Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion A Civility Deficit? Or an Indignation Deficit?
Civility’s all the rage these days. Its most prominent practitioner is, of course, President Barak Obama, who somehow manages to stay cool in an environment that is wildly overheated. Within the Jewish community, the push for civility has become almost ritualistic. Little wonder, given the very public breaches of civility these last two years or…
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Opinion Going From Egypt, Hoping for Elijah’s Coming
Among my favorite poems, there’s one called “Doubletake,” by Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate in literature in 1995. It includes a verse that reads, “History says, Don’t hope/on this side of the grave./But then, once in a lifetime/the longed for tidal wave/of justice can rise up,/and hope and history rhyme.” That verse, so filled with…
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Opinion How Big a Tent?
Drawing boundaries, whether for congressional districts after the decennial census, for nations (Israel/Palestine, for example) or to determine who belongs “within the tent” of Jewish life, is a complicated and often nasty business. At the moment, considerable Jewish energy is being invested on all sides of this last, the tent question. So, for example, a…
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Opinion Growing Disenchantment on a Global Scale
What do North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and Israel have in common? In December and January, the BBC commissioned a poll of more than 28,000 people in 27 countries around the world. The key question was “Please tell me if you think each of the following countries is having a mainly positive or mainly negative influence…
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Opinion What Obama Should Say to Israelis
There’s a growing clamor for President Obama to visit Israel (and, presumably, once in Jerusalem, Ramallah as well). But there’s a bit of a problem in imagining such a visit: What would the president say? He would likely deliver a very elegant speech; that’s one of his great skills. But beyond reassuring the Israelis of…
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Opinion Why Labor Issues Are Jewish Issues
There are moments when I envy America’s Roman Catholic Church. I felt that way back in 1983 when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a remarkable pastoral letter on war and peace, and again in 1986 with the USCCB’s “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy.” These are authoritative documents, bold…
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Opinion Revisiting Auschwitz
On an average day in 2010, nearly 3,800 people visited Auschwitz, up from about 1,200 a day in the year 2000. Such numbers jar me, since my vivid recollection of my own life-changing visit, in 1973, is that in addition to the 42 folks I was traveling with, there were no more than a hundred…
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Opinion Busting the Budget
My inbox has been crowded these last days by requests that I sign on to this draft letter or that, all demanding that budgets cuts proposed by House Republicans be restored. AmeriCorps fears it will be eliminated entirely. Federal help to states to defray some of the costs of special education would take a significant…
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