, but stating explicitly that Israel should not be constrained in any way to follow what it decides to be in its best national interest in regard to a strike on Iran. That’s why AIPAC gave him a standing ovation when Obama addressed them a few days ago. Obama has now fully embraced the militarist position of George W. Bush who argued that it was legitimate for the U.S. to take a preemptive attack on Iraq based on the suspicion that they had nuclear weapons, just as Obama two months ago gave the green light to legislation that allows the US to imprison for life without a trial U.S. citizens the govenrnment suspects to be cooperating in some way with terrorists, and just as he has taken the lead in developing drone technology aimed at civilians (which Pentagon militarists say may soon be used inside the U.S.).
Articles
Tears I Don’t Have Anymore
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When I spent time at my grandparents’ Brighton Beach apartment, I searched for Holocaust clues. “Grandma, tell me about the camps?” I begged between slurps of chicken soup.
“Not now. Eat tatehla. Eat.” Food had two functions in Grandma’s apartment: It was a symbol of freedom from Nazi oppression and served as a tasty muzzle for my invasive curiosity.
Politics & Society
The Growth of a Global Community
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Shanahan finds fault with the American Dream and our focus on purely economic growth. The focus upon prosperity has left Americans in a vacuum where meaning is concerned. Shanahan fears that this cycle has already infected not only other Western democracies, but also the many countries that are striving to achieve economic liftoff. This requires progressives to reexamine the foundation of their political philosophy, but also affords the opportunity for growth of a more satisfying and ultimately a more deeply human kind.
2012
Our Saving Grace: A Relational Mode of Being
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We need relationships; they provide meaning and context. Charlene Spretnak identifies the fallacies of modernity that have led to our current crises by highlighting one very basic point of reference underlying the predominant mode of living today: the mechanistic worldview. And she offers a way of moving beyond the limited and problematic mechanistic mindset.
Articles
Random Violence and Our Single Garment of Destiny
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Diffuse cultural values shape our choices in layered, contingent ways. This is especially true in the context of shocking human behavior, like we saw in Tucson. Attempts to account for specific human actions via sociology are, by definition, “half-baked,” but the patterns are not random.
2012
The Walls of the Reform Movement’s “Big Tent”
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Why would the Union for Reform Judaism give a right-wing Jewish leader a prominent platform from which to make hurtful, dehumanizing, and simplistic comments about Palestinian “culture”? Does inviting such a speaker honor the Reform movement’s history of moral certitude against injustice and discrimination?
2012
Obama, Palestine, and the United Nations
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For those of us who hoped that President Barack Obama would usher in a new era supporting international law, the United Nations, and Israeli-Palestinian peace, 2011 proved to be a profoundly disappointing year. In order for his policies to change, he needs to be pressured.
Articles
Rick Santorum and Karl Marx: Examining Corporate Liberalism and Reaganomics Through the Lens of Social Stratification
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The current Republican primary campaigns have repeatedly raised class issues, offering an opportunity to examine how the two main competing political ideologies in American politics—defined here as corporate liberalism and Reaganomics—respond to class-consciousness and address class interests.
Articles
Embracing a Eunuch Identity
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In addition to being Jewish, I am a member of a definable gender minority that has been conspicuous throughout history. I am a eunuch. Angels in the Torah are the Lord’s trusted messengers; the word angel comes from the Greek word angelos (messenger). In a similar way, eunuchs of biblical times were the emperors’ messengers and guardians. In gender-segregated cultures, our in-betweenness allows us to be able to transgress both worlds.