Judy Rebick is a journalist, a political activist, and one of Canada's most prominent and respected left wing media figures. She is currently the Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is the founder of Canada's irreverent web magazine rabble.ca and until recently she was the volunteer publisher of Rabble. She is a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and she is the author of Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution, Imagine Democracy and Politically Speaking, with Kike Roach.

I first met Judy at the Media That Matters conference at Cortes Island in 2005, a gathering of Media Activists who use media as a tool for social change. During the beginning of the conference we participated in an exercise in which those who considered themselves spiritual stood on one side of the room and those who considered themselves non-spiritual stood on the other. Judy and I were at polar opposites, I at the spiritual extreme and she at what she considers the political extreme.

During the conference I was both screening Scared Sacred and teaching a workshop on media and the sacred. Judy and I struck up a conversation in which she professed her absolute distaste for the word sacred which she equated with religion and oppression. When she told me that she was taking my workshop, I was terrified. However after seeing Scared Sacred Judy began to realize that what I called spiritual was what she called good values and really our opinions were not so divergent at all.

In the ensuing years Judy and I have become best friends and our dialogue of difference has considerably enriched and expanded our understanding of the planet, political action and spirituality. We have been on parallel paths of investigation and Judy is now writing a book about the idea of building power, a political movement that is based on the heart instead of the head - a consciousness which is spreading all over the globe. We have crossed paths at The World Social Forum in Kenya and in Venezuela where we were both finding inspiring evidence of a global Zeitgeist that is taking off.

~ Velcrow Ripper

WEB LINKS
Ryerson University - Social Justice
Rabble.ca

VIDEOS

Sneak Peak - Judy Rebick - Diversity

BOOKS INCLUDE

Transforming Power
Ten Thousand Roses: the Making of a Feminist Revolution
Politically Speaking (with Kike Roach)
Imagine Democracy