by RabbiBrentChaimSpodek · Sunday, October 5th, 2008
Some time ago, the Rabbis castigated Hoshea ben Elah (the last King of the Kingdom of Israel) for his corrupt practice of taking what should have been his personal responsibility and hanging it on the necks of the people (Seder Eliyahu Zuta 9) They didn’t look favorably on his moment of privatized gain and socialized loss, and yet somehow, we Americans seem to think that’s the way to go with regard to Wall Street. We can only assume the government will soon be applying that logic to the credit card debt debt of this country as well.
As long as the failures of Wall Street are being hung on our collective necks, its worth contempating what else we could have done with the $700 billion we apparently had lying under the couch cushions. From Duncan Green at From Poverty to Power, we learn that it:
Would clear the accumulated debt of the 49 poorest countries in the world ($375bn) twice over
· Is almost 5 times the annual amount of extra aid needed to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals on poverty, health, education etc ($150bn a year)
· Is about 7 years of current global aid levels ($104bn in 2007)
· Is enough to eradicate all world poverty for over two years (UNDP calculates it would take $300bn to get the entire world population over the $1 a day poverty line).
Thanks to SM for sending the link my way.
by BZ · Thursday, May 8th, 2008
60 years ago this week, the State of Israel declared independence. Here is the full text of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. It contains many ideals that Israel can work towards as it enters its next 60 years. Some of those ideals are going to get Jewschool labeled as anti-Israel for publishing them. So be it.
ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
More »
by Danya · Sunday, October 21st, 2007
A new website, FreeRice.Com (a sister site of Poverty.Com), has come up with a pretty intriguing plan: get people to play a vocab quiz game, and for every word gotten right, 10 grains of rice are donated through the United Nations World Food Program to hungry people around the world. (Those 10 grains add up if you play for a while.) The revenue is generated from pageviews for the advertisers at the bottom of the quiz game.
The vocab is pretty good–they have like 50 levels that self-adjust based on your answers, so it becomes pretty tough pretty quickly and, I have to say, kind of addictive.
Since you’re going to goof off online anyway, why not do it in such a way that helps someone?
(Tip from Justin G.)
by Mobius · Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
Jewschool reader Steg reports,
Yesterday, Rav Avi Weiss and the Jewish activist organization he founded, AMCHA: the Coalition for Jewish Concerns, coordinated a civil disobedience protest at the United Nations.
Around 50 rabbis and rabbinical students, as well as a lay communal leader or few, participated in the protest. They prepared themselves in a staging area near the Iranian Mission to the UN — putting on talleisim and distributing signs — and after a few short speeches and rounds of slogan-shouting, they marched, singing ‘Am Yisra’eil Hhai, to the steps that go down past the Isaiah Wall across the street from the UN buildings.
At the bottom of the steps, they sat down, blocking the public thoroughfare.
[...] A representative from the police department addressed the protestors, explaining to them that they need to cease obstructing pedestrian traffic, or they will be arrested and charged with disorderly conduct (as well as more severe offenses if they actively resist). So about half of the protestors stepped back and dispersed along the upper reaches of the staircase, obeying the police orders, while the other half remained sitting and blocking the steps, expressing their willingness to go all the way and be arrested in order to make their message heard more dramatically.
And so, one by one or two by two, the waiting police officers with their belts full of plasticuffs handcuffed the civilly-disobedient protestors and deposited them in the back of two police vans.
Full story.
