Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion To Know the Full Meaning of Freedom
Let’s assume that Assaf Wohl’s tongue was stuck firmly in his cheek when he proposed in the mass Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot April 4 that we should get rid of Passover. It’s “all about obsessive cleanliness and bad food,” Wohl wrote, calling it “an unbearable holiday.” Few American Jews will agree. Passover remains, here, the…
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Opinion Of Inflated Biographies and Deflated Charity
No one is perfect. Yet the high emotions of a political campaign are an inducement to idol worship. What follows is intended as an antidote to idolatry. I set John McCain to the side here. Many admire him; few idolize him. His strange plans for the economy, which would add some $400 billion to the…
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Opinion If We Judge a Man by His Words
Things are not always what they seem, but sometimes they are. Public rhetoric is sometimes over the top. The same person can speak hateful words and words of beauty. Context isn’t everything, but it is a lot. Herewith, some quotes of more than passing interest. You may want to see, as you’re reading, whether you…
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Opinion Meanwhile, the War
Meanwhile, the war. Iraq, that is, driven from the front pages by the economy, by the presidential campaign, by Eliot Spitzer, driven from public consciousness by all those plus the lies, the deceptions, most of all the pointlessness of thinking about it since President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and the rest are plainly…
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Opinion What Zionism Was Not Supposed To Be
There was scarcely time to grieve before the event itself receded and the eight young men who were killed in the horrid attack in the Mercaz Harav yeshiva (as also those who were wounded) were transformed into symbols, and then from symbols into launching pads for all manner of political argument. It is almost always…
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Opinion Why Do We Fawn Over John Hagee?
Of politics, bedfellows and such: The dustup over evangelical Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement of Senator John McCain would not have attracted the attention it did had it not come in the wake of the Tim Russert-provoked controversy regarding Senator Barack Obama, the pastor of his church and Louis Farrakhan. In the aftermath of the revelation…
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Opinion If Audacious Hope Turns Into Dispirited Cynicism
Of course there are risks; there always are. Let us be frank. It is by no means clear that the next president, no matter how skillful, will be adequate to the multiple challenges we face: ending a war, restoring American honor, dealing with the Medicare crisis (and the crisis of healthcare costs in general), reversing…
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Opinion The Poor Are With Us, But Are We With the Poor?
Different interpretations abound, but unexplained, there could hardly be a greater contrast than that between two sentences, one from the New Testament (Matthew 26:11), “The poor you will always have with you,” the other from Deuteronomy (15:4), “There will not be any poor among you.” Odds are that most people would accept the first of…
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Fast Forward Why some Satmar Hasidic leaders endorsed Zohran Mamdani as mayor, stunning many Jewish voters
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News Mamdani opposes Zionism, but wants New York public schools to teach about it
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Books John Irving always felt like an outsider — is that all he thinks there is to Jewishness?
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