| ||||||||||||||
|
Local News & Opinion
Ref. : Civic Events Ref. : Arts & Education Events Ref. : Public Service Notices Travel
Books, Films, Arts & Education
05.17 Why American Colleges Are Becoming a Force for Inequality 05.17 Why Private Schools Are Dying Out Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Health Care & Environment
05.18 Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection 05.17 New Jersey Hospital Is the Costliest in the Nation 05.17 Angelina Jolie has done something extraordinary 05.17 Obama must Make Fighting Climate Change National Project, or Die the death of a thousand Scandals 05.17 Study: Why Pot Smokers Are Skinnier 05.16 What Will It Take for Us to Recognize That the Way We Live Could Be Destroying Life as We Know It? 05.16 How Drug Companies Keep Medicine Out of Reach 05.15 Don't Look Now, but Our Medicare Spending Projections Are Plummeting 05.15 No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet 05.15 Why the world faces climate chaos 05.14 US Supreme Court finds for Monsanto in seed patent battle (Update 2) 05.13 Austerity and the Unraveling of European Universal Health Care 05.13 Global Warming: Halfway to a Mass Extinction Event? 05.13 Coming Corporate Control of Medicine Will Throw Patients Under the Bus 05.12 The giants of the green world that profit from the planet's destruction 05.11 Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries News Media
05.11 Ongoing rule: Once a demon, always a demon! 05.11 FCC: Fronting For Corporations? 05.11 FCC: Fronting For Corporations? 05.11 The news media is even worse than you think Daily FAIR Blog Justice Matters
05.18 Senator wants U.S. in oil price-fixing probe 05.18 Timothy Geithner Is Key To IRS Scandal 05.16 Why Won't the SEC Rein In the Firms That Tanked America's Economy? 05.16 Elizabeth Warren to Obama Administration: Take the Banks to Court, Already! 05.15 The IRS should do more, not less, scrutinizing of political groups 05.15 Did the IRS illegally target the Tea Party? Seven questions answered. 05.14 IRS kept shifting targets in tax-exempt groups scrutiny: report 05.12 Authorities Announce tax Haven Investigation US Politics, Policy & Culture
05.17 The Great American Descent into Plutocracy 05.17 The Real Benghazi Scandal 05.16 Take Politics Away From the I.R.S. 05.16 Should 501(c)(4)’s Be Eliminated? 05.16 What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct' 05.12 The Assault on Food Stamps Takes Legislative Form, and Jamie Dimon Profits! 05.11 The Military’s 40-Year Experiment 05.11 Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less 05.11 'Purity' culture: bad for women, worse for survivors of sexual assault 05.11 At Least 71 Kids Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown 05.11 Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address [15:05 video] 05.11 The Good, the Bad and the Crazy [6:05 video] High Crimes?
Economics, Crony Capitalism
05.18 Pope blames tyranny of capitalism for making people miserable[1:00 video] 05.18 A Simple Graph That Should Silence Austerians and Gold Bugs Forever [graph] 05.18 The Savings Heist 05.18 Sheila Krumholz and Danielle Brian on How Money Rules Washington [20:31 video] 05.14 10 Scenes From The Economic Collapse That Is Sweeping Across The Planet 05.14 The Vicious New Bank Shakedown That Could Seriously Ruin Your Life 05.14 Neo-liberalism – the antithesis to democracy [charts] 05.14 Bloomberg: "Coup d’Etat to Trade Seen in Billionaire Toxic Lead Fight" 05.13 Mel Watt, Nominee to Head FHFA, Opposes Administration by Voting to Deregulate Derivatives 05.12 IRS Blunder Gives Republicans Ammunition in Effort to Defund the Agency 05.12 Visualizing the World’s Tax Havens [Infographic] 05.11 A New Era for Worker Ownership, 5 Years in the Making Ref. : Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair [25:35 video] Ref. : Nurses vs. High-Speed Traders Ref. : We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income International
05.18 Hans Rosling: the man who's making data cool [3:19 video] 05.18 Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent 05.17 Egypt 'suffering worst economic crisis since 1930s' 05.16 Catholic Church Finally Decides That Austerity is Bad 05.15 Retirement: How They Do It Elsewhere 05.15 Europeans disillusioned and divided by debt crisis, survey finds 05.14 Interview: NATO Supreme Allied Commander on Syria and Soft Power 05.14 Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can 05.14 Cayman Islands Spars With Sachs Over Hedge Fund Directorships 05.13 Cornel West: 'They say I'm un-American' 05.13 27% of Spaniards are out of work. Yet in one town everyone has a job 05.11 U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars ... That It Will Publicly Admit 05.11 Tax evasion still crippling Africa as rich countries fail to deliver support We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
You can also mail a check to: Baltimore News Network, Inc. P.O. Box 42581 Baltimore, MD 21284-2581 |
OPED:There Is No New Anti-SemitismThe Jewish establishment has turned Judaism into a cheer-leading religion for a particular national state that has a lot of Jews, but has seriously lost sight of the Jewish values which early Zionists hoped would find realization there.
