Samuel G. Freedman
By Samuel G. Freedman
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Opinion What Jimmy and Tim Taught Me About Catholics and Jews Getting Along
Several months before the Second Vatican Council adopted its landmark document, Nostra Aetate, my family moved about a half-mile across our New Jersey hometown. That minor distance spanned the dividing line between the attendance zones for two elementary schools, meaning that at age 10 I was abruptly separated from my childhood friends. Though I went…
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Opinion How Rachel Dolezal Crossed Line From Solidarity to Slumming
A few years after graduating from college, when I was living in the racially mixed Chicago suburb of Oak Park, I played pick-up basketball at the local YMCA. Among the regulars was another young white man, who habitually augmented his gym gear with knee-high tube socks striped with red, green and black, the colors of…
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Opinion My Jewish Nose Got Me Pulled Over — White Privilege Got Me Off
One morning in early 1982, I was driving up Route 1 toward Newark Airport, borderline late for my flight. As I wove through morning traffic, calculating how fast I could go without risking a ticket, I suddenly saw the whirling red cap of a police car in my rearview mirror. I pulled over and waited…
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Opinion Divergent Views of the Holocaust Form Root of Tension With Israel
Once upon a time, decades before the embittered encounters of Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli prime minister decided to publicly humiliate an American president whom he deemed disloyal. The men in question were Menachem Begin and Ronald Reagan, and the immediate cause of their confrontation in 1981 was Israel’s annexation of the Golan…
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Opinion Checking Your Jewish Privilege
Forty-seven years ago this spring, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered United Nations peacekeepers out of Sinai. His decision set off the chain of events leading to Israel’s pre-emptive strike on Cairo’s air force and its lightning victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War. Back in those anxious weeks of 1967,…
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News Donald Sterling Rant Reveals Archetype of Small-Minded Jew Hasn’t Quite Died
Several hours before Yom HaShoah solemnly commenced, the website deadspin.com released the fullest version yet of the secretly recorded conversations between Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and V. Stiviano, his ex-mistress. Their subject matter, Sterling’s antipathy toward black Americans, at one point veered in a remarkably timely direction. “Isn’t it wrong?” Stiviano…
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Opinion ‘Breaking Bad’s Jewish Lesson
One of the most famous passages in the Hebrew Bible tells the Jewish people “what the Lord doth require of thee: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” Less remembered, but perhaps more revealing, is the preceding verse in the sixth chapter of the Book of Micah….
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Opinion Sheldon Adelson’s Self-Defeating Meddling
In late July, Sheldon Adelson pledged $6.5 million of his casino empire’s fortune, and potentially as much as $100 million, to a campaign by the Republican Jewish Coalition. It was aimed at peeling away Jewish voters from the incumbent Democratic president, Barack Obama, in potential swing states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Just to underscore…
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