I have made my moral outrage at Israel’s Gaza siege absolutely clear here. But what died at sea on the “Freedom Flotilla” wasn’t just ten people at the hands of the IDF, but any sense of innocence on either side. This isn’t non-violent resistance. My longer thoughts on why both sides — the Free Gaza [...]
Archive for May, 2010
VIDEO: Peter Beinart debates Eli Lake
Peter Beinart’s peice is still rocketing around Jewish communal conversations. In this Bloggingheads.tv video from yesterday, he takes his case against the naysaying, overly defensive whitewashing that typifies the Jewish communal establishment, personalized by Eli Lake of The New Republic. I haven’t watched all of it yet, but it looks like Lake is making weak [...]
May 27th, 2010 Filed under: Israel. 0 Comments
Definitions of social justice
Gleaned from comments I left on a Jewschool post explaining my terms and rationale for service. “Social justice” is a state of right relationships between all — right relationships between employer/employee, landlord/tenant, mother/father, rich/poor, queer/straight, religious/secular, between races. A Catholic minister taught me this definition, and it fits best. It is the same state as [...]
May 26th, 2010 Filed under: Judaism and Nomenclature. 0 Comments
Disinterest, followed by newed hope
Just in case you were all wondering why I’ve not wieghed in on the Peter Beinart peice, I’ve not because he performed my song and dance bigger and better than I ever did myself. Nothing in there is new or that I’ve not said time and again before. But because he’s a war booster and [...]
May 26th, 2010 Filed under: Judaism and Musings. 0 Comments
Peter Beinart and Jeffrey Goldberg discuss what’s wrong with the Jewish leadership
Jeffrey Goldberg emails back and forth with Peter Beinart about the latter’s clear, lucid and unpanicked explanation of why the American Jewish establishment has failed to maintain its own values on Israel. Beinart explains why our liberal values and defense of Israel have become so strained and why young Jews are severing the unfortunate ballast [...]
May 19th, 2010 Filed under: Israel. 1 Comment
Terror in my city
I have lived in conflict zones. I have traversed the hills of the West Bank, often alone. I have visited refugee camps and ghettoed villages. I have climbed walls and circumvented checkpoints to see for myself if they really prevented terrorism. I have seen militants with guns empty full clips into the air. In these [...]
May 9th, 2010 Filed under: Musings. 0 Comments
Self-appointed American Jewish spokespeople are (oxy)morons
JJ Goldberg, editor of the Forward and arbiter of Jewish communal affairs, wrote a beautiful opinion piece for Haaretz summarizing the inconsistencies, backtracking and general full-of-shit inanity that emerges from the American Jewish establishment. Who represents the Jews? The people who give big money to organizational dinosaurs that long lived out their practical mandate. Towering [...]
May 7th, 2010 Filed under: Israel and Politics. 0 Comments
Another civil rights NGO arrest, another gag order
(Cross-posted from Jewschool) Another secret arrest of another Israeli civil rights leader and another gag order secreting the act from public eyes. This time a director of an Israeli NGO working for equality for Arab citizens of Israel, Ameer Makhoul of Ittijah. And like during the Anat Kamm affair, Israeli news sites and bloggers are fighting against a [...]
May 7th, 2010 Filed under: Israel. 0 Comments
Auslander says writing is like shitting
I couldn’t have said it better myself: The difficult part of writing, at least for me, isn’t the writing itself. It’s getting to the truth, it’s scraping away all the years of programming to find out what and who you truly are. To find out, in a way, what that programming was, because it’s possible [...]
May 6th, 2010 Filed under: Quotations. 0 Comments
