Is the professional rabbinate’s role to reconcile Jews to violence in Israel and the U.S. Marc Ellis reflects on the post-mortems in the Jewish press describing the split in Brant Rosen’s Chicago-area Reconstructionist synagogue between left and right on Israel that broke out over the Gaza slaughter.
Six former secretaries of state are shown shoveling dirt in a photo from Secretaries Day at the State Department. Give it a caption, at Mondoweiss.net
If 2000 Israeli children were killed by Palestinian forces, imagine how the world would react. But proportionally, that is how many children were killed in Gaza over the last two months, with the use of American weaponry. And western governments have largely shrugged.
Steven Salaita’s firing at the U of Illinois reminds us that the concept of academic freedom began in the early 20th century in response to politically motivated firings at the behest of conservative boards of trustees. The targeted were active outside their schools in labor organizing and socialism. In Salaita’s case, donors exercised pressure on the university after he vociferously supported Palestinian rights on twitter. Marjorie Heins at Mondo
The leader of the Democratic congressional campaign committee, Rep. Steve Israel of Long Island, has…
Joan Rivers is being remembered for crossing lines others respected. Sadly, her finale during the Gaza massacre of this summer were rants against Palestinians that political people are not likely to forget.
Katie Mertz reflects on what Rabbi Brant Rosen’s resignation means to her.
Beyond the shared “promised land” and “chosen people” rhetoric that has inspired both the Afrikaner and Zionist ideologies of racial, religious, and ethnic supremacy, so has that of land redemption through settler-colonialism and transplanting indigenous populations. The connective tissue between apartheid and Zionism is thick, and not only in that both European colonial ideologies were officially institutionalized and implemented against native peoples as government policy in 1948.
New York Times headline on evidence in Israeli courts — New Light on Hamas Role in Killings of Teenagers That Fueled Gaza War — lies when it suggests that Hamas is implicated in the filings. It is in fact exculpated of the operation by an investigator’s statement.
Artist Sheilah Rechtschaffer covered a stunted tree with plastic shrinkwrap as a sculptural tribute to the Gaza massacre, at a NY art installation. Some visitors to the exhibit strongly disagreed, but like so many other Gaza conversations this summer, they kept their mouths shut