Tikkun Olam

Peter Singer is routinely described as "the most influential living philosopher" and occasionally as "the most dangerous man in the world," so it's with much giddiness that we introduce him for a second time as a contributor to Jewcy. The background: Jewcy Senior Editor Joey Kurtzman recently paid enthusiastic tribute to his own $1000 contribution to the anti-poverty campaign Idol Gives Back, and railed against the expectation that charity should be given quietly and anonymously. Joey claimed this was "destructive nonsense" and "insufferable twaddl

Radicalism has become a slutty, sloppy, imprecise word, like antisemitism or God. Over the years it’s been used to describe people of such vastly different ideological orientations that it’s now a sort of Rorschach test: You can tell a lot about people by how they interpret it. What you can’t tell, though, is what radicalism actually means. One thing is certain: Since the term was first used in its political sense at the end of the 18th century, it has never been associated with so little physical, professional, or social risk as it is for the people we today call “radical.” Truly bold progressives—Muslim women and homosexuals, for example, who face real danger while fighting for their most basic ...

Peter SingerPeter Singer has made a career out of demanding that ordinary people take responsibility for the great power they wield. In a groundbreaking 1972 essay, Singer argued that when middle- and upper-middle-class people fail to donate their money to prevent children in the developing world from starving to death, they are guilty of a moral atrocity. Singer himself gives 20% of his Princeton professor salary to nonprofits, principally Oxfam. To lead an even minimally moral life, he argues, we’re all obligated to give at least that much. This might be ...

Faisal Alam’s 1997 nervous breakdown was a watershed moment in the history of gay rights. The Connecticut-raised, Pakistani-born practicing Muslim had been dumped by his suspicious fiancée and humiliated at his mosque for using a gay chatline. Many other gay teenagers would have taken these events as a sign to abandon the faith. Instead, the nineteen-year-old Alam decided he’d just have to change 1,400 years of dogma. Alam founded Al-Fatiha—“the opening” or “the beginning” in Arabic—as one of the world’s first organizations to support gay Muslims. Most Muslim societies treat homosexual acts as crimes. European and American Muslim communities aren’t much more welcoming. But, as in Christianity and Judaism, Islam’s approach to homosexuality ...

William Upski WimsattIt started with the word nigger. Louis Farrakhan’s son Abnar Jew-baited his high school classmate William Upski Wimsatt, who countered with the N-word. Farrakhan slammed him to the locker room floor. Which got young Wimsatt thinking: How could his love of urban culture—a love that was leading him to graffiti “Jew II” across Chicago—so quickly turn to hate? Such hypocrisies would force your average dilettante to start looking for another sub-culture to co-opt. Not Wimsatt. Galvanized by loaded questions about race and class that few white people within the hip-hop establishment were asking, Wimsatt began writing incisive, ...

Hernando de SotoForget about a glorious future in which the global economic order is overthrown and the fat cats lie down with the lambs. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is more interested in what he can accomplish within the parameters of the world as it actually exists. For the past quarter-century, De Soto has been fighting global poverty through a simple and pragmatic plan to give poor squatters the deeds to the properties they’re squatting in. A curious blend of pro-market capitalist and down-and-dirty activist, de Soto has single-handedly improved the lot of Lima’s indigents. In 1979, after returning to Peru from Europe, he began thinking about underground ...

British “art terrorist” Banksy envisions a society in which art is no longer cloistered away in galleries and private collections, where it’s no longer whored out and sapped of vitality by commercial sponsors. Banksy imagines a city where art is smack in the middle of the public square, challenging citizens to confront injustices in the world around them. Having first gained fame through his graffiti, Bansky has never given up the anti-elitist approach of his street-art roots. Art is irrelevant hidden away in a museum—to have an impact, it must be visible to a broad cross-section of society. When he’s not stenciling missile-hugging children on the streets of London, Bansky has made a ...

Zell KravinskyHannah Arendt argued that during a time of collective moral failure there is no room to consider appearances—you just need to do the right thing. Though she never knew Zell Kravinsky, she might have been talking about him. A Philadelphia real estate mogul whose charitable donations over the past five years add up to $45 million and one of his own kidneys, Kravinsky doesn’t worry about what kind of giving is socially acceptable. A rich man isn’t supposed to give away so much of his wealth that he himself can no longer be considered wealthy. A husband and father isn’t supposed to give a body part to a stranger. That’s crazy! It’s extreme! But in an era in ...

Orhan PamukTurkish writer and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk doesn’t mince his words. In a 2005 interview with the Swiss magazine Das Magazin, the novelist smashed two major taboos when he said, “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” In Turkey, a veil of silence surrounds the military’s violent suppression of the Kurdish independence movement, and the government still denies the existence of the Armenian genocide during WWI. By alluding to both of these issues, Pamuk wasn’t just taking a strong stance against some of worst choices his homeland has ...

Wafa SultanWhen Wafa Sultan starts talking about Islam, things get nasty. The Syrian-born, Los Angeles­–based psychiatrist has made a side career of questioning the Koran and being a militant advocate for free speech and inquiry in her faith. Sultan’s path toward advocacy began in 1979, when, as a medical student at the University of Aleppo in northern Syria, she watched members of the Muslim brotherhood murder one of her professors while shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” When she moved with her husband and children to the United States in 1989, she began clarifying and refining her views in private writings, ultimately publishing her opinions on a reformist Islamic website titled ...

Ruth MessingerIf there is one Jewish-American who has done more than any other to ensure that the spirit of “Never Again” be made flesh, that the ethical lessons of the Holocaust be extended into today's world, it is Ruth Messinger. “Never Again” often seems an increasingly silly expression. Again happened in Bosnia, and it happened in Rwanda. Did the Holocaust-pious West or the feckless international community move in any significant way to stop either genocide? As CEO of the American Jewish World Service, Messinger has tirelessly promoted international intervention in Darfur to end the genocide. “The expression ‘Never ...

Katharine Jefferts SchoriKatharine Jefferts Schori might be presiding over one of the biggest schisms in Christendom since the Reformation. As the new head of the U.S. Episcopal Church, Schori has caught flack from the Worldwide Anglican Communion (WAC) not only for being the first female head of a national Anglican church, but also for supporting the ordination of gay bishops. Schori, in turn, has made it clear that the Anglican conservatives obsessing over such ordinations are not only wrong, but fighting the wrong fight. She wants to move the Episcopal Church’s attention from debating the presence of Jesus in the wafer and ...

The world would be a vastly better place if more monarchs were like Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. Since ousting his father in 1995 in a bloodless coup, al-Thani has worked tirelessly to eliminate his own control over what’s said, published, or broadcast in his small country. In the process he’s helping to redraw the media landscape of the entire Middle East. Hamad bin Khalifa al-ThaniNot long after assuming power, Al-Thani abolished the Qatari ...

Bill GatesBill Gates, the archetypal capitalist shark, has done more to help the world’s most economically disenfranchised people than have 158 years of socialist activism. Gates has done more than just establish himself as a Jewcy radical—he’s forced us to reconsider our most basic assumptions about the nature of radicalism itself. Gates has been the richest man on the planet for the past 12 years. But after spending his entire adult life accumulating that unimaginable wealth, Gates is now giving it away. In 2000, he founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which seeks to eliminate preventable ...