General News

Remembering May 28, 1917 in East St. Louis, Illinois

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In February of 1917, 470 African-Americans were hired to replace striking white workers at the Aluminum Ore Company in East St Louis. On May 28, white workers expressed their concern about African-American migrants at a city council meeting. After the meeting, rumors of an attempted robbery by an African-American man of a white person inflamed whites who formed mobs that attacked African-Americans on the street. Blacks were pulled off trolley cars and beaten. The state’s National Guard was called in to maintain peace, but racial tensions continued to simmer.

art

Seeing Double: A Middle Eastern Comedy of Errors

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In the 1980’s, few Americans knew much about life in the territories Israel had occupied in 1967. Fewer still understood the PLO’s historic offer to settle for a state in less than half what had been Palestine. Yet in 1989, the San Francisco Mime Troupe produced Seeing Double, a mistaken-identity farce that argued for a two-state solution. The seeming unfitness of the genre for the topic proved the secret of the show’s success: laughter allows room for hope.
Twenty-eight years later, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is better understood, but no closer to resolution. Indeed, decades of US military and diplomatic support for Israel’s actions and its “facts on the ground”, have made a solution increasingly unlikely. Last summer, the writers of Seeing Double decided we would update the play, to fit today’s harsher realities and to address the U.S. role.

Culture

A House on Shaky Ground: Eight Structural Flaws of the Western Worldview

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Imagine living in a home with structural flaws in the foundations. At first, you might not notice too much. Every now and then, some cracks might appear in the walls. If they got too bad, you might apply a new coat of paint, and things would seem fine again—for a while.
But suppose your house were in an earthquake zone? Some of us who live in California know what it’s like to call in a structural engineer and be told the foundations need to be retrofitted if the house is to survive the Big One. Sometimes foundation work is necessary if there are hidden flaws that our home is built on.

General News

Global Population and the Insane Policy of US State Dept.

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Just a Glimpse
Here’s a question about doing good in the world. How could we prevent nearly half a million unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions, or maternal death? I was stunned to read recently that the U.S. State Department eliminated American contributions to the United Nations Population Fund, an organization that has done just that, year after year. I have to believe that the white men in suits who made that decision cannot begin to imagine its consequences for real women all around the world. Several decades ago I spent a year working in health in rural Nepal, and learned in my first week of work what family planning services, or not having them, can mean to women of the Global South.

General News

The Women's Balcony — a delightful film!

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The Women’s Balcony, a movie which captures a beautiful
slice of Israeli life, is a huge upper at a time when many
people are feeling depressed and saddened by the state of our world. The movie captures the way that Jewish women have been
marginalized in parts of the Israeli Orthodox religious world,
and how they mobilize themselves to achieve power in the face
of rabbinic authority that is dismissive of their concerns. Yet this is
not another of those “religion is evil” or “men are jerks” kind of
dismissals, but rather a sensitive portrayal of how men and
women find a way, even within the boundaries of orthodoxy, to
recapture each other’s humanity, to stand up against irrational
rules, and find a path that is at once affirming of women and
affirming of parts of the Jewish tradition that these Israeli women
wish to retain in their lives. It is, in its own caring and complex way,
a celebration of the actual and potential power of Jewish women, and
it’s highly enjoyable to watch.–Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun Magazine

General News

Draining the Trump Russia Swamp

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With the dismissal of Former FBI Director James Comey, the smell from the Trump Russia swamp is becoming more and more malodorous. Something stinks in Washington D.C. At first, President Trump and his supporters wanted us to believe that the reason he unceremoniously fired James Comey was because of his actions regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server. Most people never believed this rationale. Trump has since said that the Russia investigation was on his mind when he was thinking of letting Comey go. However, that is not the subject of this essay.

General News

The Settlement Legality Debate: FAQ

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One could quibble further about the language of the Balfour Declaration (for example, it seems to promise only that the “national home for the Jewish people” will be somewhere “in Palestine,” rather than providing for the constitution of Palestine as a whole as a Jewish national home). However, the establishment of the State of Israel, with its over-fulfillment of the “national home” policy, suffices to render the related provisions of the Mandate obsolete.

General News

Making a Long-Standing UN Vision for Compassion a Reality

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In the programmatic and tactical realms, GMP and Heralding Article 25 differ. The former lays out a series of specific policy proposals, whereas Mesbahi in his book prescribes frameworks for action that leave it mostly up to the reader how to best carry them out. Mesbahi also looks more deeply at how people and politicians have perpetuated the status quo through misplaced priorities. While both writings highlight the need to put human needs and rights before money, the GMP very explicitly states that the concept of generosity through security is about more than material wealth, while Mesbahi is more focused on resource redistribution. The ESRA complements the vision laid out in Heralding Article 25 by seeking to enshrine its prescriptions within the Constitution in a manner that would compel the centers of political and economic power to get on board.

General News

A 'cli-fi missionary' with Jewish roots who is fighting global warming

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So what’s ” cli-fi ”? It’s a subgenre of sci-fi, according to some observers, and a separate standalone genre of its own, according to others. I feel that cli-fi novels and movies can cut through the bitter divide among rightwing denialists and leftwing liberals worldwide over the global warming debate. I’m not into politics; I’m into literature and movies.