By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Monday, February 27, 2023 Israeli public intellectual Paul Gross was clearly right when he wrote in Fathom, last November, that the latest electoral defeat for the center-left in Israel “feels different” to the losers. It feels that way, as well, to many of his sympathizers in the United States, self-described “American liberals and liberal Zionists,” for whom this crisis is “a crisis for us, too, and for people like us.” People like them view what’s happening here now, in the Jewish state, as in their own words, “by definition a threat to stability.”
And why is that? Because, understandably, the liberals feel their monopoly on power, exercised through the deep state—or Israeli “deep shtetl”—slipping from their grasp, after decades of Ashkenormative rule by judicial fiat. As John Goodman sang in David Byrne’s 1996 film True Stories, “We don’t want freedom, we don’t want justice, we just want someone to love.” And that someone is themselves—in their ideal, Platonic form as moderate managers with correct opinions about everything.
Continue reading →
By Dr. Jacqueline C. Rivers · Monday, October 5, 2020 The following essay originally appeared on June 12, 2020, at Religion Unplugged. Reposted here by permission.
For more than a week, hundreds of thousands of Americans, black and white, have taken to the streets across the country in an enormous outpouring of pain and rage. People, throughout the nation, primarily youth and of every race and ethnicity, have been responding to the vicious murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. Their powerful emotions have overwhelmingly been channeled into protests in over 75 cities.
Starting in Minneapolis and spreading to cities as far-flung as Atlanta, Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and even to London and Paris, people have gathered in large numbers from coast to coast, in the north and south. The vast majority of protesters have been peaceful, and the events themselves have generally been nonviolent throughout their scheduled duration. However, a smaller number of rioters have resorted to shocking levels of violence, often after the official end of the protest. Their actions have been extremely destructive and deeply troubling: police cars have been burned; police officers have been pelted with projectiles; a police precinct in Minneapolis was torched; small businesses have been destroyed. In many cities such as Boston, some police officers have shown great restraint in the face of insults and harassment. But in almost every city, we have seen arrests and the use of violence against peaceful protesters, notably in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
Continue reading →
By Cary Nelson · Monday, January 2, 2017 On the way back from Jerusalem to Ben Gurion airport following a few weeks in Israel in 2016 I settled in expecting to doze off. As usual it was 1 a.m., and I was pretty well done in from nonstop travel. But every taxi cab driver, Jewish or Arab, wants to talk, and I always learn something from these nonacademic conversations. Before long I was hearing things I was not eager to know, but it brought home the human costs of nearly a century of conflict.
Continue reading →
|
|
