Portside

With a budget of nearly $50 million a year, Birthright has taken hundreds of thousands of Jewish youths over the last two decades on its whirlwind trips to Israel. Critics charge that Birthright conflates Judaism and Zionism and encourages unconditional Jewish support for Israel by offering a misleading and blatantly propagandistic narrative of Israeli history that erases Palestinians while glorifying Israeli atrocities.

A convention fight this summer in Philadelphia offers Sanders the opportunity to make significant reforms to the Democratic Party. He should continue fighting to mobilize every last voter and delegate behind his agenda of guaranteed universal rights to healthcare, education, and dignified conditions - and continue impressing the necessity for ongoing mass agitation (what he calls the "political revolution") to accomplish the same.

The revolt in France is growing! Up to 500,000 people went on strike and took to the streets across the country to protest unpopular pro-business labor reforms that would leave many people unemployed and would be an attack on worker's rights. France's largest cities saw a new wave of street demonstrations and strikes as student groups and unions tried to maintain pressure on the government just days before the bill is brought to Parliament.(teleSUR English)

This new book by a retired Army colonel and emeritus professor of history at Boston University tells the story of decades of US policy failures in the Middle East.

For the movement to survive, it needs to focus on work that doesn’t lend itself to 140 characters.

Prince was Prince. He kept on being his eccentric, sexy, unapologetic self, and kept on making the art he wanted to make.

I was not expecting to be cracked wide open by this project. I was not expecting to shed a lifetime of tears. But I did.

"To my Democratic Party: you cannot show up in churches before election day, you cannot sing the first and last verse of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' you cannot join hands and walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and call that post-racial and inclusion," Donna Edwards told supporters after her Senate campaign loss.

"He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left," Della Volpe said of the senator from Vermont. "Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation - the largest generation in the history of America - thinks about politics."

The new Mapplethorpe film begins with the voice of Senator Jesse Helms exhorting everyone to, "Look at the pictures!" He was protesting an exhibit of Mapplethorpe's work that he viewed as pornographic, and we see the conservative politician waving what he viewed as smut, seeking to inflame the culture wars, despite the fact that Mapplethorpe had died just a few months prior at the age of 42 of AIDS. That protest turned out to solidify the artist's legend.