Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Rainer Waldman Adkins just forwarded me the 64 page agenda for the Netroots Nation annual conference (formerly Yearly Kos) which begins today in Austin.  It looks smashing with incredibly interesting topics and speakers including folks I’ve been reading and wanting to meet for years.

Now, I admit I haven’t read the entire 64 page agenda and I invite anyone to correct the following impression if I am wrong but…I did a search on the terms Israel, Palestine and Jewish and came up with no content whatsoever on any of those subjects.  I find that passing strange.  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most urgent and potentially catastrophic in the world today and not a mention of it here.  Similarly, the American Jewish community is playing a central role in the upcoming presidential election and not a word about it.  There is now a small, but growing community of liberal Jewish bloggers that I think play an important role in our own niche of the blog world.  I think we have to start asking for recognition of that by groups like Netroots Nation who seem perfectly willing to ignore us.

I’ve written to the organizers suggesting that they include a panel on some of these subjects at next year’s conference.  We’ll see what happens.

I note that this conference used to be Yearly Kos.  I also note that I was banned from Daily Kos for suggesting that Markos, Armando and other liberal political bloggers should be more transparent about their paid affiliations with political campaigns.  If the Kos ethos still reigns at Netroots Nation I probably won’t be getting any invitations.  But perhaps they’re now larger than Kos and not ruled by that site’s prejudices.