David Klinghoffer
By David Klinghoffer
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Opinion Israel Beyond Emergencies
An ardently pro-Israel Catholic friend regularly takes out his frustration on me. He demands to know why American Jews aren’t outraged at President Obama for his chilliness to the Jewish state, why, when it comes to the existential dangers facing Israel, most Jews don’t seem to “get it.” A partial explanation may lie, surprisingly, in…
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Opinion In Scandals, a Wake-Up Call for Orthodoxy
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Opinion Breaking the Cease-Fire Between Science and Religion
What is portrayed as the debate between religion and science feels increasingly like watching the very bitter dissolution of a doomed marriage. The relationship started out all roses and kisses, proceeded to doubts and regrets, then fights and silences, a mutually agreed separation, and finally to curses and maledictions: “I wish you were dead!” In…
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Opinion Omer in America
With its roots ostensibly in seasonal farming routines, the Jewish ritual of counting the Omer between Passover and Shavuot doesn’t at first seem ripe with contemporary significance. But I often remember Rabbi David Lapin’s comment that he is surprised at how previous generations found as much meaning in Jewish observances as they did, when the…
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Opinion For Conservatives, Exile and Reformation
Following Barack Obama’s victory, political conservatives are suffering a crisis that could be called psychological but is better described as spiritual. The mood is one of depression, despair, panic. Responding to calls for rebuilding the conservative movement, Rush Limbaugh demands purging it instead: “We had some people abandon the conservative movement, and they need to…
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Opinion Why We Fear Sarah Palin
A friend of mine in the media covered the Republican National Convention and brought me back a souvenir: a navy blue yarmulke with “McCain ’08” printed on it in English and Hebrew. I guess there wasn’t time for the campaign to make them up with Sarah Palin’s name, too, which is a shame. With all…
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Opinion I’d Rather Fight Than Switch
Farewell, Forward readers. Owing to the tolerant and genuinely pluralistic editorship of J.J. Goldberg and Oren Rawls, I’ve had the privilege these past five years of speaking to this newspaper’s mostly liberal readership. I have done my best to articulate a religiously and politically conservative worldview rarely heard in the Jewish community. Now the time…
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Opinion The Return of the Aristotelian Repressed
Everything old is new again. For years I have argued that embracing evolutionary theory as Darwin formulated it makes nonsense of any coherent belief in God. As an analogy, I’ve cited a medieval philosophical debate pitting Aristotelians against religious traditionalists, notably Maimonides. I never dreamed that the debate itself would be revived — and within…
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Opinion For Lauren Boebert and her appalling ‘Beetlejuice’ antics, the season of repentance is at hand
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Opinion As Yom Kippur approaches, the legacy of America’s treatment of Jewish refugees must be a call to action
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Looking Forward (Some) U.S. Jews (finally) take a stand for Israeli democracy