Ari Hoffman is a contributing columnist for the Forward, where he writes about politics and culture. He is an adjunct assistant professor at New York University, and has a doctorate in English Literature from Harvard and a law degree from Stanford.
Ari Hoffman
By Ari Hoffman
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Opinion American Jews — on the left and the right — got Trump’s Israel legacy all wrong
The release of former President Donald Trump’s explosive interviews with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s visit to the United Arab Emirates should comprise a wake-up call to American Jews: both Trump’s stalwart admirers and implacable foes are getting the story wrong. Trump’s achievements in the Middle East are far greater…
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Opinion A tragic murder in Jerusalem reminds us: Jewish Israelis face deadly antisemitism every day
Israel is often reminded by its critics that its status quo is unsustainable. Like a procrastinator in shul at the end of Yom Kippur, time is running out for it to do the right thing: to withdraw from the territories, midwife a Palestinian state, dissolve itself into nonbeing. To figure out the problem of its…
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Opinion The Inquisition decimated Sephardic Jewry. We still haven’t internalized its lessons
On a recent warm night in Madrid, a young woman shared that she had travelled over 3,000 miles, leaving her husband and two young children in Montreal, to claim Spanish citizenship. Over glasses of the local Alhambra brew, she told me that her grandparents spoke Ladino, and that whenever someone would mention Spain around her…
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Opinion The lesson we should learn from Afghanistan
The disaster unfolding in Afghanistan is a tragedy we’ve seen before. Images of Afghans falling from airplanes and streaming into terminals, desperate to leave, evoke past scenes of collapse: Saigon at the end of Vietnam, the airlifts of Ethiopians from Israel and the desperate efforts of Jews and others to flee Europe as governments fell…
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Opinion Debate | Should supporting Israel be a litmus test for participation in a rally against antisemitism?
Last Sunday, thousands gathered in the nation’s capital to protest a rise in antisemitism. The “No Fear: A Rally In Solidarity With The Jewish People” event was organized in response to the global uptick in antisemitic attacks during the last round of violence in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza in May. The rally brought…
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Opinion Omar’s comments aren’t just about Israel— they threaten the ties of Jews and the Democratic Party
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s tweets have landed her in the news, once again. Following an exchange with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which Omar urged him to investigate both Israel and Hamas for human rights violations, Omar tweeted, “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity….
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Opinion Israel’s new government teaches American Jews two important lessons
Just days after the rocket launchers have cooled in Israel and Gaza, news broke that after 12 years, the Netanyahu era is just about finished, in the most improbable of ways. The new government, which while not a done deal seems to be more likely than not, seems like it was created via a game…
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Opinion Wokeness goes to war
As rockets continue to crisscross the skies between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, as horrific riots break out in cities from Lod to Ashkelon, a more far-flung front has opened up as a result of the violence in Israel: a war for public opinion here in the United States. Just as the scale of…
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