Lev Golinkin is a regular contributor to the Forward whose work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, NBC, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time.com. His memoir, A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, chronicles his immigration from Ukraine.
Any successful refugee journey requires a number of miracles. One significant miracle for tens of thousands of Soviet Jews was the fact that disparate, raucous, often-clashing factions of American Jewry managed to set aside animosity and unite around our freedom. When I was 10 years old, my family was among those tens of thousands welcomed…
As anti-Semitism surges worldwide, Jews across the globe could sure use a little unity. Unfortunately, we just got the opposite, courtesy of Yitzhak Yosef, one of the two chief rabbis of Israel. During remarks at a rabbinical conference last week, Yosef exploded in a tirade against ex-Soviet Jews who had immigrated to Israel. Yosef’s remarks…
This week, a photo of comedian Ellen DeGeneres enjoying a football game alongside George W. Bush sparked an outburst of protests. Many denounced Ellen for legitimizing Bush, a man saddled with a legacy of anti-LGBT positions as well as the Iraq War. Ellen, who appears to have been jarred by the vehemence, responded by releasing…
Earlier this week, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) issued a press release about the use of the Holocaust to describe present day atrocities. They joined a host of other voices who had condemned Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for calling the U.S. asylum seeker detention centers “concentration camps.” “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally…
Ukraine’s always been a complex place when it comes to Judaism. The latest proof came on Sunday, when Jewish comedian Volodymyr Zelensky trounced incumbent president Petro Poroshenko in a landslide. After Zelensky’s inauguration, Ukraine will become the only country outside Israel to have a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister. But it’ll also be…
These days, reckless analogies are rampant, and not just in the Donald Trump White House. After the Robert Mueller investigation disproved collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow, the White House sent a letter to media producers, naming six prominent Russian collusion promoters, and asking outlets to consider their trustworthiness when inviting them on. In…
In the lead-up to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, a common technique on the right was to either imply or openly accuse anti-war liberals of being in league with Saddam Hussein. A cheap twist of rhetoric transformed protesting the invasion into endorsing the human rights abuses of Saddam’s regime. If you were against the war,…
The ongoing scandal over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court brings back echoes of the shameful treatment of Anita Hill during her 1991 testimony at the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. The parallels between the two hearings are a litmus test for how much Washington has progressed in the intervening twenty-seven years. The biggest…
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