Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion The Silk-purse Promises of a War We’ve Lost
The Iraq Study Group believes that “The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002…
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Opinion The Questions That Might Otherwise Be Lost
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: “As your answers have become my questions, may my questions become your answers.” The know-nothings and the know-everythings are at it again. The know-nothings, as ever, mock Darwin, scorn stem-cell research, affirm abstinence, blame science for what they see as a collapse of American values and an imminent threat to the…
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Opinion To Those Who Would Count Stones Thrown
Crunch time approaches, as we have known for years it one day would. The texture of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is about to undergo a seismic shift. Very soon now — in mid-December, it’s said — we will have the report of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former secretary of state…
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Opinion Leave a Seat Empty at the Thanksgiving Table
In the late winter of 1951, while serving as vice president of the student body at Forest Park High School, in Baltimore, I met with our school’s principal, a man named Wendell Dunn, to talk about what we might do to mark the then-approaching “Brotherhood Week.” Baltimore in those days was a segregated city, segregated…
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Opinion All Worked Up, About All the Wrong Things
It is a puzzlement: How can a community so smart and sophisticated as ours so frequently overreact, under-react, be so off course? Three examples: Among the best known and most highly respected historians of our time is Tony Judt, a professor at New York University and author of the lavishly praised, “Postwar: A History of…
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Opinion I Simply Remember My Favorite Things…
‘Victory,” John Kennedy famously said after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, “has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.” But that was in 1961, before we were able to test paternity by DNA. The illusory victory of which President Bush babbles daily is a fatherless chimera. The defeat toward which he propels us has a…
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Opinion The Fantasies of Avigdor Lieberman
Some people going through a reasonably civilized divorce confess to an unsettling fantasy. While they do not wish their partner ill, it would be nice if somehow that partner would just disappear. Cease to exist. Be utterly pulverized (albeit painlessly, to be sure). See the lightning storm up ahead? Maybe you’ll get lucky and the…
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Opinion Habits of the Informed Heart
It can hardly be called a parade. Some people are frenzied, others are sluggish, the drums beat out of synch, it’s altogether a mess. But even so, some things become clear. For example, we can now state definitively that Jerusalem is neither Washington, D.C., nor Batavia, Ill. The way we know this? When the Torah…
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Film & TV A new documentary challenges stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women — and their wigs
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Yiddish World New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America