Politics & Society

Racists Worse Than Cliven Bundy Who Actually Demand Our Viral Scorn

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Cliven Bundy – the freeloading rancher who hates America – always seemed to be a fairly despicable, self-interested person. Despite this, Fox News and right-leaning conservatives desperately celebrated him as a brave insurgent fighting government overreach. Because that’s what propaganda machines do: claw at hot-button issues and warp them for messaging purposes until they are disfigured beyond recognition. However, once Bundy revealed his racist side, saying (among other things) that black Americans were “better off as slaves,” conservative supporters such as Sean Hannity ran for the hills as the outrage and scorn for Bundy reached viral proportions. Now, Bundy deserves to be shunned and his message repudiated.

Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

NC Clergy Send Open Letter to State Government Leaders

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As Jews and Christians across North Carolina celebrated Passover and Holy Week, clergy from our Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina sent the following letter to our General Assembly leadership. Last summer, over 100,000 people came to the General Assembly to protest extremism and call for a new moral center to our common life. As we prepare for another legislative session this year, we pray for those in authority, that they might have ears to hear.

Culture

The Crisis in Israel's Holocaust Education

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Israeli Minister of Education Shai Piron’s plan to introduce Holocaust education to Israeli public schools starting as early as the first grade has been controversial. Alongside the concern voiced by many parents about traumatizing young children with gruesome details of systematic ethnic cleansing, many begin to question how the continued rehashing of communal wounds shape the development of national identity and what political interests the perpetuation of historical trauma might serve.

Culture

Hirsi Ali, Islam, and Cultural Relativism: The Brandeis Controversy

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In an age of identity politics can we criticize the formerly colonized or semi-colonized “Two-Thirds World” (in the faculty letter’s terminology)? How to address female genital mutilation in Somalia, slavery in Mauritania and the lynching of gays in Kenya? Especially when such occurrences are clothed with the authority of religion, how do we respond?

General News

Ukraine and the Myths, Blessings, and Curses of Nationalism

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Reliable estimates of the numbers of Jews now living in Ukraine are hard to come by. 80,000? 100,000? 200,000? Nobody really knows. This confusion is mirrored in any independent attempt to get a clear picture of how the recent turmoil is affecting them. After the Ukrainian president Yanukovych fled, back in February, those with seats in the new government included the far rightist anti-semitic group Svoboda, who have claimed in the past that the country’s been ruled by a ‘Moscow-Jewish mafia’; and there were reports of pro-Maidan paramilitary forces patrolling the streets of Kiev wearing swastika armbands and mouthing anti-semitic slogans.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Israel/Palestine: A World of Hope and Pain

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The Holy Land is a land of trauma. Old hatreds and fears cling to the Israelis and Palestinians like skins. Here is my Israeli patient, a scar in his side from a Palestinian bullet; my Palestinian friend, shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier; the Bedouin family whose home, made of scrap aluminum, was demolished by Israeli bulldozers; the Palestinian teenager sent to prison for throwing rocks at soldiers; and the Israeli soldier whose job was to interrogate arrested teenagers. Until the sharp pain that runs through the heart of Israel/Palestine is acknowledged, nothing can change.

General News

How the Progressive D.C. Community Helped Me Defeat the Right-Wing, 'Pro-Israel' Silencing Machine

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On February 6, my inbox was inundated with messages from people I did not know. I’m so disgusted, they read; You’re going to hear from us again, they read; We’re going to fight this, they read. As someone who has grown accustomed to sporadic bits of hate mail for my progressive views on Israel, I was prepared for the worst. However, these emails, largely from residents of the D.C. metro area, were messages of support, messages of defiance. They were messages from those who had just learned that the D.C. Jewish Community Center, already under pressure from right-wing organizations and influences on a number of fronts, had quietly cancelled my high-profile book event, at which I was to speak about the themes of reconciliation and dialogue contained in my memior, What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?

Inter-Culturalism

Jews as Racialized Other as Reflected in the Kansas Murders

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Why did a self-described “white supremacist” target apparent white people at Jewish community centers? The answer is quite simple: Though Jewish people are members of every so-called “race,” even Jews of European heritage (Ashkenazim) have been and still continue to be “racially” othered by dominant Christian European-heritage communities in some quarters.