The New York Times reported on January 31 about the most recent attempt by the American Jewish community to conflate intense criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. In a neat little example of slippery slope, the report on "Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," written by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, moves from exposing the actual anti-Semitism of those who deny Israel's right to exist—and hence deny to the Jewish people the same right to national self-determination that they grant to every other people on the planet—to those who powerfully and consistently attack Israel's policies toward Palestinians, see Israel as racist the way that it treats Israeli-Arabs (or even Sephardic Jews), or who analogize Israel's policies to those of apartheid as instituted by South Africa.
Meanwhile, the media has been abuzz with stories of Jews denouncing former President Jimmy Carter for his book Palestine: Peace or Apartheid. The same charges of anti-Semitism that have consistently been launched against anyone who criticizes Israeli policy is now being launched against the one American leader who managed to create a lasting (albeit cold) peace between Israel and a major Arab state (Egypt). Instead of seriously engaging with the issues raised (e.g. to what extent are Israel's current policies similar to those of apartehid and to what extent are they not?), the Jewish establishment and media responds by attacking the people who raise these or any other critiques--shifting the discourse to the legitimacy of the messenger and thus avoiding the substance of the criticisms. Knowing this, many people become fearful that they too will be labeled "anti-Semitic" if they question the wisdom of Israeli policies or if they seek to organize politically to challenge those policies. Yet there is nothing "new" about this or about this alleged anti-Semitism that these mainstream Jewish voices seek to reveal. From the moment I started Tikkun Magazine twenty years ago as "the liberal alternative to Commentary and the voices of Jewish conservatism and spiritual deadness in the organized Jewish community," our magazine has been attacked in much of the organized Jewish community as "self-hating Jews" (though our editorial advisory board contains some of the most creative Jewish theologians, rabbis, Israeli peace activist and committed fighters for social justice). The reason? We believe that Israeli policy toward Palestinians, manifested most dramatically in the Occupation of the West Bank for what will soon be forty years and in the refusal of Israel to take any moral responsibility for its part in the creation of the Arab refugee problem, is immoral, irrational, self-destructive, a violation of the highest values of the Jewish people, and a serious impediment to world peace.
The most frequently repeated injunction in Torah are variations of the following command: "Do not oppress the stranger (the 'other')."
What the Jewish establishment organizations have done is to make invisible the strong roots in Judaism for a different kind of policy. The most frequently repeated injunction in Torah are variations of the following command: "Do not oppress the stranger (the 'other'). Remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Instead, the Jewish establishment has turned Judaism into a cheer-leading religion for a particular national state that has a lot of Jews, but has seriously lost sight of the Jewish values which early Zionists hoped would find realization there.The impact of the silencing of debate about Israeli policy on Jewish life has been devastating. We at Tikkun are constantly encountering young Jews who say that they can no longer identify with their Jewishness, because they have been told that their own intuitive revulsion at watching the Israeli settlers, with IDF support, violate the human rights of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, or their own questioning of Israel's right to occupy the West Bank, are proof that they are "self-hating Jews." The Jewish world is driving away its own young. But the most destructive impact of this new Jewish Political Correctness is on American foreign policy debates. We at Tikkun have been involved in trying to create a liberal alternative to AIPAC and the other Israel-can-do-no-wrong voices in American politics. When we talk to Congressional representatives who are liberal or even extremely progressive on every other issue, they tell us privately that they are afraid to speak out about the way Israeli policies are destructive to the best interests of the United States or the best interests of world peace—lest they too be labeled anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. If it can happen to Jimmy Carter, some of them told me recently, a man with impeccable moral credentials, then no one is really politically safe. When this bubble of repression of dialogue explodes into open resentment at the way Jewish Political correctness has been imposed, it may really yield a "new" anti-Semitism. To prevent that, the voices of dissent on Israeli policy must be given the same national exposure in the media and American politics that the voices of the Jewish establishment have been given. We hope that the creation of our interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP at spiritualprogressives.org) can provide a safe context for this kind of discussion among the many Christians, Muslims, Unitarians, Hindus, Buddhists and secular-but-not-religious people who share some of the criticisms of Israel and who will eventually try to challenge the kind of anti-Semitism that might be released against Jews once the resentment about Jewish Political Correctness on Israel does explode. Even better if we could succeed in creating a powerful alternative to AIPAC. Unfortunately, that path is not so easy. When we approached some of the Israel peace groups to form an alliance with us to build the alternative to AIPAC we found that the hold of the Jewish Establishment was so powerful that it had managed to seep into the brains of people in organizations like Americans for Peace Now (not the Israeli group Peace Now which has been very courageous), Brit Tzedeck ve'Shalom and the Israel Policy Forum or the Religious Action Center of the Reform movement. As a result ,these peace voices are continually fearful that they will be "discredited" if they align with each other and with us to create this alternative to AIPAC. Meanwhile, while they look over their right shoulders fearfully, the very people that they fear will "discredit" them for aligning with each other and with us are already discrediting them as much as they possibly can. Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, author of the 2006 New York Times best-seller The Left Hand of God (Harper San Francisco), and national chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (spiritualprogressives.org). He may be reached at RabbiLerner@tikkun.org.
Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on February 2, 2007. |
| ||||||||||||