Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion Freedom From Facts
The Glenn Beck “Restoring Honor” rally is over, and both Abraham Lincoln, whom Beck sought to take hostage, and Martin Luther King Jr., whom Beck sought to emulate, remain intact. We will get to Beck in a moment. But let us get Sarah Palin, who was a featured speaker at the rally, out of the…
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Opinion At Ground Zero, a Fight We’re All Losing
Let’s try this: Women wearing a hijab, the Muslim head covering, ought not be allowed to walk on the perimeter of Ground Zero, lest they offend the sensibilities of the survivors of 9/11. And are we not all, in some sense, survivors of 9/11? The deaths there were so random, so pointless in their non-specificity,…
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Opinion Our Charmless Politics
What to make of the political realm? We have a president of dazzling intellect, endowed with spectacular oratorical gifts, who improbably cannot find a voice to talk with the American people. Once, while Bill Clinton was still president, I heard him ruminate before an audience for 20 minutes or so, working out a connection between…
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Opinion For Israel, There’s Only One End Game
The “two state solution” to the Israel/Palestine conflict has become the glamourless default position of most of those who think about the conflict. It has achieved that lumpy status despite the flaws in its logic, the problematics of its implementation, the dangers that inhere in it and the determined hostility to it from some on…
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Opinion A Tale of Two Citizens
Now and then, there’s a moment when everything comes together, when all the sturm und drang that so often characterizes Israel’s saga recedes, the land is girdled by rainbows, it streets are filled with song and marshmallows. So it must have been when 29-year-old Hillary Rubin, who had made aliyah to Israel (from Detroit) in…
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Opinion Seeing the South With Shirley Sherrod
It would be an absurd overstatement to say that we were friends, but it is true that some 20 years ago, along with Irv Cramer, then the executive director of Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, I spent the better part of a week traveling through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, a trip organized for us…
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Opinion The Rabbinate Is the Problem
In Pirkei Avot, “The Ethics of the Fathers,” it is written: “Love work, hate holding power, and do not seek to become intimate with the authorities” (Pirke Avot 1:10). Now, let’s imagine that all the fervently Orthodox rabbis in Israel were men of unassailable virtue, wise like Solomon, gracious as Avraham, learned as Maimonides, humble…
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Opinion Hath Not a Jew Tensions?
And here, yet again, a new production of “The Merchant of Venice,” this time at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park. And, to decidedly mixed reviews, starring Al Pacino. (The Times loved him; The New Yorker not.) “The Merchant” is, of course, an exceedingly difficult play to pull off in our time. No…
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