Alex Zeldin is a contributing columnist for the Forward. Follow him on Twitter @JewishWonk.
Alex ZeldinContributing Columnist
By Alex Zeldin
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Opinion Bernie’s campaign is dead. Long live Bernie.
On Wednesday, April 8, 2020 Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced he was dropping out of the Democratic presidential primary. Many post-mortems on his campaign will likely focus on what it means for his “faction” of progressives. But whether or not it survives as a cohesive faction in the future, there is no doubt that the…
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Opinion My great-grandmother survived Stalin and Hitler. I’m thinking of her this Passover.
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article We’re going to be alone for the seders. It was the first thought in my mind that really hit home the severity of the COVID-19 crisis as New York authorities began telling people to stay home. The next one was: Are we even going to be able to…
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Opinion Trump’s presidency led straight to America’s epic coronavirus failure
In her influential analysis of totalitarian regimes “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that the key to mass propaganda was the propensity of its audience to believe the worst, “no matter how absurd.” Totalitarian mass leaders understood that they could make people believe “the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that…
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Opinion Bernie Sanders says he’s proud to be Jewish. Will Jewish voters care?
“I am very proud of being Jewish and that is an essential part of who I am as a human being,” Vermont Senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders says in a new campaign ad he tweeted this weekend on the subject of his Jewishness. It signaled the latest evidence of a marked change from 2016,…
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Opinion American Jews must defend the two-state solution – before Democrats accept that Trump destroyed it.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration released its long-trumpeted “deal of the century” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plan, which can be read in full here, does what no American presidency has done before: It provides specific American terms for borders, refugees, and Jerusalem, along with other contentious issues like the status of Gaza, prisoners…
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Opinion The use and abuse of the Holocaust: a new international pastime
“So I was hiding out in the heap of dead bodies because in the last week when the crematoria didn’t function at all, the bodies were just building up higher and higher. So there I was at nighttime, in the daytime I was roaming around in the camp, and this is where I actually survived,…
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Opinion Attacks against the Orthodox signal the return of ‘social anti-Semitism’
“We brought you to America to get away from this,” my mother called to say the night after the deadly attack in Jersey City against Hasidic Jews this past December. Her words rang in my ears as report after report came out of Jews being attacked, most of them Orthodox or Hasidic, on the streets…
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Opinion Trump Aside, Are Jews A Nationality?
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was signing an executive order defining Judaism as a nationality. The article set off an internet firestorm, with many Jews openly worrying that this was not meant to protect Jews, but to distinguish us from the American people. President Trump will sign an executive…
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