If a few years down the road a young person who knows and respects you were to rise from the shambles of democracy and heaped-up havoc wreaked by the Monkey King in the White House and ask what you did to stop him, would you be ashamed to answer? I’ll let Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel …
The air around me is swirling with opinions on “identity politics” and the failure of the Clinton campaign to capture the loyalty of what are variously called “poor whites,” “white working-class voters,” and so on—formulations that join class and race. Readers have sent me Mark Lilla’s piece in the New York Times (“The End of …
I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. Here’s a quote from my friend Keryl McCord’s Facebook post that explains why: So tonight I’m calling bullshit on progressives who still think that voting for, well, you know, Voldemort, is okay for progressives because it isn’t. You may want the system to be destroyed but the dogs of war …
Tuesday night, antisemites on Twitter attacked me in a particularly visceral and disgusting way, and I want you to know about it. I believe that each of us who shows up for love and justice should be able to come as we are, fully owning our ancestors, our multiple identities, and our personal choices. I’ve …
In a debate in Flint, MI, on Sunday, Bernie Sanders, asked to describe his “racial blind spots,” said this: “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto—you don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down …
Last Friday, on the first night of Passover, I was asked to share a teaching on Moses, who led our people out of slavery in Egypt. A friend suggested I share it with you: The idea that always arises for me when I think of Moses and many other leaders of spiritual or political revolutions …
SELMA. A few days ago, an estimated 40,000 people descended on Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (and recently portrayed in Ava DuVernay’s film) and of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark civil rights legislation passed in its …
Today’s my birthday. When my husband asked what I wanted, I told him I wanted to feel young for a day. Spending the day in bed would have been one way to get my wish, but this is not what I had in mind: here we both are, in the grip of hacking colds. As …
The physicist Niels Bohr said it very well: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” It occurs to me that prediction is just a short sidestep from analysis. Saying what you think will happen has got to be grounded in some interpretation of whatever is happening now. Maybe Bohr should have said this too: …
I spent decades denying I was an optimist before copping to it, and now—instead of trying to live the label down, I find myself trying to live up to it. I’d say this year has left me with an acute case of whiplash. Turn my head one way, and I see activism at a height …