wall street

Culture, Israel-Palestine

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

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The seven of us stood in the parking lot of the office building across the street, and Joe opened the zippered cover of his three-ring binder full of painstakingly collected photographs of the old neighborhood gathered for the exhibition. As he began reading aloud an oral history from Marian Sahadi Ciacci—“A Syrian who married an Italian!”—it felt like a religious occasion, a conjuring out of almost nothing of an entire world gone by.

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Politics/Law

Where are the Clergy? A Report from Occupy DC

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Many liberal religious activists, Rev. Merritt said, remain stuck in the 1960s in how they frame and address economic issues, yet have abandoned protest strategies in favor of the model of maintaining a Washington office whose purpose is to lobby members of Congress. Other religious activists are too focused on “events-oriented things” like staged arrests, “where they’ve pre-negotiated the thing, which is not to me civil disobedience.”

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Politics/Law

The Messiah is Not Coming

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Not long ago I helped lead a graduate seminar in leadership in which I challenged the old idea of the heroic leader and messianic deliverer; an idea that has deep roots in all three Abrahamic faith traditions. Not one person in that seminar room—not even the white males who were present—had anything good thing to say about the old model. Everyone agreed that we can do better by listening to each other, trusting each other, and finding new paths together.

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Politics/Law

Worse Than the Robber Barons

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We’ve always had unscrupulous tycoons, market manipulators and connivers, but we’ve never had as obnoxious a bunch of weasels on Wall Street. These morally deformed punks claim the right to undermine perfectly sensible (and sorely needed) regulation because we haven’t learned to make dishonest gain for ourselves in the ways they have become almost kabbalistically schooled in doing.

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