I woke up on Monday morning to the news that Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Australia were killed—15 as I write—and more than 40 wounded by a father-and-son team of gunmen who festooned their car with homemade ISIS flags. The youngest victim was 10; the oldest an 87 year-old Holocaust survivor. The older …
NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 58th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 21 November 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie …
A great soul passed this morning. Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow, scholar, activist, teacher, spiritual leader, and so much more celebrated his 92nd birthday on October 12th with a Zoom hosted by The Shalom Center, the organization he founded in 1983 and led until last year. The Zoom was also the occasion for sharing the two …
A few days ago I stumbled on a startling truth I want to share with you. Do you know the concept of “mirror worlds?” It has a few meanings. The one I’m using describes a parallel dimension that mirrors the world as we know it, but everything important has been flipped, monsters instead of mates, …
Back in February, when I wrote about the first few deranged actions the MAGA regime took against cultural agencies—”Il Duce Redux: Art Under Trump“—I focused specifically on art, as my title said. One of the things that tends to convince artists of the significance of our work is autocrats’ reliable tendency to go after it …
Twenty years ago, my friend Daniel Burstyn introduced me to an exercise created for Passover, the Jewish holiday which this year begins on the evening of 12 April. The holiday commemorates the exodus from slavery in Egypt (“Mitzrayim” in Hebrew, which also means “straits” or “narrow places”). The tradition is to retell the story as …
I’ve had the same conversation with many friends in the last few days: what is wrong with the Democrats? Why aren’t they responding to the Trump-Musk emergency with the speed and energy required to stop them from (to use Steve Bannon’s repugnant language) “flooding the zone with shit” at “muzzle velocity” and drowning the body …
In 2018, the egregious Trump strategist Steve Bannon—erstwhile investment banker, Hollywood executive producer, and cofounder of Breitbart News—was interviewed by the writer Michael Lewis, who inquired about the Trumpists’ strategy to vanquish the Democrats. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to …
My husband and I have a new year’s custom. Every December 31, each of us writes on little slips of paper the things we want to bring into the new year. We place the papers in a bowl near our wood stove, and start our ritual each year by reading the slips we created on …
Are you as confused as I am about how to comprehend and respond to the current political moment? Many people seem certain, far more certain than I, but what I notice is that they are certain of opposite things. Indeed, the mood of antagonism and polarization that currently saturates the United States lends itself to …