Reader Comments: 2024 Elections - The Debate, Young Voters; Not One Child; Israeli Protesters, Netanyahu Sabotages Hostage Deal; Remembering Michael Lerner; Govt Knew Ethel Rosenberg Not Spy Before Trial; Fight for School Integration; Announcements;
“I drew this cartoon before the debate because, if there was one thing I could bank on, it would be that Trump would tell a torrent of lies, and he didn't disappoint.”
Unfortunately the machismo attitude you cite reflects these young men's attitudes toward women. It's indicative of how far we have yet to go for men in general to recognize women as full human beings without feeling threatened by this fact. Giving up the illusion of male supremacy is difficult, similar to white people giving up the illusion of white supremacy.
The huge Israeli protests have been about bringing down the Netanyahu government. They also had a deeper, more subversive message. Without any of the speakers explicitly saying as much, Sunday’s demonstrations were for an end to the war.
All this is true but it's taking the easy way out to place all the blame on Netanyahu as if Israeli policy toward Palestinians is newly brutal. The entire illegal settler movement has been brutally appropriating Palestinian land in the West Bank, creating facts on the ground to make any future Palestinian state impossible for decades including via terrorism against the rightful residents, arson, beatings, murders. All of this has been carried out with the tacit or active encouragement of democratically elected governments for decades. Don't mistake present demonstrations against Netanyahu for opposition to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for the purpose of attaining sole ownership by Israel of all the "disputed" territory, which is not in fact disputed but recognized as belonging to the Palestinians by international law. There would be small demonstrations against this "war" if there were no hostages but the massive protests would not be taking place.
Once some people sat down and wrote a definition of genocide. Now families wander through ruins, being bombed and deliberately starved, having limbs amputated without anesthesia because of a military force whose philosophy is shot through with desire to have the target group annihilated. Diplomats and scholars sit in rooms, sipping coffee perhaps, and pick apart words deciding whether the situation fits the definition crafted 80 years ago.
Consider a hypothetical. Putin has claimed he has rights to Alaska, Hawaii, and California, apparently because Russians were in these spaces in times past - or something. He invaded Alaska a decade ago and occupies it. He now makes a frontal attack on California, destroys cities and tens of thousands of lives and continues to occupy the rest of the State. He has made it clear, that Russia's mission is to destroy Western decadence," to paraphrase his advisor Aleksandr Dugin, and therefore has the right, the "moral obligation" to invade and occupy all of North America "from Alaska to the Falkland Islands."
Under such circumstances, what exactly should the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, et al. do? Should we begin by letting him continue to hold Alaska (read: Crimea)? Should we now let him hold those regions of California that he has occupied for the past two years? Should we "negotiate peace" and let him regroup, rebuild his armies, use California's great Central Valley to feed his armies as they prepare to invade Nevada, Arizona, Utah? Because in fact that is exactly what he would do.
There is only one acceptable outcome. Russia returns to - is forced to return to - Ukraine's territorial boundaries including leaving Crimea, is forced to pay reparations, and its leaders are tried at the Hague for war crimes. To "negotiate peace" is to accept that Putin has started WW III, that Ukraine is just his first incursion, and that he will proceed to try to occupy all of Europe. The US and NATO have willfully failed from the start to admit that Putin has larger goals. The US and NATO (and the EU) have failed to provide supports to a friendly neighbor that would help them beat back this invasion. Biden and his administration have waffled, dithered, held Ukraine hostage to fighting only on its own territory, force Ukraine to literally aid and abet Russia's destruction of its own cities. We have failed to help a neighbor, we have allowed them to be harmed, and now we are to tell them that they just have to settle for the harm we helped create. An analogy would be to tell a battered woman she just has to continue to take her beatings.
The influential rabbi and publisher of Tikkun magazine urged Jews to reconnect with their spiritual traditions while he resoundingly supported Palestinian self-determination.
Michael Lerner, the influential author, editor, anti-sectarian rabbi, co-founder of Tikkun magazine, and for decades an indefatigable curator of any and all perspectives that could help heal a broken world, died August 28 in Berkeley, CA. He was 81.
For half his life he had believed that contemporary Jewish life had lost its connection to the sacred, and that that connection could be restored. The mid-80s was “a time when the liberal voices were being increasingly marginalized in the Jewish world,” Lerner toldJ. The Jewish News of Northern California earlier this year. “And there was no intellectually serious magazine at the time that could provide such a voice.”
