Shane Burley

2 weeks 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.

1 month 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.

1 month 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.

1 month 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.

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

Over the last year and a half, the movement for Palestinian liberation has become one of the largest American social movements of the decade. Not only that, there has also been an incredible resurgence of the Jewish left, as Jewish Palestine solidarity organizations, such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, organize a growing contingent of young Jews for an end to the genocide in Gaza.