Every year when I return to Hebron I have come to expect that I will find the Israeli Military Occupation more entrenched, the people more battered, more resigned. I expect that the Christian Peacemaker Team I have worked with since 1995 will have new challenges to meet. When I rejoined the team in early March, however, the extent of the restrictions on team’s monitoring work at checkpoints during school hours frankly shocked me. Border Police no longer permit us to exit the Old City near our apartment and make the five-minute walk to the Qitoun checkpoint to document how the soldiers treat schoolchildren and teachers passing through. Instead, we must take a fifteen-minute taxi ride over the hills and around to reach a location we can see from the roof of our house. read more

Despite Donald Trump’s unpopularity with New York State voters—71% hold unfavorable views of him, more than any other candidate—it helps to remember that he is the product of New York City and its political culture. His career tells us a lot about changes in a supposedly liberal city and state—especially when it comes to media manipulation, the politics of resentment, and the blurring of public and private interests.

Trump became prominent in New York City during the 1970s, a decade marked by a fiscal crisis, population losses, and shrinking working class and middle class incomes. He rose to power as the liberal city of New Deal New York stumbled. Then he exploited the inequalities, meanness, and celebrity journalism that have risen since its fall. read more

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross is best known for her five stages of grief on dealing with a fatal illness. The first reaction, the first stage of grief, is denial. You can’t believe this is happening. It is only temporary. It is not as bad as it seems. Then comes anger. It is not going away. It is getting stronger; you are getting weaker. It’s spreading. The next stage is bargaining. There is a way to stop this. It can be controlled. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to interact with it, to limit its ambitions. And then there is despair. It’s not going to work. You’re going to lose, and you’re going to lose everything. Finally, there is acceptance. As long as it’s going to happen, you might as well get behind it, if you can, if it lets you. You know it’s going to feel much better than the alternative, which is trying to struggle against it, and be painfully destroyed. Or admit defeat, and remove yourself, as far away as possible, to a place of safety. read more

What is the basis of Jewish law? This is not a trick question. The safest answer, surely, is the Torah.
And we here are using Torah as a synonym for the word of God, as found in Tanakh, the holy scriptures. But if you ask what is the definitive code of Jewish law, the best answer is not the Torah, but the Talmud. The Talmud is divided into two main parts, the Mishnah and the Gemara, both written centuries after the final canonization of Tanakh. The Mishnah is remarkably self-contained. It is a discussion of law by sages, providing various opinions, along with some indication of what was the consensus view among them. But the Mishnah devotes almost no space to explaining how the sages reached their conclusions—it just states opinions, not explanations. The Gemara, written several hundred years later is more expansive, with more discussion of the law, exploration of hypothetical cases, and some attempt to provide justifications for rabbinic rulings, usually in the form of prooftexts, citations to biblical verses that appear to bolster the case for the point under discussion. read more

Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu,
I write this letter to you with a heavy heart as it pains me deeply to see the beautiful dream of a strong and proud Israel, the country that was expected to embrace what is virtuous, moral, and just, now losing its reason for being—as a free and secure Jewish state living in peace and harmony with its neighbors.

The state’s social fabric is being torn apart by political divisiveness and economic injustice. The country is increasingly isolated, degenerating into a garrison state surrounding itself with walls and fences, vilified by friends and reviled by enemies. read more

Israelis, human rights organizations, and the United Nations call to end the practice of administrative detention. This practice has recently taken on a face and a name of a Palestinian journalist, Mohammed al-Qiq from the village of Dura. Al-Qiq, who was arrested and held without charges, demanded a trial to end his detention. When his request was denied al-Qiq went on a hunger strike that today Thursday, February 17 is on its 84th day. His hunger strike has revealed the cruelty of the process in which detainees are powerless to seek legal justice and exposed in full public view the horror of their use of hunger as a last resort. read more