That Precious Strand of Jewishness That Challenges Authority

That Precious Strand of Jewishness That Challenges Authority PDF Author: Leon Rosselson
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629633984
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
“For my parents and grandparents, Jewish identity, in religion, culture and language, was a given. Not so for me. I’m not religious, not a Zionist, so in what consists my Jewishness? Is a love of chopped liver and a belief that chicken soup cures all ills enough? And does it matter? This is the story of my search for answers. It is an argument with myself, with song lyrics to embellish the argument.” Like so many of those others in Britain of Jewish lineage, songwriter and award-winning folk singer Leon Rosselson is descended from antecedents who fled pogroms in eastern Europe. Pertinently, he questions what being a Jew means—is it adherence to Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a citizen of Israel, or someone who eats “chicken soup with knedlach”? He describes clearly and with historical insight how any concept of “Jewishness” can involve all of those things and more. In his own life, he has decided to pick and choose from this tradition and history and build on what he deems to be the progressive, humane, and universalist values of that Jewish background. Rosselson is a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, seeing in the victimization of Palestinians by the state of Israel parallels with historical Jewish persecution. He concludes this short essay by stating: “I share with the growing number of Jews in the diaspora who place solidarity with the oppressed above demands of tribalism and with those in Israel who dare to stand against the powers that be.”

That Precious Strand of Jewishness That Challenges Authority

That Precious Strand of Jewishness That Challenges Authority PDF Author: Leon Rosselson
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629633984
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 38

Get Book

Book Description
“For my parents and grandparents, Jewish identity, in religion, culture and language, was a given. Not so for me. I’m not religious, not a Zionist, so in what consists my Jewishness? Is a love of chopped liver and a belief that chicken soup cures all ills enough? And does it matter? This is the story of my search for answers. It is an argument with myself, with song lyrics to embellish the argument.” Like so many of those others in Britain of Jewish lineage, songwriter and award-winning folk singer Leon Rosselson is descended from antecedents who fled pogroms in eastern Europe. Pertinently, he questions what being a Jew means—is it adherence to Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a citizen of Israel, or someone who eats “chicken soup with knedlach”? He describes clearly and with historical insight how any concept of “Jewishness” can involve all of those things and more. In his own life, he has decided to pick and choose from this tradition and history and build on what he deems to be the progressive, humane, and universalist values of that Jewish background. Rosselson is a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, seeing in the victimization of Palestinians by the state of Israel parallels with historical Jewish persecution. He concludes this short essay by stating: “I share with the growing number of Jews in the diaspora who place solidarity with the oppressed above demands of tribalism and with those in Israel who dare to stand against the powers that be.”

The Fascist Groove Thing

The Fascist Groove Thing PDF Author: Hugh Hodges
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 162963946X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This is the late 1970s and ’80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists. Each chapter presents a mixtape (or playlist) of songs related to an alarming feature of Thatcher’s Britain, followed by an analysis of the dialogue these artists created with the Thatcherite vision of British society. “Tell us the truth,” Sham 69 demanded, and pop music, however improbably, did. It’s a furious and sardonic account of dark times when pop music raised a dissenting fist against Thatcher’s fascist groove thing and made a glorious, boredom-smashing noise. Bookended with contributions by Dick Lucas and Boff Whalley as well as an annotated discography, The Fascist Groove Thing presents an original and polemical account of the era.

Cointelshow

Cointelshow PDF Author: L.M. Bogad
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1604865636
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
Inform yourself! Inform on your neighbor! Follow Special Agent Christian White on a cheerfully creepy tour of declassified government surveillance documents. White probes the redacted (blacked-out) texts of the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Programs, searching for the words erased in the name of the Freedom of Information Act. Learn fun techniques for the infiltration of activist groups, how to earn benefits and a pension as an agent provocateur, and how to, in the words of J. Edgar Hoover, “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” your neighbors! These are our tax dollars at work, folks; we might as well enjoy it. This script has been performed by writer/activist L.M. Bogad in theatres, galleries, labor halls, and community centers for the past twelve years. The pamphlet also includes a preface by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and a companion essay by Bogad about the history of domestic surveillance/harassment, and a “how to” for would-be performers of the script. Back by popular demand, this new Second Edition adds photos of the original COINTELPRO documents used in the show. There are also many updates to the script: more information, more character development, and more and better jokes, all in the darkly humorous style of the original.