Tikkun was one effort to bring about such a restoration. Lerner also wrote close to a dozen books on the connections between the personal and the political as they related to Jewish life, including Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation (1994), The Politics Of Meaning: Restoring Hope And Possibility In An Age Of Cynicism, (1994), 1994; Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America (1996); Spirit Matters (2000); The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (2006); and Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World (2019).
Michael Lerner was born and raised in an observant conservative Jewish family in Weehawken, NJ. His own account of his education includes an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, after which he headed west and was pursuing a doctorate in philosophy when the vibrant University of California student movement drew his attention to the interactions between social conditions and the state of the soul. He threw himself into political action, chairing the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1967 and ’68. In 1970, while teaching philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle, he was one of the organizers of a major protest against the war in Vietnam, for which he spent some time at a federal penitentiary on contempt of court charges.
Lerner, who was radicalized by the New Left in the late 1960s, sought to unite political and spiritual concerns with a new “politics of meaning.”
He returned to Berkeley, where he would remain for the rest of his life, and where he continued to examine the impact of social conditions in general on Jews in particular. It was while he was in that spirit of inquiry that he first encountered Nan Gefen, neé Fink, in a meeting that changed both their lives. A native Californian, Fink was also a psychotherapist at the time, although over the years she would redirect her focus to the spiritual. She converted to Judaism in 1985, and together she and Lerner articulated the hope for social, spiritual, and political transformation that in 1986 became Tikkun. They married in 1987. Eventually, Fink left both Lerner and Tikkun, but to the extent that the magazine was their child, Lerner kept custody of it.
Lerner remarried, more than once. Tikkun survived and indeed flourished. In 1993, The New York Times referred to Lerner as “this year’s prophet,” describing the magazine as “a progressive political journal with a distinctly Jewish outlook.” And in 1995, First Lady Hilary Clinton spoke approvingly about Lerner’s “politics of meaning” in a speech about health care. In that same year, Lerner was ordained as a rabbi. And Lerner—and Tikkun—resoundingly supported Palestinian self-determination.
But this past April, Lerner, who had co-existed with cancer for most of a decade, announced that he could no longer run the magazine and was closing it down. At his death, he was survived by his estranged wife, Cat Zavis, and his son, Akiba Jeremiah Lerner.
When Lerner died, the Forward, the New York Times of the U.S. Jewish world, wrote at length about how Lerner had “merged spirituality and social justice.” The actual New York Times has yet to publish an obituary.
[Now based in Paris, Judith Mahoney Pasternak is a long-time U.S. writer and journalist in the progressive media and an activist for feminism, peace, and Palestinian self-determination. Over the years, Tikkun published a half-dozen of her articles, including her anti-Zionist credo,“Nine Stops on a Long Road.”]
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The National Security Agency (NSA) released a formerly classified document confirming that the U.S. government knew that Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy long before her trial and execution. In response, her sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, and the Rosenberg Fund for Children call on President Biden to issue a proclamation stating that Ethel was wrongfully convicted and executed.
Ethel and her husband, Julius Rosenberg, were executed 71 years ago during the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War Era. They had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, in what was called “the crime of the century.” Their sons were only six and 10 years old when their parents were killed.
We have said for years that Ethel was not a spy, and her execution was wrongful.
The release of this August 22, 1950 memo serves as the capstone for an overwhelming body of evidence that the U.S. government knew that Ethel Rosenberg never spied for the Soviet Union.
Jennifer Meeropol, RFC Executive Director and granddaughter of the Rosenbergs, says, "President Biden has the power to right this historic injustice, redress the harm done to my family, and bring peace to my father and uncle in their lifetimes. The Rosenberg Fund for Children was established by my father, Robert, almost 35 years ago in memory of his parents and as a testament to the community of progressive people who stood with him and his brother when their family was targeted. The RFC joins my father and uncle in calling on President Biden to act swiftly to address this grievous injustice.”
Fifty years ago this week, on September 12, 1974, police were stationed outside schools across Boston as Black and white students were bused for the first time between neighborhoods to comply with a federal court desegregation order. The cross-town busing was met with shocking violence, much of it directed at children: angry white protestors threw rocks at school buses carrying Black children and hurled racial epithets at the students as they walked into their new schools. The chaos and racial unrest would escalate and continue for years.
The Busing Battleground, which pulls back the curtain on the volatile effort to end school segregation, detailing the decades-long struggle for educational equity that preceded the crisis, is now streaming on our website, the PBS App, and on YouTube.
To learn more, explore our School Integration in America Collection, spend some time with our Pain and Promise project which includes fifty-six interviews with people from around the country who experienced school integration, and watch our recorded conversation Still Separate, Still Unequal.
