Arlene Goldbard

Everyone I talk to is exhausted by the prospect of seven more months of presidential campaigning, American-style. But many people are also resigned: this is the system, it always has been, what can you do about it?
The culture of politics says a great deal about a country. (You can read more on this subject in [...]

I have a dear friend who understands the world of finance as well as I know my way around my own kitchen. For a long time, she’s been sending me alarming bulletins from people who keep a close eye on banks, Wall Street and federal financial regulators.
The economy has developed such an elaborate and [...]

There are two sides to the human proclivity to view the big world through the little world of our own experience. When I’m depressed, I project my misery outward: the disturbing headlines jump out of the newspaper and pile up at my feet; only the bad news seems true, and the rest recedes. When I’m [...]

When I read earlier this week these words of the Dalai Lama on the Chinese murders of Tibetans demonstrating for human rights and self-determination, I was moved by the depth of helplessness expressed by this great teacher who is seldom seen as shaken. The Dalai Lama’s quiet words struck me as it would to see [...]

Geraldine Ferraro was unrepentant this week as she stepped down from her post on Hillary Clinton’s campaign finance committee after having inserted her foot into her own mouth well past the knee. “If Obama was a white man,” she said, “he would not be in this position.” Trying to make it better, she dissed herself: [...]

The Germans have a word for it—schadenfreude—joining the words for joy and harm to mean taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. The Eliot Spitzer scandal fascinates me because it offers a veritable typology of schadenfreude.
Most everyone was briefly shocked—I say, shocked—to learn of the New York governor’s involvement with prostitutes, which we all immediately [...]

A few days before International Women’s Day (March 8th, yesterday), a friend and I were talking about the results of the Ohio and Texas primaries. I shocked myself to notice how deeply devastated I’d been that Obama hadn’t won big in both states, even though my rational mind knew he was still in the lead, [...]

George W. Bush is still George W. Bush, busily vetoing the ban on waterboarding and sowing cheerful malice around the world. But let us give him props now for a quite remarkable discourse on the subject of the noose and all it symbolizes.

It’s almost Super Tuesday, and my email inbox is flooded with messages proclaiming that to vote for Obama is to oppress women. Most of them are detailed accounts of discrimination against women from time immemorial, coupled with the suggestion that any criticism of Clinton is internalized sexism.
What is most remarkable to me is that it [...]

I spent the last few days with people whose work in the world combines art and social justice, mostly the community-based and collaborative work I’ve written about for decades. As a group, we tend to be simultaneously weary and hardy. The theme that comes to mind is from Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 2:21: [...]