Opinion

• Opinion

  Analogies Have Consequences

  In 1995, right-wing Israeli demonstrations opposing any political accommodation with the Palestinians featured posters depicting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the uniform of a Nazi SS officer. The message was duly received. On November 5, 1995, Yigal Amir, a far-right Israeli law student, assassinated Rabin at a Tel Aviv peace rally. Members of Israel’s…

  By Menachem Z. Rosensaft

  3 min read
• Opinion

  The Israeli Rabbis’ Mustard Wars, or Who You Callin’ ‘Neo-Reform’?

  Things are getting hot along one of Israel’s most important religious fault lines. No, it’s not Haredi vs. secular or Orthodox vs. Reform. It is a rancorous and seemingly unbridgeable rift within Religious Zionism, roughly the same territory that Americans call Modern Orthodoxy. As in America, Orthodox liberals in Israel have been on the defensive…

  By J.J. Goldberg Aug 7, 2009 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  One Last Letter to Good People: Farewell, Amos Kenan

  The news of Amos Kenan’s death in Tel Aviv August 4 came as a surprising, almost physical shock. A bohemian artist and journalist from Israel’s founding generation, Kenan has been on my mind a lot in the past few weeks. I met him only a couple of times, probably 40 years ago, when I was…

  By J.J. Goldberg Aug 6, 2009 | 2 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’s strike in Qatar: An audacious bid for victory, or just another foolhardy provocation?

  

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

  

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  Opinion

  A Missing Culprit, but Culpability All Around

  Here is how it happens. First, demagogues use incendiary rhetoric to inflame passions against a group or individual. Next, a “lone gunman” attacks the target(s) of that rhetoric. Then, the same demagogues who fanned the flames in the first place condemn the attack, express shock — shock! — that such a thing could ever have…

  By Jay Michaelson Aug 5, 2009 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Why Is Israel Trying To Break Breaking the Silence?

  Ever since Breaking the Silence published testimonies from Israeli soldiers who participated in Operation Cast Lead, various government bodies and public figures in Israel have waged an aggressive smear campaign against the organization. Rather than engaging in meaningful analysis and debate of the disturbing contents of these testimonies, Israeli officials have chosen to try to…

  By Gila Orkin Aug 5, 2009 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  The Long Shadow of Scandal

  ‘Three Rabbis named in Three Separate Conspiracy Charges.” “Two Rabbis and their two assistants… charged with violations.” “Rabbi to be indicted [for]… uttering or transmitting false or forged papers for the purpose of defrauding the Government.” Sound dismally familiar? Actually, these passages all appeared in The New York Times over what was, for Jews, an…

  By Jonathan D. Sarna Aug 5, 2009 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Teachable Moments, Sans Teachers

  I confess: When it first occurred, I didn’t think that Henry Louis Gates’s contretemps with Sergeant James Crowley of the Cambridge police could be much of “a teachable moment.” At the time, the whole episode, so vastly blown out of proportion, seemed to me best forgotten, a not especially surprising misunderstanding in an unusually awkward…

  By Leonard Fein Aug 5, 2009 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Roger Cohen Digs Himself Deeper

  Pity poor Roger Cohen. The freshman New York Times columnist has stumbled into a mess of trouble of late, and he doesn’t quite seem to know what’s hit him. And the more he tries to climb out of the hole he’s dug, the deeper he digs himself in. Cohen’s woes started last January, when he…

  By J.J. Goldberg Aug 5, 2009 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Save Sudan

  The green banners have draped the walls of Jewish centers and synagogues for years now, a public sign of the sympathy and responsibility so many American Jews share for the suffering people of Darfur. If there is a hell on earth, surely it is that barren region of western Sudan, where more than 3,300 villages…

  Aug 5, 2009 | 4 min read
• Letters

  August 14, 2009

  Let’s Not Let Norway Off Too Easy Your August 7 editorial “Norway and the Holocaust” cites Norway’s condemnation of Knut Hamsun, its pro-Nazi Nobel laureate in literature, in responding to critics of Norway’s chairmanship of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Rebirth. But the history of Norway’s relationship to Jews…

  Aug 5, 2009 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  ‘Re-Brissening’ Jon Stewart and David Ben-Gurion

  You may have read in our Bintel Blog recently about cultural critic Ron Rosenbaum and his July 24 manifesto in Slate, calling on Jon Stewart to show his ethnic pride and reclaim his birth name, Jonathan Leibowitz. It’s almost as if the Leibowitz in you is trying desperately to escape from behind the mask of…

  By J.J. Goldberg Aug 5, 2009 | 2 min read