Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion It’s Race
When David Letterman asked Barack Obama the other night whether he shared Jimmy Carter’s view that much of the venom directed at him could be explained by racism, the president replied with his best applause line of the show: “First of all, it’s important to realize that I was actually black before the election” —…
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Opinion The Joys of Socialized Medicine
Oddly, it was only after President Obama’s speech to the joint session of Congress that it dawned on me for the very first time that without Medicare these past years, I would by now be either bankrupt or dead. There are two reasons I’d never before thought of that. The lesser of the two is…
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Opinion An Experiment That, for a Time, Did Not Fail
“Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end…” That song may be much on the lips (or, more likely, in the hearts) of veterans of Israel’s now nearly comatose kibbutz movement. It may seem a bit odd to be talking about the kibbutz movement, home to less than 2% of Israel’s people,…
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Opinion A Health Care Solution, but Dare We Speak Its Name?
Take away the loonies, the ones shouting comparisons of President Obama to Hitler, the ones talking about “death panels” and all the other stuff. Imagine a reasoned discussion of the pros and cons of the health care reforms now before us. The health care reforms now before us? Excuse me, but what are they? We…
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Opinion A Lion Who Roared for the Least Fortunate
There was no reason back then, none at all, to suppose that Edward Moore Kennedy — Teddy — would one day be thought not merely a distinguished United States senator but one of the all-time greats. In 1962, at the ripe age of 30, one brother the incumbent president, another the nation’s attorney general, Ted…
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Opinion Which War To Tackle? ’48 or ’67?
Does history matter? At first blush, the question is — well, to blush for. Obviously, history matters. July Fourth is history, and so is Pesach, and Simon Bolivar and the Great Depression and Galileo and on and endlessly on. Still, much depends on how we define words. I leave for another time discussion of what…
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Opinion The Anti-Pressure-Over-Settlement-Expansion League?
The tag line above the Anti-Defamation League’s Web site reads, “To stop the defamation of the Jewish people, to secure justice and fair treatment for all.” Its mission statement, unchanged since it was founded in 1913 and prominent on the home page of its Web site, is straightforward: “The immediate object of the League is…
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Opinion Teachable Moments, Sans Teachers
I confess: When it first occurred, I didn’t think that Henry Louis Gates’s contretemps with Sergeant James Crowley of the Cambridge police could be much of “a teachable moment.” At the time, the whole episode, so vastly blown out of proportion, seemed to me best forgotten, a not especially surprising misunderstanding in an unusually awkward…
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