From efforts to counter homophobia to campaigns for more caring immigration policies, social justice struggles all rely on a similar leap of faith – the idea that, on a mass scale, we can shift our collective sense of what is possible and transform the world around us.
In this unsettling era of drone strikes, mass shootings, and impending climate disaster, it’s not hard to find information in the progressive mediascape about everything we are doing wrong. What’s harder to find is an analysis that combines an uncompromising commitment to exposing injustice with an insistent faith in our power to create empathy where hatred once festered, to heal from trauma, and to find meaningful ways to resist the crushing transnational economic forces that shape our lives.
That’s why Tikkun‘s fierce and full-hearted critiques are so urgently needed right now. Our authors reject despair. Instead, they actively articulate a vision of the world we want to live in, even as they offer unflinching analyses of human rights abuses against Palestinians, mass incarceration in the United States, and the violence of deportation.
We can’t continue publishing these articles on our own. Readers like you are critical to keeping this magazine alive. We need your help to sustain Tikkun‘s vision of social transformation.
If you don’t yet subscribe to the print magazine, that’s a great place to start. You can subscribe here. Or if you already have a subscription for yourself, you can buy a gift subscription as a present for your friends and loved ones.
During my five years on Tikkun‘s editorial staff thus far, I’ve led the magazine in dynamic new directions, redesigning our website, putting together a special interfaith issue on Queer Spirituality and Politics, working with former managing editor David Belden to produce a powerful introduction to Restorative Justice practices, commissioning articles for a special issue on Embracing Immigration and Ending Deportation, and shaping the direction of our recent Identity Politics, Class Politics, Spiritual Politics issue to center the voices of younger writers, queer writers, and writers of color.
This work is energizing. It’s a wonderful feeling to put together these special issues and then hear activists, organizers, and congregations talk about how much they learned from reading them and how they are using the magazine as a resource in their activist efforts. My mind is racing with ideas for all of the future special issues I’d like to put together – issues on topics like disability activism and spirituality, regimes of debt (and how spiritual texts can inspire efforts to resist and abolish debt), radical parenting in an age of climate disaster, and much more.
I am excited to pursue these topics and more for you in the coming months. But in order to continue doing this important work, we need your support. Please help us meet our core expenses of creating the magazine.
You can be assured that not a cent of your money will be wasted, and even a little contribution will make a big difference. Our tiny staff is expert at creating something out of nothing. On a good month, we have an image budget of $400 total for all the art needed for the entire 72-page issue of the magazine, including its cover (I know this because, due to the tightness of our budget, I am now the art director as well as the managing editor!). In the hardest moments, we have had an image budget of zero. So you can imagine what a difference a donation of $500 (or even $50) will make to us.
Tikkun has survived for nearly three decades thanks to the generosity of readers like you. Can you help build a strong foundation to keep Tikkun alive for another decade? Click here to become a member of the magazine’s activist/support network and make recurring monthly donations to the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
Warm regards,
[brclear]
Alana Yu-lan Price
Managing Editor, Tikkun
Thanks for all your great work, Ms. Price. Your point that TIKKUN “combines an uncompromising commitment to exposing injustice with an insistent faith in our power to create empathy where hatred once festered, to heal from trauma, and to find meaningful ways to resist” is well-said. I recently sent in my contribution, and I urge all other “spiritual progressives,” by any name, to do the same.
Need some money? Ok, here’s a deal:
Publish an editorial agreeing to all of the following true statements in their entirety, and make it the policy of this blog that no author may pen a piece, nor any comment be published, that contradicts them, convince me that the proper measures are in place to ensure this, and I will write you a check for $5000:
1) Jewish Voice for Peace and BDS do not desire a two-state settlement and therefore cannot be considered to be “peace” activists, nor can they be considered anything but hostile to Israel.
2) AIPAC is not a lobbying organization and does not comprise a “lobby”, as they donate exactly zero dollars to political campaigns. They are an advocacy organization, like hundreds of others in DC. The reason that most federal politicians support Israel is because a majority of their constituents do.
3) There is no genocide, ethnic cleansing, or anything of the sort in Israel. So-called Palestinians have one of the highest rates of population increase in the world. The only ethnic cleansing that is relevant in the Israeli-Arab conflict is the one million Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries after 1948.
4) Anti-Zionist Jewish groups like the Neturei Karta are a tiny fringe cult comprising at most several hundred people. They don’t represent any legitimate thought current within Judaism and are not taken seriously by anyone else.
5) The roughly $3 billion annual US aid to Israel represents less than 2% of Israel’s GDP and therefore any statement to the effect of “our tax dollars at work” in reference to Israeli actions is ludicrous.
6) The Khazar hoax has been disproven by every shred of available genetic, linguistic, and historical evidence. All Jews from all over the world share common ancestors that lived in Israel during the Second Temple period.
7) The majority of the ancestors of the people who would later adopt the name “Palestinians” arrived in Israel much later than the Second Temple period. The term “Palestinian” was not used to refer to Arabs until the 1950s.
8) Iranian officials have made genocidal statements against Israel and anyone who denies that is an antisemite.
9) The website Mondoweiss uses language indistinguishable from neo-Nazi sites such as Stormfront and Veterans Today to criticize Israel, Judaism, and Jewish Americans, and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate forum, nor can anyone who participates there be considered a legitimate author.
10) The website Daily Kos tolerates language indistinguishable from neo-Nazi sites such as Stormfront and Veterans Today to criticize Israel, Judaism, and Jewish Americans, and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate forum, nor can anyone who participates there be considered a legitimate author.
11) The USS Liberty conspiracy theory is a hoax. Multiple investigations have shown that.
12) The concept of the “Chosen People” in Judaism means chosen for a special burden – to maintain God’s covenant with Abraham – not chosen for special favors.
13) Arab Christians have among the the highest socioeconomic indicators of any group in Israel. Israel is by far the country in the Middle East that grants its Arab citizens the most freedom.
14) The King David hotel bombing was 70 years ago, and has been overshadowed by countless larger acts of terror since. If you have to resort to this event that happened 70 years ago, before Israel was even a state, to criticize Israel, you have lost the argument.
15) There was and is no connection between Zionism and totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism, and any such claim is antisemitic.
testing. testing.
I’m trying to figure out how this comment made it though the ridiculous filter but my other one didn’t. But too bad for you because in it I was actually offering to cut Tikkun a $5000 check. No joke. Oh well…