Events and Victims

Events and Victims PDF Author: Bartolomeo Vanzetti
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629635308
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
This work by Bartolomeo Vanzetti, edited and with a detailed introduction by Jon Curley, features a never-before-published short story by this famous anarchist and victim of legal persecution, xenophobia, and condemnation for his radical politics. That fact that Vanzetti, an Italian immigrant, learned to write in English while jailed for a capital crime is remarkable enough. What is even more astonishing is that he chose to use his new language skills to write creatively, inventing a parable about worker exploitation and environmental disaster that is as relevant today as it was almost one hundred years ago when this prisoner took up his pen. “Events and Victims” allows Vanzetti a new literary and historical voice, an important document that narrates the very injustice that its author suffered and fought. In a time of assault on immigrants, dissidents, radicals, and the environment, “Events and Victims” is as timely as ever.

Heart X-rays

Heart X-rays PDF Author: G.H. Mosson
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 162963526X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 43

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Book Description
Heart X-rays is a twenty-first-century beat epic poem that ranges across landscapes and voices, with appearances by Banksy, Pussy Riot, hip-hop, the down and out, the up and coming, heartbreak and joybreak, while exploring the mystery we call the human heart. Now in its second printing, Heart X-rays offers poetry that strikes a cord today with non-traditional style and timeless poetic craft. If indeed poetry can offer an RX, a prescription to the bloody joyful teary-eyed American paradox, it is one that calls forth all the voices that have not yet been heard, that harbors an innocence that reaches into the very heart of our own excellence. A collaborative work between two poets and working-class activists, Heart X-rays is a poetic memory of today written in the alphabet of a future.

Divide and Conquer or Divide and Subdivide?

Divide and Conquer or Divide and Subdivide? PDF Author: Mark Leier
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629634042
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
The battles between Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx in the First International (aka the International Working Men's Association, 1864–1876) began a pattern of polemics and rancor between anarchists and Marxists that still exists today. Outlining the profound similarities between Bakunin and Marx in their early lives and careers as activists, Mark Leier suggests that the differences have often been exaggerated and have prevented activists from learning useful lessons about creating vibrant movements.

Simultaneous Revolutions

Simultaneous Revolutions PDF Author: G.H. Mosson
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629638676
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Simultaneous Revolutions offers a meeting place for individual expression in this plague year where, forced to look within and stay afar, people can do both with these companion poems. With poems about Bob Dylan, contemporary singer Grimes, the Clash, Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries, Allen Ginsberg, and also featuring voices from warehouse rave to the ignored alley, from the blurry highway to a couple’s river-walk to a calm man’s tilling, these poems offer a provocative panorama of our both ancient and neon times. Headed down the wounded highway like a nurse on the same road, don’t know what the banners say today, but sense the ill from the good. —from “Soulphone Ringing” Who hasn’t traveled the revolutions of living? What would that map look like, as varied people chart their own ways to harbor? Find out by checking out Simultaneous Revolutions. From the Lower East Side to the Lehigh River Gorge, from Standing Rock to Chesapeake Bay, from St. Louis to Vermont to San Francisco, Simultaneous Revolutions stands exactly at the broad confluence of a hundred nourishing, wild, wounded rivers—coming together—flowing to a gathering of power, becoming one.

Moral Resistance and Spiritual Authority

Moral Resistance and Spiritual Authority PDF Author: Seth M. Limmer
Publisher: CCAR Press
ISBN: 0881233196
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This foundational new book reminds us of our ancient obligation to bring justice to the world. The essays in this collection explore the spiritual underpinnings of our Jewish commitment to justice, using Jewish text and tradition, as well as contemporary sources and models. Among the topics covered are women's health, LGBTQ rights, healthcare, racial justice, speaking truth to power, and community organizing.

Being Jewish Today

Being Jewish Today PDF Author: Tony Bayfield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472983831
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
'Being Jewish today' gives an account of both the journey of a particular British Jew and the journey of millions of women and men through today's perplexing and difficult world. With honesty and integrity Rabbi Tony Bayfield breaks new ground in exploring the meaning of Jewish identity and its relationship to Jewish tradition and belief. He does so from the perspective of a person fully integrated into the modern Western world. The rigorous questions he asks of his Jewishness, Judaism and the Jewish God are therefore substantially the same as those asked by individuals of all faiths and none.

Birth of Our Power

Birth of Our Power PDF Author: Victor Serge
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629630527
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Birth of Our Power is an epic novel set in Spain, France, and Russia during the heady revolutionary years 1917–1919. Serge’s tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the blood-and-rain-soaked trenches of World War I. When the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain, Europe is “burning at both ends.” Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge’s “tale of two cities” is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city “we” could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered capital of the Russian Revolution besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites. Between the romanticism of radicalized workers awakening to their own power in a sun-drenched Spanish metropolis to the grim reality of workers clinging to power in Russia’s dark, frozen revolutionary outpost. From “victory in defeat” to “defeat in victory.” The novel was composed a decade after the revolution in Leningrad, where Serge was living in semicaptivity because of his declared opposition to Stalin’s dictatorship over the revolution.