![]() Arguably such grassroots activity has always been the most important source of social progress. More persuasive is Barber’s point that our newly recognized global interdependence offers the opportunity to work with international movements and the organizations representing them that have sprung up in the past half-century: the green and environmental movements, internationally oriented rights and labor movements, debt-reduction and literacy projects and many others. Such suspicions are strengthened by noticing the governments the United States is eager to take as allies in the struggle against terrorism: Pakistan and Uzbekistan, among others. The focus on democratic principles may make it easier to gain the support of fellow Western democracies, but these values can still be regarded as secondary to economic interests and the pursuit of empire as the dominant goals of US foreign policy. But though the tiger may have changed its stripes, we might well suspect it is still the same old tiger. I commend Wilentz for commenting positively on Al Jadid (despite its “painful” review of her novel).īenjamin Barber remarks that the September 11 attacks have produced a paradigm shift in government ideology: The old realpolitik has been replaced by a policy with rights and democracy as its goals. US intellectuals and others should pay more attention to minority publications if they want to have a better knowledge of those who share the country (and the world) with them. If Al Jadid has been ignored, it is not because it has not been actively trying to communicate with other Americans but probably because mainstream American intellectuals are too concerned with their own “niche obsessions” (Wilentz’s term for the concerns of some publications like Al Jadid). Many of Al Jadid‘s contributors are Americans of Arab origin, and they represent a good segment of the Arab-American intellectuals and their community. Its reference to Al Jadid is perhaps the first mention that this Los Angeles quarterly, devoted to Arab culture and arts, has had in a mainstream US publication, although it has been published for several years now. Thank you for publishing Amy Wilentz’s “In Cold Type”. Please check out Tikkun on the newsstands or at JO ELLEN GREEN KAISER We are trying to mobilize an activist force to lobby US and Israeli leaders to end the occupation and to support Palestinians in nonviolent action. Because of this position we have received hate mail, and Lerner has received death threats. Some of our strongest pieces against the occupation are by our editor, Rabbi Michael Lerner, who argues that the occupation hurts the state of Israel by undermining core Jewish values. Tikkun has published Said and other Palestinians, along with the remaining voices of the Israeli peace movement, like Uri Avnery, David Grossman and Tanya Reinhart. Those few Jewish voices belong, by and large, to Tikkun magazine, a progressive Jewish critique I help edit. In “A New Current in Palestine” Edward Said asks, “Where are American liberals?” Said’s certainly right that outside of “a tiny number of Jewish voices,” far too few Americans of any stripe are protesting the Israeli occupation. Neve Gordon’s “An Antiwar Protest Grows in Israel” on the reservist protest is the most encouraging news to come out of Israel in months.
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