Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/rseliger/page/3/)
… Grant demonstrated that his apology was genuine. He appointed more Jews to public office than all previous presidents combined, and spoke out for Jewish rights on multiple occasions.
Back in 2007, Norman Finkelstein was supposed to take part in an Oxford University Student Union debate about the future of Israel and Palestine. Incongruously to the British-Jewish organizations that vociferously objected to, and torpedoed his participation at the time, Finkelstein was scheduled to debate for a two-state solution. Widely known as a stridently anti-Israel writer-activist, the former academic supports Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) as tactics against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, but condemns the global BDS movement for being dishonest about its real agenda of displacing Israel as a Jewish-majority state. He also views a full right of return for Palestinians as unrealistic. To the outrage of the anti-Israel far-left, he denounces the BDS movement as a “cult.” Finkelstein says he’s “not going to be in a cult again,” as he admits to having been a Maoist in his youth.
I made a point of seeing Rabbi Lerner twice in his recent sojourn to New York. Last Sunday evening, he was part of a panel discussion of religious leaders and academics at Riverside Church, called “Occupy the Mind: Progressive Moral Agenda for the 21st Century.” It was organized by James Vrettos, a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, who began the discussion with an impassioned recitation of progressive concerns. Dr. Cornel West contributed his usual brilliant oratory: witty, entertaining and challenging. In a mutual exchange, he pointed out that fellow panelist Dr. Serene Jones, president of the nearby Union Theological Seminary, will be his “boss” when he moves from Princeton to Union Theological in July, where he began his academic career in the late 1970s.
… the primary goals of such meetings is education, to shed light on the nature of the occupation that most Israelis and members of the international community are unaware of, and to produce initiatives that can help bring about an end to the occupation and a peaceful resolution of the conflict. …
The mother of the Yiddish song and language revival, Adrienne Cooper, has left us suddenly and entirely too soon.
… there sometimes is an unseemly self-centeredness among Jews in their vigilance against “moral equivalence” arguments in invoking the primacy of the Holocaust as compared with other mass crimes or nasty conflicts. … Yet complications abound; for example, even if one criticizes Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, they are in no way “genocidal,” ….
As Republican Presidential contenders vie for Jewish votes by professing undying love for Israel … , there’s that brouhaha on Obama administration figures who don’t simply blame everything on the Arabs.
My prescription for Israel would be to spare no effort to forge a generous political agreement with the Palestinian Authority for two states, …. but it’s still up to Iran to stop threatening Israel’s existence.
The following is an eyewitness report by Hillel Schenker, an Israeli journalist and veteran peace activist who combines both of these pursuits in his current role as co-editor of The Palestine-Israel Journal:
No matter what, I planned to go to the 16th annual memorial rally in memory of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Just as I have for the past 15 years. Just as I did on that fateful Saturday night, November 4th, 1995, when I went to the mass rally For Peace and Against Violence that was organized to counteract the slander campaign being carried out against the Prime Minister. It was at the end of that rally that Rabin was shot three times by Jewish terrorist Yigal Amir. ….
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has just made a significant stride toward reaching out for peace with Israel. As reported by Carlo Strenger, Abbas has owned up to some important historical truths in an interview aired both on Israeli and Palestinian television.