Kathleen Peratis
By Kathleen Peratis
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Opinion Looking for Sparks of Justice
International justice has taken a pasting during the watch of this administration. In 2002, President Bush said, “We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world’s most important multilateral body to be enforced.” But this year he nominated John Bolton to be America’s representative to…
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Opinion We Reap What They Sew
The sweatshops of the Lower East Side and the largely Jewish-led labor movement to which they gave rise are part of Jewish iconography. My Russian-born, Brooklyn-bred mother-in-law was able to support her disabled husband, her young son and her own widowed mother on her wages as a seamstress in a Lower East Side garment factory…
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Opinion An Island of Empowerment
From the air, the many islands off the Andaman Sea coast of southern Thailand’s Trang Province look like Shangri-La: luxuriantly green, white beaches, aqua sea. Last week I visited the small village of Koh Muuk on one of them, Muuk Island. Early and misleading reports following the tsunami of December 26 — a date referred…
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Opinion Silence in the Face of Torture
Just before Alberto Gonzales’s testimony at his January confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, one wag noted, “Mr. Gonzales has directed members of his staff to revise the White House definition of torture to include torture.” Witty, but painful. In his prepared remarks, Gonzales said, “America stands against and will not tolerate torture under…
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Opinion Our Kids and the Workplace
Thousands of children will go to work with their mothers or fathers on Ms. Magazine’s “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” in April. Most of the kids will spend the day in a white-collar enclave, the sort of place they may hope or expect to inhabit in four or eight or 10 years….
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Opinion The Blindness to Household Labor Rights
The first two women nominated to be attorney general of the United States, Zoe Baird and Kimbe Wood, withdrew their names in quick succession, both having been exposed as domestic scofflaws — they employed (apparently) undocumented foreign workers to care for their children, and they (apparently) did not pay Social Security taxes on their wages….
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Opinion A Lesson From the ACLU On How To Admit Mistakes
As we learned from this year’s presidential race, it is hard to forgive where there is no admission of error. So it was with joy and relief that I learned, October 18, that the American Civil Liberties Union finally had owned up to a whopper — the signing of a pledge, as a condition of…
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Opinion Badgering Honor
Such a fuss! The Republicans set out to rob John Kerry of his heroism, and it appears that in the public mind, they have succeeded. Now, when we read of the senator’s Vietnam heroism, or lack thereof, it is usually juxtaposed against President Bush’s service, or failure to serve, in the National Guard. The score?…
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Fast Forward Netanyahu alleges that Israeli soldiers died because Biden-era arms ’embargo’ meant they ‘didn’t have enough ammunition’
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Yiddish דרײַסיק יאָר זינט איך בין געוואָרן אַ ייִדישער איבערזעצערLooking back on my 30 years as a Yiddish translator
איינער פֿון מײַנע באַליבטסטע דיכטער, וועמעס ווערק איך האָב שוין אַ סך איבערגעזעצט, איז אָסיפּ מאַנדעלשטאַם.
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