Culture

The Honorable Scars of the McCarthy Era

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We haven’t done guest-written book reviews on Tikkun Daily before but here’s a nice one to start with:
Review by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum
It has been over fifty years since the end of the McCarthy era, but the impact of the blacklist has not gone away. Julie Gilgoff’s compelling memoir (at right, published by Allbook Books, 2010) about her grandfather Max Gilgoff, a Brooklyn, New York high school teacher, gives us a highly personal, insider’s view of that “Scoundrel Time” and its aftermath. Max Gilgoff wasn’t famous, like the Hollywood Ten. But in his community, he was a revered French teacher, a poet, an intellectual, and a man who fought for the powerless. When Henry Fields, a local, young black father of four was shot to death by a policeman for a minor traffic infraction, Gilgoff helped organize a peaceful protest that channeled his community’s anger.

Judaism

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom on the Torah portion of Yitro comes from Rabbi Zalman Kastel. Kastel illuminates the virtues and limitations of authority and encourages us to always question authority, yet to submit to it when appropriate. Kastel is National Director for the Together for Humanity Foundation. Authority Trashed, Tucson, and Tunisia: Problems and Opportunities of Democracy of Opinion
by Rabbi Zalman Kastel

In rejecting elitism and in pursuit of freedom, we now face the idea that all opinions, not just people, are of equal value. Is this democratisation of opinion, combined with a breakdown in authority, a contributing factor to the madness in the world?

art

A Strong and Demanding Love: Art as a Force for Social Transformation

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by Evan Bissell
“In doing this, lets create some love through the work and be able to accept our differences and the conditions of our lives…Whatever we create with those eyes on that paper, let that be acceptance of our experiences and move to that point of forgiveness.” — Vonteak, a participant in the What Cannot Be Taken Away project
“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” — Audre Lorde
Vonteak, one of eight collaboratively designed portraits. 5′ x 8′ Acrylic and oil pastel. In a short cinderblock room at the San Francisco jail, eight fathers and I told the life story of fresh satsuma mandarins that we held in our hands.

Politics & Society

Fear and Loathing at the TSA

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By Neil Hanson
The flap over the TSA searches of airline passengers highlights just how far we’ve fallen into the deep chasm of slavery to fear and the illusion of security. I have zero doubt in my mind that the deep and exhaustive searches that we submit ourselves to when we fly reduces the threat of violence on aircraft, and reduces the risk that we’ll experience another event like 9/11 employing passenger airliners as weapons. We’re absolutely mitigating a risk, and we’re paying a price to do so. The annual budget of the TSA is about $6.3 billion, and that doesn’t count all the collateral financial costs of a nation submitting to this level of scrutiny. We also pay with the loss of one more portion of our privacy.

Gender and Sexuality

Abolish "don't ask, don't tell" and ask Obama to freeze home foreclosures

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We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are asking you to write to President Obama and Congress on two critical issues:
1. Ask Obama not to appeal U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips’s decision that the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is unconstitutional. Believe it or not, despite the fact that President Obama says he is still committed to ending the military’s discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, his administration has announced that it will appeal Judge Phillips’s decision. Obama should instead embrace the decision and order the military to comply immediately. Of course, many of us wish that he would also downsize the military and use it to advance peace rather than fight wars.

art

Collaborative Art Fractures Prison Walls

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The image of a hand pressed against thick glass, fingers outstretched, made its way onto Evan Bissell’s canvas because it still haunts one of his collaborators, a young woman named Chey who saw it as a child visiting a jail. “My dad used to do that when I’d visit him,” she wrote in a note to viewers of the “What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project” at San Francisco’s SOMArts space. “The glass was so thick that you couldn’t feel any warmth.” The collaborative art exhibition, which seeks to open our imaginations to new ideas about why harm happens and how harm can be repaired, is itself a hand pressed to the glass of the prison system, a warm-hearted attempt to create new flows of communication and empathy between people shut inside and people shut out. The project grew out of months of written dialogue between four fathers at San Francisco County Jail #5 and four teenagers whose own fathers are or were previously incarcerated.

General News

Is the "Anti-Immigrant Tide" Reversible?

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Well, it’s only an apparent tide and to the extent to which it seems to have momentum, it is reversible. Those are conclusions of what is, in my opinion, an excellent analysis of the current political state of play on the immigration rights issue, in a just published article, “The Preventable Rise of Arizona’s SB 1070,” by Justin Akers Chacon. Last June the General Assembly of my Unitarian Universalist denomination adopted Immigration Rights as a 4-Year Study-Action Issue, orienting its associated congregations, as much as possible given UU pluralism, toward a single primary topic of shared conversation. Since then I have been looking for a coherent way to understand the causes, the political forces standing in the way of a just resolution, and a sense of how progressives might engage this issue with some chance of a positive outcome. Chacon’s article is the best analysis I have seen so far.

Culture

Guest Post: “The artist formerly known as Molly Norris,” By Christopher Stedman

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Last week the atheist blogosphere lit up with reports that Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist who inadvertently inspired “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” (EDMD), had been forced to change her identity and go into hiding due to death threats she received from extremists. How did these same bloggers who promoted EDMD respond to this news? They expressed sadness and frustration. And who wouldn’t? Poor Norris – imagine having to give up everything you knew because your life was in danger.

Empathy

Examining Islamophobia

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We probably all start out prejudiced; having been brought up by people who look and act like us and believe the things that we learn to believe, we start by assuming that our way is the right way to do things, and if people do things differently they must be wrong. The need to grow beyond that childhood perspective is what led Mark Twain to optimistically claim that, “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” But though we now live in a global village, in which the floods in Pakistan or fires of Russia are no further than a click away, an irrational fear of Islam or Muslims, Islamophobia, has been rising as fast as the floods, and spreading as fast as the fires. The most obvious examples are the inchoate rage some have felt at plans to build a Muslim community centre two blocks from ground zero, and the proposal to burn Qur’ans sponsored by a fringe Florida pastor. But it goes a lot further: last week Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, wrote: “Muslim life is cheap, particularly to Muslims…