General News

What We Must Do Now, One Year after the Israeli Election

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One year ago, Israeli voters reelected Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, backed by a new coalition from the hardest of the hard right, with the antidemocratic Ayelet Shaked at Justice, Naftali Bennett politicizing the Education Ministry, and Tzipi Hotovely, of “This land is ours, all of it is ours” fame, heading the day-to-day operations of the Foreign Ministry. How did the Israeli left lose so badly? And is there any hope now?

General News

Merrick Garland, a Good and Decent Man

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He had me at tutoring elementary school children. Before President Obama’s official announcement that he would nominate Hon. Merrick Garland to the United States Supreme Court, the news had leaked, and cable news networks were already giving information about him. His is an impressive Curriculum Vitae. So, when the president began to give Garland’s credentials for the court, I had heard much of it before.

Culture

Tikkun Throwback: Stopping David Duke and Patrick Buchanan: A Strategy for the 1990s

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The candidacies of David Duke and Patrick Buchanan for the Republican presidential nomination are likely to give new publicity and respectability to only barely disguised racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic ideas in American politics. Right-wing extremists are creating a poisonous tendency in American political discourse, as they seek to establish a pseudo-community among the white middle class by mobilizing anger against the poor, the homeless, welfare recipients, immigrants, Blacks, gays, Jews, or the Japanese, and by rallying around talk about “America first” (the slogan of the pro-Nazi isolationists in the 1930s).

General News

One God: Dr Larycia Hawkins, Wheaton College, and Presidential Politics

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God is Love, the rest is commentary. This is an a priori presupposition born of faith. When I contemplate the simple sentence – God is Love – I contemplate the power and the mystery of a life force that defies words. We give God, this Divine Love, anthropomorphic qualities so that we can make God thinkable and speakable. We make God father, mother, friend so that we can wrap our minds around the concept that we are in relationship with a Love that existed before the beginning and will exist after the end, a Love that is as vast as the still expanding universe and as finite as a single grain of sand or a single drop of water, a Love that contains within itself all the laws of physics and mathematics and biology, a Love that loves us personally, knows our names, who understands the language of our laughter and of our tears.

Politics & Society

On Race, Religion, and Human Complexity

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In a debate in Flint, MI, on Sunday, Bernie Sanders, asked to describe his “racial blind spots,” said this:
“When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto – you don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or you get dragged out of a car.” The Clinton campaign quickly mobilized to condemn him for a raft of implications, saying that not all Black people live in ghettos, that not all people who live in ghettos are Black – many are immigrants who belong to other racial categories, for instance. Some people objected that not all white people lack understanding of racism’s impact, others that there are plenty of whites who know poverty firsthand. This is a rehearsal of politics-as-usual, of course, in which each faux pas is ammunition, and huge edifices of argument are loaded onto the usage of a word or phrase, (in Bob Dylan’s immortal words) “just like a mattress balanced on a bottle of wine.”

Christianity

Monotheism as a Moral Issue, Part Two: God's Image and Equality

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The only argument I have ever found to support our intuitive commitment to equality is the biblical premise. Abraham Lincoln revealed his commitment to the Bible when he interpreted the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address. There is no moral claim in any other legal system as powerful as: All Men are Created Equal. Of course, we understand this now to mean all persons (with many disputes about when personhood begins and ends). No other legal system even comes close to using this religious language. The typical European legal provision reads: All persons are equal before the law. As we know from the history of slavery, the law can not be distrusted as the ultimate arbiter of our values.

Politics & Society

Women in Power, South American Style

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In the past 10 years, three women were elected – and reelected – as presidents of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. They are, from left to right in the photo, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Michelle Bachelet, and Dilma Rousseff. (See mini-bios in Notes below.)
Unlike Margaret Thatcher, the first and only female Prime Minister of Great Britain, or Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, these three women are not conservatives. They were elected as part of the “Pink Tide” that swept much of South America following the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela. Women in power in South America is not what I would have expected when I was in school.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Debbie Weissman and Others Respond to Rabbi David Gordis on Israel

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I am responding to the “Reflections on Israel 2016” by David M. Gordis. In some things, I agree with him, and in some others, my criticism is even sharper. However, I take great exception to his conclusions. Let me begin with the term “failure.” There are a number of failed states in our region—most notably, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Israel is certainly not in that category.

General News

The Antidote to Absurdity: Winona LaDuke and Mililani Trask

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You have to tell the story of how it happened, how you didn’t ask permission and it was okay. Because we have become a people who almost have to ask permission to do anything. And that is folly, because the people you are asking permission from have no right to grant you permission. Winona LaDuke
How do you feel?This past Saturday at services, the rabbi asked congregants to call out reasons why it was good to have Shabbat, an island in time that grants respite from the world of doing. “As a refuge from the madness,” I found myself saying, “as a reminder that something else exists.”

Empathy

All the News That’s Fit to Print: How the Media Hide Undocumented Workers

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In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the Internet is replacing the “real,” material world, as theory asks us to question the very notion of reality. Yet that virtual world turns out to rely heavily on some distinctly old systems and realities, including the physical labor of those who produce, care for, and provide the goods and services for the post-industrial information economy.