Tikkun Covers Weinstein…with a Catch

Tikkun, which describes itself as a “progressive Jewish magazine,” recently gave an interview to Michael Weinstein in which he repeated many of his standard lines (America is equivalent to Nazi Germany in 1937, on a train to Slaughterville, withering fields of fire and sucking chest wounds, etc).

When Weinstein couldn’t come up with one, Tikkun told him it believed that the reason for the rise of the “Christian Right” was that only Christians were adequately responding to a “spiritual crisis” in America.  Weintein was asked how he would address this “crisis:”

How do you build character in this multi-religious, pluralistic way, that is feminist, that is sensitive to people, and yet is part of this huge, military, dominate-the-world force that seems to be what the American military is up to now?

His response: 

I don’t make cakes or bread for a living, but I know that you certainly don’t put nitroglycerin into bread and cake, and you’d better…stop putting fundamentalist Dominionist Christian nitroglycerin into whatever recipe you’re using at West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, and the rest of our Armed Forces, to build character.

When pressed to provide a solution rather than a soundbite, Weintein finally admitted it was a question that couldn’t be answered by one of his standard vitriolic sound bites.