Politics & Society

Can You Help Sustain Our Vision of Social Transformation? A Letter from the Managing Editor

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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.

Politics & Society

Inspiration and a Little Comedic Relief in the Struggle for Immigration Rights

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While Congress has haggled over border militarization, Tikkun’s been pursuing stories of immigration activism and analyses based in radical love. The result: our summer print issue, “Away with All Borders: Embracing Immigration and Ending Deportation.” Meanwhile, Tikkun contributing editor Josh Healey has been hard at work on a powerful project of his own—a comedic call to action for humane immigration reform.

Education

Berkeley Students Plan Strike in Wake of Police Violence

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The videos of police violence that have gone viral on the internet show only half the story. The other half took place at a general assembly later that night, when hundreds of students, community members, and professors voted to call for “a strike and day of action on Tuesday, November 15, in all sectors of higher education.”

Culture

Photo Essay: Sacred Spaces at Occupy Oakland

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Buddhist monks in orange robes chant in one corner of the Occupy Oakland encampment. Across the plaza, a reverend in a rainbow stole reads Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Six Principles of Nonviolence.” A block away, candles burn on an unorthodox altar to the death of capitalism.

Politics & Society

VIDEO: Occupy Oakland Closes Down Port

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There was such a warm community feeling at the port when news came that — after an arbitration process involving the International Longshore Workers Union — port officials had agreed to cancel the evening shift due to the protesters’ blocking of the gates. Many danced when they heard the news.

art

Collaborative Art Fractures Prison Walls

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The image of a hand pressed against thick glass, fingers outstretched, made its way onto Evan Bissell’s canvas because it still haunts one of his collaborators, a young woman named Chey who saw it as a child visiting a jail. “My dad used to do that when I’d visit him,” she wrote in a note to viewers of the “What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project” at San Francisco’s SOMArts space. “The glass was so thick that you couldn’t feel any warmth.” The collaborative art exhibition, which seeks to open our imaginations to new ideas about why harm happens and how harm can be repaired, is itself a hand pressed to the glass of the prison system, a warm-hearted attempt to create new flows of communication and empathy between people shut inside and people shut out. The project grew out of months of written dialogue between four fathers at San Francisco County Jail #5 and four teenagers whose own fathers are or were previously incarcerated.

Christianity

Humanist Easter: Egg Art, Feminist Rabbits, Muddy Romps

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When I was a child, my family celebrated Christian holidays in a fairly standard secular way, decorating a tree on Christmas and hunting eggs on Easter, not to mention joining in the customary consumption of marshmallow peeps, “jelly bird eggs” (whatever those are), and other foods invented by companies with a clever eye for turning a profit from a holiday. My version of Easter lacks the radical Christian religiosity that Nichola laid out in her recent post about Good Friday as a time “to look at the crucifixions necessary to preserve the fiction of Pax Americana, or any false peace maintained by force, whether violent or hegemonic.” It lacks the progressive rethinking of the resurrection narrative that Rabbi Lerner highlighted in his spiritual wisdom of the week post with a quotation from Peter Rollins. But it’s still one of my favorite holidays of the year. On its surface, the humanist Easter I grew up with may have seemed drained of meaning to religious onlookers, but it was actually highly ritualized and deep in its own way.

Humanism

Radical Passover: Celebrating Collective Resistance

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Why is there an olive on the Seder plate? Why is there an orange on the seder plate? And how can the liberation story of Passover relate to our modern-day struggles against oppression? Traditional Passover haggadot (the books of readings used at seder services) are full of answers but not to these questions. But then again, most seder plates don’t have olives and oranges on them …