Haaretz: How Cremation Became a Hot Israeli Business

The reasons for its secrecy are understandable: 'Aley Shalechet,' the oldest and best known cremation company in Israel, saw its crematorium set aflame and destroyed in 2007, at the height of the ultra-Orthodox war against the right to cremate bodies in Israel. Following this incident, the company relocated the crematorium, and since then, it has insisted on even more stringent secrecy than it did before. [...]

Thus Meshi-Zahav has abandoned the active fight, which in the past included complaints to the police and reports in ultra-Orthodox newspapers. “We thought it was a mistake to give them all the publicity, because most of the Israeli public doesn’t connect to this, isn’t familiar with it and doesn’t do it,” he said. “Only a tiny minority.” [...]

Let's be honest: in economically weaker communities High Spirit has fewer clients than it does in upscale neighborhoods. And yet, cremation is generally something embraced by people who grew up in a non-Jewish environment. Farewell ceremonies in front of an open casket are usually found in Christian families. They say it’s more of a religious-communal issue, not a financial one. “I don’t think a family’s financial situation plays a role” says Sharon. [...]

“But I was always bothered by ordinary burials, how they threw the body into the grave [in a shroud]. As far back as my grandfather and grandmother, when I saw that, I thought, why is it like that? Why not in a coffin? Why are soldiers and government ministers buried in a coffin, but not ordinary people? Are they less valuable? Personally, this is something that always bothered me.”

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CityLab: With GM Job Cuts, Youngstown Faces a New ‘Black Monday’

But local residents recognize the cruelty of optimism—and they’re tired of trying to adapt to a changing economic landscape. In the late 1970s, economic apologists called deindustrialization “creative destruction” and described plant closings as part of the “natural economic order.”[...]

The fall of Youngstown since the 1970s offers a textbook illustration of what happens when a significant portion of local workers lose their jobs. Businesses across the community suffer—not just suppliers or service providers who directly supported a closed plant, but also restaurants and bars and retailers of all kinds. Stores close, windows get broken, storefronts get boarded up, and downtowns empty out. Cities lose the tax dollars to pay for street repairs, police patrols, fire departments, and more; crime rises, the built environment deteriorates, and populations decline. Between 2001 and 2010, the population of Youngstown dropped from 82,026 to 66,982; the Mahoning Valley had the largest population decline of any of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. Since then, the region has lost another 23,000 people, 4.1 percent of its population. In May, the Wall Street Journal listed the area as one of the fastest-shrinking cities in the United States. 

The social costs of deindustrialization may be even worse. Population decline breaks apart families and shatters neighborhoods. You can see this on the streets of Youngstown, in the thousands of abandoned homes and empty lots. While the city has seen a decline in vacant properties over the last decade, much of that comes not from reclaimed homes but from the nearly 600 that have been demolished.

Deindustrialization also hurts individuals. Rates of addiction, suicide, domestic violence, and depression rise, as do rates of heart attacks and strokes. That human harm has social consequences. Residents may blame themselves for the decline of their community, and that undermines their ability to stand up for themselves and pursue new opportunities, and their faith in the institutions that people rely on for support.

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Aeon: Love in a time of migrants: on rethinking arranged marriages

In his book In Praise of Love (2009), the French communist philosopher Alain Badiou attacks the notion of ‘risk-free love’, which he sees written in the commercial language of dating services that promise their customers ‘love, without falling in love’. For Badiou, the search for ‘perfect love without suffering’ signifies a ‘modern’ variant of ‘traditional’ arranged-marriage practices – a risk-averse, calculated approach to love that aims to diminish our exposure to differences: ‘Their idea is you calculate who has the same tastes, the same fantasies, the same holidays, wants the same number of children. [They try] to go back to arranged marriages,’ writes Badiou. The philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek subscribes to similar ideas about arranged marriages, referring to them as a ‘pre-modern procedure’. [...]

Due to the growth of international migration, the question of how Western states treat arranged marriages bears very serious consequences in terms of how we perceive the emotional lives of migrants and diasporic community members. The prevalent Western perception of illegitimacy is unwarranted, based both on ignorance of arranged marriage and on a lack of insight into Western norms.

Badiou criticises both libertinism (superficial and narcissistic) and arranged-marriage practices (empty of that organic, spontaneous and unsettling desire that inspires emotional transgressions). He argues that love is real when it is transgressive – a disruptive experience that opens people to new possibilities and a common vision of what they could be together. It possesses the power to floor the ego, overcome the selfish impulse, and transfigure a random encounter into a meaningful, shared continuity. To Badiou, love is not simply a search for an adequate partner, it is a construction of an almost traumatic transformation that compels us to look at the world ‘from the point of view of two and not one’. [...]

Postcolonial feminist theory has demonstrated that women who opt for arranged marriages are not passive subscribers of patriarchal traditions, but engaged in negotiating the practice to shift the balance of power in their favour. Arranged marriage might not be the perfect solution to the problem of love, but it isn’t a fossilised holdover from archaic times. It’s an ever-evolving, modern phenomenon and should be understood as such.

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Like Stories of Old: The Philosophy of The Fountain – Escaping Our Mental Prisons

Revisiting The Fountain; this video essay pushes beyond the various interpretations of the plot to explore the deeper themes at the heart of Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious film.

The Guardian: Free education is disappearing before our eyes

The mass evacuation of children from British cities to rural areas laid bare the abysmal lack of education many had received. The government response was the 1944 Education Act, which established what we now call state-maintained comprehensive schools and free, compulsory education to the age of 15. Free, as in not requiring parental fees. It was a change the then education minister, Rab Butler, would describe in the House of Commons as characterised by “dignity”; but 75 years later, under cover of Brexit, this basic pillar of our postwar order is being quietly eroded, with “free” schools asking parents if they can make a contribution to help meet the chronic funding shortfall they are facing. Money for the “little extras”, as the chancellor, Philip Hammond, in his recent budget, described the luxuries our pampered snowflakes enjoy these days – things like toilet paper, textbooks and stationery. [...]

Here’s a conundrum. How does a school that struggles to pay for textbooks meet the increasing pressure to demonstrate high performance? Ofsted, the schools regulator, acknowledged last month that schools were limiting their curriculum to focus on end-of-year tests. A primary school teaching assistant I spoke to recently told me about children learning nothing but maths and English in their final year. The children who had no hope of passing were siphoned off into a dud class so that the higher performers could get on with providing the school’s required performance data uninhibited.[...]

Some schools are overtly creating a top tier, where the most academic pupils are groomed for high grades and Russell Group university admissions, and offered experiences – such as residential and theatre trips – that are simply not available to the rest. One state school organised a £3,000 trip to Borneo, for those who could afford to pay – achieving class segregation through seemingly voluntary exclusion.

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