For the past few days, this video of writer Greg Karber giving Abercrombie and Fitch clothes to the homeless has been going viral on my Facebook newsfeed. Karber started this project in response to A&F CEO Mike Jeffries’ statement that “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids….We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” In order to take A&F’s cool factor down a notch, Karber went to his local Goodwill, bought all the A&F clothes he could find, and distributed them to the homeless. More than a dozen of my friends have shared his video, many of them leftists. It’s not hard to see why Karber’s response might seem appealing: Jeffries certainly deserves to be condemned (though reprimanding a grown man for being an exaggerated stereotype of a middle school bully is not exactly a controversial stance), and embarrassing him while helping others seems to be a worthy goal. I can usually appreciate trolling the rich and powerful, but at whose expense does it truly come? [click to continue…]
Writer, social activist, and red-diaper baby Naomi Klein was born in Montreal on this date in 1970. Her parents had moved there from the U.S. three years earlier as resisters to the Vietnam War. Klein’s books include No Logo (2000), an anti-corporate and anti-globalization manifesto, and The Shock Doctrine:The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), an attack on Milton Friedman’s free-market capitalist prescriptions as applied to countries in times of tumultuous change (such as post-Communist Eastern Europe or in Chile under Pinochet). The Shock Doctrine has been translated into some 30 languages. An emerging leader of the environmental movement, which has become the focus of much of her journalism, Klein has also been a supporter of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel’s occupation policies since 2009. She is one of North America’s best-known intellectual-activists, and one of the corporate world’s most clear-sighted critics. To see her interviewed by Bill Moyers on climate change and capitalism, see below.
“Around the world in Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos; exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image.” —Naomi Klein
More than 700,000 people attended the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation on this date in 1993. Urvashi Vaid, director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the central organizer of the march (which was endorsed by the NAACP, among others), gave a shout-out to activist Jews from the podium: “It is fitting that the Holocaust Museum was dedicated the same weekend as this March,” she said, “for not only were gay people persecuted by the Nazi state, but gay people are indebted to the struggle of the Jewish people against bigotry and intolerance.” Among other speakers at the podium was Judith Light, a soap opera star (One Life to Live) and Tony Award-winning stage actor who has been a prominent gay rights ally and AIDS activist. Light, who is Jewish, straight and married, sits on the board of the Matthew Shepard Foundation and had a library named after her at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. She is the co-founder with Cyndi Lauper of the Give a Damn Campaign, which aims to convince straight people to stand up for LGBTQ rights and inclusion. Light also starred on the Ugly Betty television series, one of the most gay-positive comedy shows in history. To see her speaking out for straight solidarity with gay people, look below.
“Bigotry or prejudice in any form is more than a problem; it is a deep-seated evil within our society.”—Judith Light
E. Richard (Rick) Brown, founder of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and a longtime advocate for national health insurance, died at 70 on this date in 2012. He was “a tireless advocate for the uninsured,” notes a UCLA Newsroom obituary, “and he promoted the development of health data surveys to both dispel persistent myths about the uninsured and document the devastating consequences of the chronic lack of health insurance for millions of Americans.” Brown came from a poor, progressive Jewish family (his father was a union organizer) and experienced first-hand the humiliations of “medical charity” when his brother smashed his bike into a tree and the family had no basic health coverage. In 1990, Brown co-authored California’s first single-payer health care legislation. In 2001, he developed the California Health Interview Survey, which produced its data from interviews with more than 55,000 California households. The research became the cornerstone of dozens of California health-related laws. Brown was also full-time senior consultant to President Bill Clinton’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform and served as a senior health policy advisor for the Barack Obama for President Campaign.
“My mother always remembered the stigma she felt when the eligibility workers at the county hospital grilled her about her income and were very demeaning to her because she couldn’t pay the medical bills.” —Rick Brown
Frances Stern, a social worker and dietician who researched the nutrition of low-income workers and established the Food Clinic at the Boston Dispensary, died at 74 on this date in 1947. Stern was a pioneer in home economics, helped to found the American Home Economics Association in 1908, and wrote an influential book in 1917, [...]
It’s Never Too Late to Change the World by Sherrey Reim Glickman I want people to know who I was! Born in 1924 into a Jewish immigrant household in Brooklyn, I was raised on chicken soup, meatloaf, pot roast, gefilte fish, hamburgers, hot dogs, and steak. I loved them all, never questioning what the source [...]
Two of the four Foner brothers who were leaders in the American labor movement and progressive academic circles were born on this date in 1910. Philip Foner wrote and edited more than 110 books, many involving groundbreaking research: on American slavery, on black history, on women and social activists as agents of change in America, [...]
Why Jews Lean Left — And Should Stay That Way by Lawrence Bush “We Jews are, as it were, the sons of the revolution, the daughters of the revolution. We should be aware of it.” —Leo Baeck, Judaism, 1949 For the past three years, I’ve been sending out a daily e-mail called Jewdayo, which [...]
“Marvin, what do we do now?” That famous final line in Robert Redford’s 1972 film The Candidate was meant to sum up the ways that big time electioneering obliterates politicians’ purpose and vision. This is a very important moment to ask the question — understanding that the ‘we’ refers not so much to the President [...]
Daniel Sieradski (aka Mobius), the founder of Jewschool and other popular Jewish websites, and a key Jewish figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, was born on this date in 1979. Sieradski has worked as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s digital media director and has been an innovator in connecting the organized Jewish world with social [...]
For the past few days, this video of writer Greg Karber giving Abercrombie and Fitch clothes to the homeless has been going viral on my Facebook newsfeed. Karber started this project in response to A&F CEO Mike Jeffries’ statement that “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids….We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” In order to take A&F’s cool factor down a notch, Karber went to his local Goodwill, bought all the A&F clothes he could find, and distributed them to the homeless. More than a dozen of my friends have shared his video, many of them leftists. It’s not hard to see why Karber’s response might seem appealing: Jeffries certainly deserves to be condemned (though reprimanding a grown man for being an exaggerated stereotype of a middle school bully is not exactly a controversial stance), and embarrassing him while helping others seems to be a worthy goal. I can usually appreciate trolling the rich and powerful, but at whose expense does it truly come? [click to continue…]
