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 De Blasio is the wrong messenger, but has a point: All Jews are responsible for each other.
Never tweet angry. It’s a trite commandment, but like many clichés, it sounds a universal truth. Mayor Bill de Blasio violated it last night, when he infamously proclaimed, “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed.” My message to the Jewish community, and all communities,…
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Opinion Debate | Should American Jews celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut?
Columnists Ari Hoffman and Joel Swanson discuss.
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Culture In the story of Henry VIII, lessons for Jews in power
Sometimes, books pair together naturally, like steak and red wine. At other times, the rhymes are harder to hear, but sound deeply and stay sticky in the brain. That’s the case with Hilary Mantel’s “Mirror and the Light” and Ruth Wisse’s “Jews and Power.” The first is about a person, the second about a people….
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Opinion Debate | Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitic?
Join Forward contributing columnists Ari Hoffman and Joel Swanson for a live debate on April 21 about whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. At a time of rising anti-Semitism, the question of how to define that ancient scourge that still plagues our modern world is a central one. It’s also a difficult one, given that we Jews…
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Opinion The Seder is a passport to the past and the future
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article In her book, “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag bans us from using metaphor to describe disease. We need to toughen up, she thinks, and forgo the flight away from the thing itself, the marauding crimes wreaked on the body by maladies too many to count. As Sontag writes,…
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Opinion Coronavirus’s lesson about the deep connection between the physical and spiritual
COVID-19 is the very worst kind of news. On a warpath from Wuhan, it has inflicted enormous human suffering, savaged the global economy, and ripped apart the very fabric of daily life. COVID combines the tools of the assassin’s trade — stealth, silence, ease of movement — with the worst of the terrorist’s capacity to…
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Opinion Joe Biden will save us – from politics
Last night, primary results confirmed what had become apparent last week: Joseph R. Biden will be the 2020 Democratic nominee for President. The familiar face sleepwalking through Iowa has made Joe-mentum the greatest comeback in primary history, the resurrection of a four-decade long presidential dream for the former Catholic boy from Scranton. Even those who…
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Opinion Jews love Israel but don’t vote on it, and other things everyone gets wrong
This week, the non-partisan Jewish Electorate Institute released a poll squarely aimed at the politics of Jewish American voters. Its conclusions offer a roundhouse refutation to the alarmists of all political stripes who insist that American Jews are a community in need of a politics of extremism. The first major finding is that American Jews…
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