Daniel Lubetzky

Ben Smith highlights some excerpts from an excellent article by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic.

Smith explains about Obama:

He’s trying to do something hard, and unusual: Associate himself with a strong pro-Israel line, but also refuse to be associated with the hardest line on everything, calling settlements "unhelpful" and, elsewhere, distancing himself from a reflexive Likud line. This isn’t strange in terms of Israeli politics, say, or scholarship of the region; but it is in American politics.

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I saw this at a cash register in a local deli…

Here is an article that gives you hope that a lot of our interconnected environmental, climate-change, waste disposal, energy and resource scarcity, pollution and geo-political threats can be tackled through technology before our world implodes:

Floyd Butterfield and Thomas Quinn launched E-Fuel Corporation.  Their product allows you to create ethanol in your backyard.

The holy grail will be reached when someone comes up with equipment that takes bio-trash and turns it into clean energy.  There you have the cleanest solution to so many problems.

It is not impossible – the core technology actually already exists. My crazy fellow Mexican Jewish friends Zeev and Zak Zaidman run a health foods company called Kopali that goes from place to place on a bus fueled with trash. 

Wouldn’t it be great if ordinary citizens all joined together and said, "I have had enough – and I am going to do something about it!" and then pushed their Heads of State to once and for all deliver a two-state-agreement?!

They could draw inspiration from this:

"I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore!"

- From NETWORK, the movie (let’s just hope that the civic action wouldn’t be hijacked by corporate networks, though it could turn into something like this):

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This is better than a warning on a cigarette box.

Avarice is different.  It means setting your heart on money, a thing that no wise man ever did.  It is a kind of deadly poison, which ruins a man’s health and weakens his moral fiber.  It knows no bounds and can never be satisfied.  He that has not, wants; and he that has, wants more.

- Sallust, In The Jugurthine War and the Conspiracy of Cataline, discussing how the Roman Empire was overtaken as ‘the disease [of

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OneVoice recently launched one of its most ambitious and impactful projects: an essay contest asking every Palestinian and every Israeli child to dare visualize what 2018 would look like if we were to get our act together and achieve a framework 2-state-agreement in 2008.

You can see here a video of the Imagine 2018 essay contest being imparted at a school in Gaza.

While it’s an essay contest, in addition

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Look at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

- Carl Sagan, commenting on a picture of planet Earth taken 4 billion miles away by NASA, showing a fragile speck of blue adrift in an unimaginably vast sea of space. See a film with Carl Sagan’s commencement address at the Pangea Day website.

The film-maker Jehane Noujaim dreamt a day when people across the world would see the same films, images and messages on the same day, at the

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I was struck when I saw the initial cut of this film at how the Director, Adam Hootnick, was able to be objective and empathetic about every subject it covered, avoiding caricatured stereotypes, and helping us understand the perspective and motivations of those involved during the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.  I highly recommend it for any person who wants a better understanding about the Middle East.

UNSETTLED, a documentary feature film following the lives of a varied group of Israeli twenty-somethings during the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip, will open for a limited engagement at NYC’s Pioneer Theater on Friday, May 9th, and LA’s Laemmle Music Hall 3 on Friday, May 16th. The film has won a number of festival awards including Jury Prizes at Slamdance (2007) and Sonoma Valley (2008). MTV’s Kurt Loder calls it "remarkable for the balance of its compassion, and for the range of youthful intelligence it reveals," and Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, former Pakistani representative to the UK, calls the film "very important for people in the Muslim world." Special dialogue events have been announced in both cities.

In New York, the 8pm May 13th screening will feature a post-film talkback with Director/Producer Adam Hootnick and Najla Said, actress and writer.

In Los Angeles, the May 18th screening will feature a post-film talkback with Professor Reza Aslan, author of No god but God.

To view a trailer and get ticket info, visit http://www.UNSETTLEDmovie.com