Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/galleryeditor/page/27/)
Last week we here at Tikkun Daily started running a series of blog posts by Buhle about Bernie Sanders, comics, and the 2016 presidential election. With each post we also published comic art by Buhle and the other artists at Bernie Sanders Comics.
Comic art, the comic strip and the comic art book, owe less to the Jewish tradition than do film or theater (a favorite quip reads: it would be easier to write a history of American Jews without theater than American theater without Jews … because American theater without Jews would hardly be a history at all). But the tradition, continually growing and changing, still owes a lot to the Jewish tradition, and in several interesting ways.
Everyone knows that television talk shows on mainstream news channels are stacked against Bernie. As Sanders’ victories in state primaries continue to roll in, the Bernie surge is described as interesting but irrelevant, except for as it adds to or subtracts from Hillary Clinton’s supposedly inevitable campaign against Trump.
Meanwhile, social media is flooded with discussions about this notable bias. Is this a contradiction of historic proportions? Or perhaps a return to a little-discussed saga within American liberal history.
The Bernie Sanders campaign has provoked so much homegrown vernacular expression, ranging from visual art to music, that one might fairly call it the grassroots social media campaign par excellence.
This last summer, when a crowd of 10,000 in Madison, Wisconsin, broke the virtual press boycott on covering Bernie Sanders as more than a fringe candidate, I was stunned to see the same phenomenon. I’ve seen it again in photos of street events with Bernie making an appearance.
The new anti-Semitism extends far beyond darkened movie theatres to the spotlight shining on Donald J. Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. What if Trump had substituted “Jew” in his diatribe against Muslims? What if he told enraptured followers that: Jews should be banned from entering the country until we can figure out what’s going on. And imagine: He’d require Jewish-Americans to register with a government database, and mandate special identification cards. Warrantless surveillance of American Jews and their places of worship would become the new normal.
In recent years, too many in the African American community have expressed a disconnect to Holocaust topics, seeing the genocide of Jews as someone else’s nightmare. After all, African Americans are still struggling to achieve general recognition of the barbarity of the Middle Passage, the inhumanity of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow, and the battle for modern civil rights. For many in that community, the murder of six million Jews and millions of other Europeans happened to other minorities in a faraway place where they had no involvement.
The night after Purim the two of us sat feasting – a queer Hebrew bible scholar and a trans woman activist. The book of Esther was on our minds, as we read Esther every year on Purim, the festival when we celebrate the brave Jewish queen who saves her people from annihilation in Persia. Also on our minds was the “bathroom panic” gripping the nation over the perilous prospect of transgender women using women’s restrooms. To address the threat, state legislatures are being flooded with proposed measures to deny transgender people access to restrooms and facilities in accordance with their authentic gender identity, instead forcing them to use the restroom matching the inaccurate gender assigned to them at birth. To those who may have missed the news, the rallying cry of these bills is “no men in women’s restrooms.” Since the trope that transwomen are actually men is patently absurd, we sought to delve into the mental plumbing of the cisgender men who craft these “bathroom panic” laws. What is it that compels them to enact such draconian measures? What is the source of their unrighteous anger?
The Labour Party has become embroiled in a row about anti-Semitism. Why the row? After all, the Labour Party is committed to challenging racism and anti-Semitism – which is a particular form of racism. It’s a row because the anti-Semitism in question concerns anti-Zionism – and not everybody in the Labour Party agrees that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. At the heart of the current row, a tweet re-tweeted by Labour MP Naz Shah, which suggested that Israel be relocated to the United States. For those who shared the tweet, it seemed fair comment, given the support of the United States for Israel – and the fact that the second largest Jewish population in the world resides in the United States. Of the 14.2 million Jews living in the world today, six million live in Israel and over five million live in the US.
In honor of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s recent birthday, we here at Tikkun Daily thought we would mark the day by publishing an interview with Johanna Fernández, a professor of History at Baruch College (CUNY) who edited Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal that was published last year.