Courtney Bender discusses the controversial ballot measure to prohibit circumcision of males under eighteen years of age, which will be up for a vote in San Francisco in November.
Posts Tagged ‘Judaism’
June 1st, 2011
Beyond denial
posted by Justin Neuman
For a brief moment in 2007, news of a hit Iranian television series, whose Farsi title was translated variously as Zero Degree Turn or Zero Point Orbit, proliferated across the print and digital mediascapes of the Anglophone world. The series, created by Iranian director Hassan Fathi at great expense and broadcast in a thirty-episode season on the flagship state television station IRIB1, revolves around a Romeo and Juliet plot of illicit romance, with a distinctive twist: while the proverbial Romeo is one Habib Parsa (played by Iranian hearthrob Shahab Hosseini), a Muslim Iranian pursuing his studies in France, his Juliet is none other than a Jewish classmate, Sarah Astrok (played by the French actress Nathalie Matti), with whom he falls in love.
April 25th, 2011
From exodus to immigration
posted by Charles Gelman“Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists broke matzo with Jewish Israelis in a Tel Aviv basketball court before this year’s Passover began. The “Out of Egypt” seder, a thousand-strong gathering in a seedy park near the central bus station, was four days early; many of the guests—African refugees and Asian migrant workers—are busy cleaning Israeli homes during Passover proper. The Sudanese and Eritrean guests have literal Out-of-Egypt stories to tell: Most lived in Cairo for months or years before crossing the Sinai by foot to get to Israel. But there’s no Moses in their exodus stories. There are Bedouin smugglers who charge thousands of dollars to lead them through the desert. There are Egyptian border guards who shoot. There are barbed-wire fences to run and jump—if they make it, into another people’s Zion.”
April 1st, 2011
Implicated and enraged: An interview with Judith Butler
posted by Nathan Schneider
Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is among the leading social theorists alive today. Her most recent books are Frames of War (2009) and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011), an SSRC volume that puts her in conversation with Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West. As we carried out our conversation by email between Brooklyn and Berkeley, uprisings were occurring across the Arab world, and a U.S.-led coalition had just begun conducting airstrikes in support of rebel forces in Libya. We had discussed some similar questions, and some different ones, a year earlier in an interview for Guernica magazine.
October 25th, 2010
Review of “Three Faiths” exhibition at NYPL
posted by Charles GelmanEdward Rothstein, of The New York Times, reviews “Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” a new exhibit at the New York Public Library.
September 11th, 2010
Against Judaist-Christianism
posted by Arjun AppaduraiI do not have much to add to the debate surrounding the Islamic Cultural Center that will surely be built near Ground Zero. But I do have a strangely delayed reaction to the word “Islamism”, whose short and pernicious history deserves more attention than it has been given. The suffix “ism” in this case is clearly not intended as a compliment. If you consult any word list on Google, it becomes clear that Islamism is a label for any variety of Islamic thought or action that can be judged to be inappropriately politicized, with the exemplary case being political violence.
September 2nd, 2010
Standing shoulder to shoulder
posted by Amanda KaplanRabbi Marc Schneier and Imam Shamsi Ali discuss the coincidence this year of Rosh Hashanah and Eid al-Fitr, with regard to the ongoing controversy around the planned Islamic community center in lower Manhattan.
August 17th, 2010
Delegation of American Muslim leaders visits Auschwitz and Dachau
posted by Charles GelmanIn Forward, the Jewish weekly newspaper, A.J. Goodman reports on a recent trip of Muslim leaders to Auschwitz and Dachau.
August 4th, 2010
Jewish community responds to ADL statement on the Cordoba Initiative
posted by Jake AlterThis past week, adding to the controversy surrounding the Cordoba Initiative, the Anti-Defemation League (ADL) voiced its opposition to the project, prompting critical reactions from a number of Jewish leaders.
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