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Normalizing The Extraordinary in Medellín, Part Two

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Note: This is the second of two parts on Arlene Goldbard’s visit to cultural development projects in Medellín, Colombia, in early December; you’ll find the first here. Ana Cecilia Restrepo, the director of La Red de Escuelas de Musica de Medellín – that Colombian city’s network of music schools that are much more than schools, as you can read in Part One – was driving me back to my hotel on the last night of my stay. Medellín is widely recognized as a city that has successfully launched its transformation from a place terrorized by drug lords and their gangs, in which going out at night was basically not an option, to one explicitly and assertively aligned with its own remaking. See Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times piece from 2012, for instance, or this account of Medellín being named Innovative City of the Year in 2013, particularly for its new transportation infrastructure. As she drove, Ana told me one of the city’s famous rejuvenation stories.

Politics & Society

To Fully Fight Islamophobia, U.S. Jews Must Confront How Pro-Israel Organizations Foment Anti-Muslim Hate Now Spreading Across America

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Anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from American lawmakers and presidential candidates reached a fevered pitch earlier this month when, standing before a cheering crowd aboard the USS Yorktown in South Carolina, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States. This call came on the heels of Trump and Ben Carson calling for mosques to bemonitored, Senator Marco Rubio suggesting that places where Muslim-Americans gather beshut down, and hundreds of lawmakersvotingto turn away Syrian refugees.

General News

Four Santas

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I am late returning from the North Pole this year because Santa has been on the road. I am one of Santa’s helpers who come to the North Pole every year to help with the preparations for Santa’s Christmas Eve work. I help track and locate children who have moved since last Christmas, so I watch migration patterns closely. This year has been awful for so many children. One might think that the Syrian refugee crisis, the kidnapping and murder of children in Africa, and the immigration of unaccompanied children from Central America to the United States would not concern Santa, but it does.

Culture

Clay Feet Abounding: The Presumption of Progressive Virtue

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There’s a scandal swirling around progressive organizing circles right now.An impressively large number of women have come forward to accuse Trevor FitzGibbon, principal of a large and widely respected public relations firm employed by countless movement organizations, of sexual harrassment and sexual assault. Find the story on Vox and elsewhere. The FitzGibbon charges have stimulated lively and painful discussions online and in person. Over the last few days, I’ve read dozens of posts from women who now feel invited, even impelled, to share stories of offenses committed against themselves and their colleagues. I’m certain the patterns will be familiar to you, dear readers: women who endured repeated humiliation but feared speaking out because of reprisals; women who spoke out and were ignored; women who rebuffed advances from men at work who had power over them, and found themselves tacitly stigmatized and denied opportunity until they moved on; women who were fed up to the breaking point with the daily repetition of mundane offenses – men who steal your ideas for their own, being ignored in meetings, casually offensive comments on one’s body or dress, and so on. Before I move on, let me stipulate that women can be abusers and men can be victims too.

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Normalizing The Extraordinary in Medellín, Part One

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I arrived in Medellín, Colombia a few days after a man who claimed to be acting with divine guidance killed three and wounded nine at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.The very next morning I learned that 14 people had been killed and 22 seriously injured at an attack on a holiday party at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. A day or so later, “The Daily Show” ran a montage of clips of President Obama responding to a series of mass shootings. Watching that, you start to ponder the normalization of terror. Many people in the U.S. like to think of Americans as civilized. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone righteously condemn the barbarism of another society without noticing the scale of our own.

General News

'California' has Always Been Islamic

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A half millennium has taught us that America is very far from that country Utopia whose name literally means “No Place.” There has always been a disjunction between the words expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, or indeed the nebulous desire to find paradise towards that direction where the sun descends. It is true that the “discovery” of the New World led to genocide, and that its history is as enmeshed with violence as any other part of the world (perhaps more so). And yet the platonic ideal of this idea, this desire for a better world, must still lie at the heart of the American project if we’re to have any hope of surviving the twenty-first century. To weld shut the gate of America for Muslims, a country that they have inhabited before the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, to even consider such an abomination, is to be tempted by the howling cries of the worse demons of our nature.

General News

Explaining the Holocaust: How and Why It Happened

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How can one transmit the enormity of the Holocaust to a younger generation? In this very sensitive and perceptive book, Mordecai Schreiber has achieved that goal. In two hundred pages he is able to provide not only an overview of the Holocaust, but also present a variety of Jewish and Christian theological responses to this time of madness and murder, which he reexamines now, seventy years after Auschwitz. The author takes us through the First World War and its aftermath, particularly in Germany, the rise of Hitler, the key architects of the Shoah, focusing on Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Eichmann, and Josef Mengele. He follows with the evolution of the Holocaust, The Judenrat dilemma, and Jewish inaction during the Holocaust (yes, there were things that could have been done).

General News

Trump Reveals the Toxic Ideology of the GOP

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The leaders of the GOP clearly don’t want Donald Trump to be their party’s nominee for President. They don’t want him representing the Party in any way at all. They are fervently praying for him to self-destruct or just fade away before he destroys the Party!