Shane Burley

2 weeks ago | znetwork.org | Benjamin Balthaser |Shane Burley

As Jewish protesters began flooding capitol building rotundas, blockading roads in cities across the country, and staging an unprecedented protest in New York City’s Grand Central Station, journalists attempted to pin down this “new” phenomenon. Some in Jewish establishment organizations decried these Jewish dissenters, either claiming them as patsies for terrorism, betrayers of their community, or not Jews at all.

1 month ago | religiondispatches.org | Shane Burley

While Jewish history is so often recounted as a linear pathway—usually pointing toward and ending with the creation of the State of Israel—it’s easy to forget that it’s a tradition of cycles. The Torah is read in weekly increments, called parashiyot, and the Hebrew calendar acts as an arcane map to locate the spiritual tools left by ancestors.

2 months ago | inthesetimes.com | Shane Burley

Not all coups change a country in an instant. Some are a slow-boil process of subversion that nonetheless leaves the institutions they affect unrecognizable. Journalist Talia Lavin has spent her career looking at the violent and bigoted politics of the United States’ rightward turn, and, as she chronicles in her recent book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, the Christian nationalist movement currently remaking U.S. society was one such long revolution.

2 months ago | maiseh-review.ghost.io | Shane Burley

Despite all the “free speech” advocates dominating online political discourse, it’s been nearly impossible to find a consensus understanding of the “free speech” they are proffering. The term itself implies something that is simultaneously obvious and illusory. P. E.

2 months ago | jfrej.org | Shane Burley

By Shane BurleyOctober 7 was one of the largest global political shifts since Trump’s first candidacy in 2016, especially for the U.S. Jewish community. Mainstream Jewish organizations, which often track liberal, fractured as many purged their ranks of anti-Zionist voices critical of Israel. At the same time, the ranks of long-established Jewish leftist organizations swelled, even as some of their established relationships with the mainstream Jewish world were cut off.