Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion Was There a Context for Breivik’s Madness?
His lawyer says he is insane, which is a perfectly plausible diagnosis of Anders Behring Breivik, the slaughterer of 77 Norwegians, most of them children, on July 22. The diagnosis is not only plausible; it is comforting. For if we are dealing here with a madman, then no further inquiry regarding motive need detain us….
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Opinion We Jews Are a Peculiar People
It will not come as a surprise if I suggest that we Jews are a peculiar people. For all the talk of escalating assimilation, we remain, in important respects, quite different from most other Americans. I report here on a massive survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a survey of…
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Opinion A World Where Jews Have No Safe Houses
Not so long ago, Jews everywhere understood the bottom-line benefit of being Jewish. They may have put it differently, but in the end it was this: To be Jewish means you have safe houses all over the world. Heaven forbid you have to run and hide, you can turn to another Jew — even one…
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Opinion ‘We Don’t Hunt’
Here is a story I used to tell frequently, but haven’t for many years now. It is a true story I made up in 1980 or so. (A true story I made up? Yes. The compelling reason we love stories is that they do not have to have happened in order to be true.) It…
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Opinion A Way To Embrace Palestinian Statehood
Few issues have so discombobulated the American Jewish community — to say nothing of the Israeli government — as the prospect of a United Nations vote on recognition of Palestine. Students of the matter debate whether such a vote would have any practical significance, but most Jews, as well as most Jewish organizations, have viewed…
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Opinion A Country In Need of Social Justice
Why does it matter that the Jewish people persists, beyond the sometime comforts of ethnic identity? What grand purpose is served by the continuing existence of the Jews? Obviously, there are a variety of plausible responses to those questions. Having a compelling way to fill in the blank in the sentence that begins, “It is…
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Opinion Will the Real Daniel Gordis Please Stand Up?
Rabbi Daniel Gordis, I’m told, is perhaps the single most popular speaker on Israel to American Jewish audiences. He moved to Israel in 1998, after serving as founding dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and in Jerusalem he serves as senior vice president of the…
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Opinion I’ve Got a Problem With Barack Obama
Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone, but the United States has some problems. Fear not, however; for two reasons, I am not going to present here a catalog of our problems. The first reason is that there is not sufficient space to do that; the second is that by now, we are, most of us, quite familiar…
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