art

Movie Depicts Sweetness of Simple Faith

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It’s Sukkot, the seven or eight-day autumn holiday (depending upon how you classify Simchat Torah) in which religious people eat their meals in a loosely constructed booth (a sukkah) gaily decorated with plant materials. “Ushpizin” is a charming seriocomic Israeli drama, made in 2004, depicting a particularly tempestuous Sukkot in the lives of a Hasidic couple in modern-day Jerusalem. Liberal Jews have strong feelings about the limited cultural vistas and the unhealthy political influences that we see on Israeli policies from this quarter–more perhaps in the intrusion of religion into the affairs of state and civil life than on attitudes toward peace-making, where the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are often confused with the national-religious camp. But this film reminds us of the positive spiritual dimension to the Haredi lifestyle. Dramatic changes of fortune are seen as divine intervention, an answer to their devotion and a part of their ongoing dialogue with God.

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The Tree Hugger

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This is a poem for Oakland, for the fallen brothers, for the fallen trees —
and for the good men in my life. The Tree Hugger
his skin is brown
limbs long, he is lanky like me
but still: strong arms, thick spine
he is an oak
tree rooted in the Town
find him from Lower Bottoms
to top of the hills
from Berkeley border to Deep East
he is a tree and we
have never spoke,
clapped hands, dapped it up
i barely look him in the eye
* * *
i remember the first time
someone asked me to hug a tree
DC, 10th grade
field trip for all the city kids, all boys,
took us all the way past the suburbs
to the mystical land of West Virginia
Appalachia:
land of miners and mountains
union bumperstickers and a Confederate flag
sharing the same Chevy in front of our bus
poor white folks and the richest forests
my greedy eyes had ever seen
i loved climbing trees
used to race my brother to the top
like we were running from the cops
which he was,
sometimes,
but no sirens singing out here in coal country
just pines and firs and miles and miles of
oaks: thick, brown, and beautiful
with green goatees and high-top fades
like Will Smith from the ’80s
hiking through the woods
in our oversized Timberlands
that actually made sense for once,
we reach a green meadow
and in the middle:
a single, giant oak. Mr. Jeffries, biology teacher
in khakis and a comb-over, says
“Alright, boys. One by one,
I want everyone to go hug that tree.” What?

art

It's Personal: Filmmaker Documents Father's Survival

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When I think of my parents’ tale of survival, and what they lost, the Holocaust becomes personal. It also has occurred to me that my father was never more savvy nor persevering in his life than when leading his young wife and her widowed aunt to safety in the United States: through countries under attack (Yugoslavia and Greece) and in rebellion (Iraq) to the other side of the world (British India), and back around the horn of Africa, up to the Americas and to New Jersey where they first settled. Sept. 28 marks the commercial debut of “Six Million And One,” David Fisher’s true-life depiction of his Israeli family coming to grips with how the Holocaust affected them. Twelve years after his survivor-father’s death, he discovers his diary of remembrances from his months of captivity, first deported from his home in Hungary to Auschwitz and then to the slave labor camps of Mauthausen-Gusen and Gunskirchen in Austria.

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Writing for Change in San Francisco

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At first, I was worried that a one-day conference wouldn’t be worth $99 or, at the last minute, $149, but the moment I was welcomed into the Unitarian church on Franklin, I received a nice string backpack containing three new books, all useful, and two, especially valuable. Already I had recouped $60! And there was much more. This is a conference I believe many Tikkun readers would appreciate. Hawken and the Seattle Protests: Writing That Changes the World
The best moment – Paul Hawken’s speech – came first.

art

Claire Schwartz: Photographing the West Bank Checkpoint

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Photographer Claire Schwartz explores both sides of the Israeli West Bank Barrier and the Bethlehem/Jerusalem checkpoint in her series entitled israel.checkpoint.palestine. Schwartz describes her photographs as a form of visual activism and social justice. “For me, art is all about my politics,” she says. “It is a way of being creative and expressing things that are political.”

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I Heart Hamas?!

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[youtube: video=”DAYEit6o5S0″]
On a humid Saturday afternoon in Manhattan last weekend, I found myself going to see a show with a title that would have driven me away not so long ago: “I Heart Hamas”. The one-woman show “I Heart Hamas And Other Things I’m Afraid to Tell You” was created and performed by Jennifer Jajeh, who profiles her identity as a Palestinian-American actor as she navigates family pressures, stereotypes in show business, and intimate relationships with humor, curiosity and frustration. Jajeh takes her audience on a trip to her homeland in Palestine, and through her first-person narrative we get an insight into her daily reality and her ability to find comedy in tragedy. Jajeh defines her show as “a tragicomic one-woman theater show about my experiences as a Palestinian American and my decision to move to Ramallah in 2000.” Jajeh describes the difficulty of getting acting jobs and directors asking her to “be a little less Palestinian” or trying to decide whether she can pass for Mexican.

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Visuals for Healing: Janice Fried's Meditative Art

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Janice Fried is a figurative illustrator based in New Jersey. Together with author Caroline Myss, she created a card deck of affirmations called “Wisdom for Healing.” She gets responses from people all over the world who have been touched by her illustrations in the collection. Some therapists have reported using her images for group sessions; others with illnesses use the images for daily meditation.

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Tom Block: An Activist Artist Who Infiltrates and Inspires

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While artists do not change the world by merely raising awareness of a social issue, their activist art can mobilize people and resources around a cause.Tom Block, a witty and eloquent artist and writer based in Silver Spring, Maryland, revealed this philosophy to a mixed-faith crowd at the Mishin Fine Arts Gallery in San Francisco from May 4 to May 6. Block uses both his book (Shalom/Salaam: A Story of a Mystical Fraternity) and his artwork to spark conversations between people of various backgrounds interested in “infiltrating and taking over ‘the system.'”
The first ever Amnesty International Human Rights festival, produced by Block in 2010, showcased many of his paintings and furthered several goals of activist art. Congressional sponsors of the festival included Congressmen John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, Olympia Snowe, and Chris Van Hollen, names which helped “inject the work into the worlds of social and political leaders.” More than thirty-five exhibits appeared throughout the US, Canada, and Europe. Dozens of newspaper articles, radio, and television interviews spawned by the festival drastically increased media awareness of the plight of political prisoners like Jose Gallardo, a brigadier general in the Mexican army who spent nine years in jail for publishing an academic paper that exposed the army’s human rights abuses.

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DJEMBE & CANVAS: An Artist of “Spiritual Uplift”

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Though many of the deities in his paintings wear masks, DJEMBE & CANVAS does not. A mask would deflect, disown, and, most importantly, disguise. He disguises nothing. Instead, when we first meet him, we come face-to-face with bleached, blinding honesty. And with this radiant honesty, he inspires us to shed our counterfeit identities and transcend the living masquerade.