In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
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Opinion
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Opinion
Got Mail?
A story is told of a man working in the city of London who routinely sent a letter to his mum in Kent to tell her what time he’d be home for supper each evening. The Royal Mail in Great Britain was that frequent, and that reliable. Up until 1950, twice-a-day delivery was available in…
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Opinion A Time for Candor
“Civility” is all the rage these days, but civility isn’t everything; there’s also candor. Nor should anemia be the price of civility; leave room for passion. On June 29, readers of JTA were presented with an opinion piece by two ex-officio leaders of American Jewry: Lee Rosenberg, president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,…
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Opinion The Israel Project to N.Y. Times: Expose Anti-Israel NGOs, Too — Like the New Israel Fund
A little before midnight on Monday, July 5, the New York Times posted on its website its lengthy, deeply reported investigative piece on U.S. tax-exempt donations that go to fund settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the right-wing American charities that channel those donations, including some that seemed in the Times…
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Opinion Obama Should Keep Bush’s Word, But Bibi Needn’t Keep Olmert’s?
Bibi Netanyahu’s visit to the Obama White House this week gives us an opportunity to watch history unfold. Or unravel. It’s hard to tell. Maybe it’s like that old Palmach song said, Rabotai, ha-historia hozeret (“Folks, history repeats itself”). On the eve of the summit, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs is beating up…
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Opinion Bibi’s Trifecta: Reach Out to Turkey, Boost Fuad, Diss Lieberman
The other day I was blogging about Binyamin “Fuad” Ben-Eliezer, Israeli trade minister, crusty old general and Labor Party senior statesman, who told Yediot Ahronot last weekend that the world is getting tired of Israel and its “explanations” for failing to conclude a peace agreement with the Palestinians, and that time is running out on…
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Opinion Awaiting a Third War With Lebanon
It’s summer in the Middle East, and the Arab media is again stoking speculation that war will break out between Israel and Lebanon. The typical scenario being put forth suggests that attacking Hezbollah on some pretense is a convenient way for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to escape pressures in the United States regarding…
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Opinion Peace Demands Courage
Too often Israeli-Palestinian relations are seen as a zero-sum conflict in which whatever is good for one party is bad for the other. In reality, both parties, for different reasons, need the same thing: a negotiated agreement that ends the occupation and the conflict once and for all. Palestinians cannot achieve their basic goal of…
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Opinion Postville: Slaughterhouse Slum
How did former Agriprocessors executive Sholom Rubashkin — convicted of financial fraud and sentenced in June to 27 years in prison — end up in such a sorry mess? And how did the company he ran, once the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world, help transform the rural community of Postville, Iowa, into a slaughterhouse…
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Opinion The Manipulative March
A friend called to tell me, with pride in his voice, that his 16-year-old son had been accepted to a very special “Israel program” — three weeks of intensive touring, some social action work, lectures, whatnot. But first, “They start in Prague, and then Krakow and Auschwitz.” There is a tradition that dates back to…
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Opinion The Michael Caine of Israel Ambassadors
Maybe I’m watching too many movies. When I was called and asked if I wanted to meet Matthew Gould, Britain’s first-ever Jewish ambassador to Israel, I immediately imagined a blue-eyed Paul Newman type who passes undetected. Searching the Web, I learned that his background includes deputy chief of mission in Iran and security-related postings in…
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Opinion The Big Tent
As the first-ever convening of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Jews got underway in California at the tail end of June, conference funder and philanthropist Lynn Schusterman threw down the gauntlet — in her Tulsa, Oklahoma way, of course. She’s too polite and Southern to pick a real physical fight, but her words were plenty…
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