Dec 06
Jeanette Friedmandomestic violence, feminism, israel, judaism, politics, social action, women in america
Naomi Graetz, the biblical scholar and author of groundbreaking books on the sources for coping with discomfiting Jewish topics like wife-beating, talked about slavery and trafficking at the Rabbis for Human Rights North America Conference on December 6. Graetz, who lives in Omer, a Beersheva suburb, came to the States for that meeting and a biblical scholar’s conference in Atlanta.
Graetz explains that slavery and trafficking resonate from biblical times. Poverty and circumstance have always forced some women into the trade — where they are dehumanized. And while there are those who say prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, Graetz notes that pimps came first, and it is a very lucrative trade, indeed. According to the U.S. State Department, 12.3 million people are in slavery and forced prostitution around the world — most of them women and children. “The practice of closing one’s eyes to a social phenomenon with distressing overtones creates denial — and that prevents the establishment from responding effectively to trafficking,” she said.
read more here.
Oct 02
Jeanette Friedmanbook review, commentary, domestic violence, education, feminism, philanthropy, social action
TUESDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2010 15:43
BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
About a week before I covered the Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan, I read the galley proofs for Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff has written lots of books about how our lives are affected by computers and marketing, corporations and the media, and he’s invented words we now use all the time. But instead of just re-writing the material from Wikipedia, you can read all about him here. His new book focuses on how computers and smartphones have changed our lives and what we have to do to make those tools work for us, so that we aren’t used by them.
But in a more subtle way, it is also about weapons of mass distraction — if we are all distracted by all the things we are doing on our computers and phones, we will be too busy to notice how America has fallen by the wayside. We may not realize until it’s too late that we have turned ourselves into a nation of ignoramuses — and it is just one of the issues Rushkoff talks about, issues that were significantly related to issues addressed last week at CGI.
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Oct 02
Jeanette Friedmaneducation, feminism, history, philanthropy, politics, social action
9/24/2010
1,950 private/public commitments will help 300 million people over ten years
BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
While STAR magazine and other tabloids touted the confessions of a bimbo who said she got it on with Ashton Kutcher, and predicted the end of his marriage to Demi Moore, Kutcher and Moore were at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in Manhattan, where they formally announced their campaign to end sex trafficking in the United States. “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” is their message, and Kutcher told American men to get off their asses and do something. One in five American men buy sex, and 75% of the women in the trade are enslaved by their pimps. The average age of entry is 13, and it is not done by choice.
Kutcher told a packed house that Tuesday marked the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. While most Americans assumed slavery was over and done, he said, there are more people enslaved now than ever before in human history — 27,000,000 — most of them sex slaves, with 80% of them women and girls. In the United States alone, he noted, there are 1,000,000 sex slaves, one third of them children under 15, many of them stolen off the streets. He and others on the panel described a number of heartbreaking cases. You can watch the panel discussion here.
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Oct 02
Jeanette Friedmanlocal stories/community, new jersey news, social action
MONDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 2010 11:16
Mayor, police chief and interfaith community leaders will attend
BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
A year of witnessing hate crimes was more than enough to trigger a Stop the Hate Rally called for 7:30 next Monday night at Congregation Beth El in Edison. The rally, sponsored by the Metuchen-Edison Clergy Association, is in response to a year-long series of hate crimes in the area, that included the beating of a Jewish boy and the murder of a professor from India in nearby Old Bridge. There was a spate of antisemitic acts, including swastikas getting scratched into cars at a local Lexus dealership. Last week, as a result of that and more recent incidents, Edison police provided extra protection for area synagogues during the High Holy Days.
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