Elayne Clift
What’s at stake with the election in November
Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues from the earliest days of this newspaper.
Recommended reading
BRATTLEBORO-Thank you for your thoughtful editorial. (Full disclosure: My personal views align with those of Jewish Voice for Peace, which also had a Viewpoint in Voices on the same day.) I would like to suggest three books that I believe will offer your readers necessary historical context for the...
What civilized, developed nation justifies executions?
Prison labor comes cheap. It is based on exploitation that serves corporations, governments, and correctional facilities.
Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues from the earliest days of this newspaper. BRATTLEBORO-In February this year, Texas executed a man named Ivan Cantu for murder despite the fact that evidence discovered post-trial had raised serious questions about his guilt, persuading jurors...
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Looking the truth in the eye
BRATTLEBORO-As someone who has been a public health educator and advocate for many years, I appreciated Joyce Marcel's article, which illuminated racial disparities in health care caused by diagnostic tools that rely on technology. I also applaud the sources she quoted who are drawing attention to those disparities. I'd be interested to read a follow-up article about differences in care that derive from racism in the medical profession in general, which is rife with race-based assumptions and stereotypes. A variety...
What are we going to do about the women?
Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues from the earliest days of this newspaper. BRATTLEBORO-Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when agrarian and rural lifestyles gave way to urbanization following the Industrial Revolution, everything changed for women in dramatic ways. As the late Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in her important book, For Her Own Good, tenement living left women in despair as a total cultural and economic tidal wave began. Some...
Where are the state’s priorities?
Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues from the earliest days of this newspaper. Remember the outcry when we realized that prior Republican administrations, national and state, cared about children but only from conception to birth? It's looking like déjà vu all over again with millions of children in this wealthy country going hungry. As The New York Times noted in a January article, more than eight million kids in 13 states are about...
The time for change is now
Elayne Clift (elayne-clift.com) has written this column about women, politics, and social issues from the earliest days of this newspaper. As Greek philosopher Heraclitus claimed around 500 BCE, "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. There is nothing permanent except change." The noted philosopher meant that change is the only reality. Given our political processes in election years, institutional change is needed more than ever as...
A time of heartbreaking conflict, two views ring true
I am writing to stand with Nancy Braus and Samia Abbass in their respective Viewpoints [Voices, Dec. 20]. The two pieces are related in my view insofar as they express the feelings of both a Jewish woman and an Arab woman at a time of heartbreaking conflict that affects not only Jews and Arabs but all of us. Braus's piece, "For Jews on the Left, a terrible position," speaks to the effect the Middle East catastrophe has had on those...