Opinion

• Opinion

  The Jewish Future, in Black and White

  I’ve seen the future, and it’s black and white. It was a sunny Sunday morning in our Lower East Side community playground, animated by a frenetic blur of whooping kids, my own included. Alone on a bench, I’d neglected to bring a book from home and wasn’t in the mood to socialize with the parents…

  By Uzi Silber

  3 min read
• Opinion

  A Blockade That Doesn’t Apply to Lulavim

  When Israel recently opened a loophole in its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, it wasn’t heeding international calls to loosen its closure for humanitarian reasons. Instead, Israeli officials were spurred to action by the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. On September 29, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak approved the immediate importation of palm fronds, or lulavim, from…

  By Mya Guarnieri Oct 7, 2009 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  The Conscience of a (Jewish) Conservative

  Throughout my life, I’ve found that my co-religionists are astounded when they find out I’m a conservative. “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing as a Republican?” they ask, as if everything from Genesis through Kings II were somehow merely early drafts of the Democratic Party platform. Recently, the neoconservative eminence Norman Podhoretz turned…

  By Noam Neusner Oct 7, 2009 | 3 min read

Columnists View All

• Jodi Rudoren This is my last column as editor of the Forward

  

• Jay Michaelson American Jews were played — now what?

  

• Rob Eshman A billionaire Gen Z influencer is reinventing philanthropy — with this South African rabbi’s help

  

• Nora Berman Is Netflix’s new show the most Jewish cartoon ever?

  

• Dan Perry Israel is not deliberately killing journalists in Gaza. But it does bear responsibility for their deaths

  

• Emily Tamkin Trump’s attack on George Soros is ludicrous. It also endangers Jews (and everyone else)

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  What the Survey Really Says

  Well, the results are in. The latest Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion was released October 2 by the American Jewish Committee, and it’s chock-full of useful information — though probably not in the way its sponsor intended. The survey doesn’t really offer much that we didn’t already know about American Jewish opinion. It reveals…

  By J.J. Goldberg Oct 7, 2009 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Surprising, Yet Not Surprising: Ahmadinejad and Other Self-hating Jews

  The course of Middle East politics probably won’t be changed drastically by the news, reported October 3 in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born Jewish. But the disclosure is intriguing enough to spark a whole new line of speculation. The Forward’s Nathan Guttman suggests that Ahmadinejad’s obsessive Jew-bashing may be an extreme case…

  By J.J. Goldberg Oct 5, 2009 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Read Before You Rebuke

  Not more than a day after the Goldstone report — technically, the “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict” — was published, on September 15, the chorus of criticism began. Israel’s immediate and vehement denunciation of the report was quickly taken up by most American Jewish organizations. The most common…

  By Leonard Fein Sep 30, 2009 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  After Utopia, Loving Israel

  Why are American Jews abandoning us? Why do American Jews hold Israel to a higher standard than they do any other country in the world — including the one they so proudly call home? As an American professor on sabbatical in Israel, I field questions like these on a regular basis. The “waning American Jewish…

  By Jonathan D. Sarna Sep 30, 2009 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Who Can Head Off Climate Change Before the Tipping Point?

  Join me, if you will, in a brief thought experiment. Let’s imagine that John McCain had been elected president last fall. Imagine, too, that Republicans had held their own in the Senate and confidently dominated Washington the way they did two or three years ago. What would be different? Let’s start our search in Jerusalem….

  By J.J. Goldberg Sep 30, 2009 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Change on the Iran Front

  Israel’s new year got off to a promising start with a rare dose of good news on its most troubling battlefront: the Iranian nuclear threat. As it happened, Iran was also high on the agenda in New York when the world’s leaders gathered for the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly, right after…

  Sep 30, 2009 | 2 min read
• Letters

  October 9, 2009

  Defending Democracy In Honduras The rule of law and democracy must be restored in Honduras (“Jewish Groups Take Sides in Honduran Strife,” October 2). Rep. Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is correct in his statement that, regardless of how we view a deposed leader, coups d’etat are unacceptable and the United…

  Sep 30, 2009 | 4 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Ahmadinejad Was Heard — Were We?

  And then the shofar was sounded. For the first time the crowd stood still. The sound carried to the United Nations building across First Avenue. First a long blast and then the short staccato wailing sounds, reflecting the brokenness of too many in Israel and the world today, and then again the long tekiya, as…

  By Avi Weiss Sep 25, 2009 | 3 min read