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Na’vi and Goliath: Palestinian Protesters Dress as Avatar Underdogs

By Shalom Goldman

…e American Jewish press. In The Forward, the popular and culturally astute New York Jewish weekly, regular columnist Jay Michaelson wrote a January 22 piece titled “Taking Avatar Seriously: Environmentalisms, Spiritual and Practical,” describing the film’s philosophy as “a bit of pantheism, a bit of nature mysticism, and a surprising dash of monotheism, as well. In other words, it’s Kabbalah.” Avatar’s Kabbalism, Michaelson concluded, is “a challe…

Poor, Persecuted Dinesh D’Souza

By Sarah Posner

…allenged Senator Kristen Gillibrand for her seat in 2012. According to the New York Times, D’Souza’s lawyer is claiming that the government “targeted” D’Souza “because of his consistently caustic and highly publicized criticism” of President Obama. D’Souza’s much-discussed 2010 essay and book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, in which he blamed Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior” on his adaptation of his father’s “anticolonial ideology,” made him a…

Bobby Jindal Hypes His Christian Cred at Liberty U.

By Murali Balaji

…d States. Though the community slowly established itself in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago, the reality for many Hindu immigrants—and their children—was that they were alone in a new country without much of a support network. My story is somewhat similar to Jindal’s. I grew up in small towns in New Jersey, New York, and Ohio before my family settled in the Philadelphia suburbs in the 1980s, and I was subje…

Trump’s Yiddish Trash Talk Launches the Great ‘Schlong’ Debate of 2015

By Peter Manseau

…st conspicuously in the Hasidic community, which means that once a year in New York there is quite a lot of shlogging going on. Just three months ago, a court battle in the city failed to end the practice in Brooklyn. Thousands of chickens were shlogged that day. If pressed on his use of words, Trump may yet claim to have seen video. As a native New Yorker, Trump is likely more aware of this ritual, and has probably heard more Yiddish, than many A…

No, Sunni and Shia Muslims Have Not Been Fighting Forever

By Haroon Moghul

…it helps us get past the simple headlines—check out the front page of the New York Times today, suggesting the Iranian-Saudi rivalry is embedded in and involves all Sunni and Shia—but because this reader’s question inadvertently helps us understand why so many in the West and the Muslim world keep talking past each other. Here’s the reader’s question: Can you give me any insight into the apparently undying hatred of Sunni Muslims (e.g., the Saudi…

Could a Real Life Jurassic Park Help with Climate Change?

By Michael Schulson

…are 100% whiz-bang awesome (although they are), it’s that they were, for many millennia, integral parts of the Arctic tundra ecosystem, promoting botanical diversity and churning up the dirt. In doing so, they helped the permafrost stay frozen, instead of releasing its enormous stores of trapped CO2 into the air. It’s possible, writes Shapiro, that mammoths would “actually slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, and th…

RD Book: Class Conscious

By Lynne Gerber

…in the Halls of Power, with a story of the joining of two worlds at a posh New York event. Hosted by Rupert Murdoch “in one of Manhattan’s most celebrated ballrooms,” the event feted Rick Warren—evangelical preacher and publishing sensation—bringing together the seemingly disparate worlds of urban sophistication and folksy faith. “Do you know any of these evangelicals that are here?” a publishing house editor asked Lindsay. “I’m dying to meet one….

How Trump’s Assertion of “Power to Pardon” Tramples the American Sacred

By Spencer Dew

…nty at odds with the American experiment. In his recent interview with the New York Times Trump talks as if he considers himself “above the law, and… believes himself to be, through no fault of his own, besieged by internal and external enemies, particularly in the Justice Department and the F.B.I.” The suggestion of self-pardoning makes explicit the possibility of circumventing the rule of law, understanding the power of the position of president…

A Boundary-Busting Memoir of Love, Mental Illness, and Being Muslim in America

By Haroon Moghul

…onceptions about your topic? American Muslims—how could there possibly be any misconceptions? (Sarcasm.) I once read a poll that indicated that whether an American thought Obama was a Muslim was the single greatest predictor of whether she voted for Clinton or Trump. It’s flattering to represent a demented national obsession, but it’s also deeply disturbing. Yes, ISIS is dangerous and, true, Muhammad Ali meant a lot to America, but we exaggerate t…

Teaching Plato in Palestine: Can Philosophy Save Us From Our Differences?

By Jerome E. Copulsky

…e led a clandestine salon with a group of Hasidic Jews in a hipster bar in New York’s SoHo neighborhood; conversed with high school students in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil; and convened a series of workshops with the Mohawk Council of Akwesanse on the US/Canadian border. These journeys were originally inspired by a series of conversations he had in a language exchange group while he was working on his Arabic skills in Cairo. Over time, Fraenkel’s de…