Join us on September 19th at 7 pm EDT for a critical discussion with author and columnist Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson exploring the implications of Project 2025, a policy agenda coordinated by the Heritage Foundation that aims to reshape American governance under the banner of Christian Nationalism. This initiative poses profound challenges to the separation of church and state and could have far-reaching consequences for American Jews and other religious minorities. Register here.
The extreme Christian Nationalist agenda articulated in Project 2025 threatens to reshape America, potentially undermining religious freedom, civil rights, and the safety of Jewish communities. This is not just another policy discussion—it's a call to action. Is the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness meant to privilege one kind of American over all others, by race, gender, and religion?
Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is a columnist for the Forward, a contributor to CNN, and a weekly commentator on religion and politics in his newsletter, Both/And. He has twice won the New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing, wrote the first long-form analysis of Christian Nationalists' redefinition of "religious liberty" in 2013, and was the first to report on Leonard Leo's impact on the Supreme Court, in 2018. Jay holds a JD from Yale Law School, a PhD in Jewish Thought, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination.
Register now to be part of this crucial conversation and learn how you can stand against Project 2025 and the rising tide of Christian Nationalism. Your voice matters, and together, we can defend true religious freedom!
The Women: Our Impact on the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
September 19, 2024, 4-5:30 PM ET
For speaker bios and registration link, click here
The ultimate success of the movement to stop the war in Vietnam was due to the mobilization of multiple segments of society, such as students, academics,businesspeople, lawyers, religious activists, unions, veterans, and humanitarians. Not least of these were traditional women's peace organizations such as the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom and Women Strike for Peace that redirected their efforts toward stopping the war. Vietnam specific groups were created such as Another Mother for Peace and to organize a meeting between American and Vietnamese women in Toronto, Canada. This webinar features the experiences of women peace activists who helped to transform the movement into a broad coalition that reached into a majority of American households and influenced the movement for women's liberation.
The first annual Week of Action for Peace and Climate Justice will address the links between war, militarism and climate injustice, promoting grassroots action and policy making for peace and climate justice. This year’s theme is divest from war – invest in climate justice!
The Week of Action for Peace and Climate Justice will run yearly, involving a wide range of events and actions organised by groups around the world, from webinars to advocacy events to demonstrations. Working together, we will:
Raise public awareness of the links between war, militarism and climate injustice;
Build connections between peace, climate and justice movements;
And build momentum for collective action and policy making against militarism and for climate justice.
You can take part in the Week of Action from anywhere, by planning your own event or action for peace and climate justice. Use the key resources above, especially the toolkit, to help you plan your event/action, and contact us for any other support.
Why?
War and militarism have helped to cause climate breakdown. War destroys lands and ecosystems, polluting water, soil and air, while leaving behind toxic remnants and unexploded weapons that cause harm generations after a conflict ends. The world’s militaries account for 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions; emissions which are still excluded from global climate agreements. Military industries depend on vast amounts of metals, minerals and fossil fuels; and military spending diverts resources from climate action. But some people argue militarism is part of the solution: that we need harder borders, more arms and bigger armies to cope with climate breakdown. They claim that war can be made green – but this is not the solution.
We do have alternatives that can both protect ourselves and the planet. It is vital that movements for peace and climate justice understand the connections between our causes and work together for a world that values the safety and wellbeing of everyone; foregrounding people and planet over power and profit. No climate justice without demilitarisation!
This year’s theme: Divest from War – Invest in Climate Justice
The world’s wealthiest countries have consistently failed to meet targets to provide $100 billion in climate finance to help countries suffering the worst impacts of climate breakdown. Meanwhile, there always seems to be money for war: in 2023 global military spending rose for the ninth year in a row, reaching a record high of $2.44 trillion (an increase of 6.8 per cent in real terms from 2022). 2023 also saw the hottest day – highest global temperatures – ever recorded.
We need to invest in building a safer and fairer world in the long-term, rather than in fueling war and militarism, which are helping to drive climate and environmental harm. It is time to move the money from militarisation to just forms of climate action. It is time to break the ties with military and fossil power, for the world’s wealthiest to reckon with colonialism and make progress on reparations for loss and damage. Groups are welcome to focus on the linkages between peace and climate justice that are most important to them in their actions, but we invite people to unite behind a common demand to divest from war – invest in climate justice!
Who?
This week is being facilitated by a sub-committee of the Arms, Militarism and Climate Justice Working Group. For more information, please email [email protected]
