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
Goldstone’s Legacy
Even if granted the very best of intentions, Richard Goldstone’s report on Israel’s and Hamas’s conduct during last winter’s military operation in Gaza has left a bitter and confusing legacy. Bitter, because rather than being a constructive prod toward self-examination of the morality of a new kind of warfare, the report has left Israel only…
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Opinion Denial on the Temple Mount
In recent weeks, Palestinian religious and political leaders have brought tensions over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to a boil. During Sukkot, Jerusalem’s muezzins called on Palestinians to rally around the Al-Aqsa Mosque, reportedly warning that “Jews will try to break into it.” A little more than a week earlier, Palestinian worshipers at the site hurled rocks…
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Opinion A Nobel Future?
At last I have use of the word: Surprize! For that is surely the least that can be said about this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama. But enough about that, maybe even too much. It’s a different Nobel Prize, with larger ramifications, that I find fascinating — to wit, this year’s prize in…
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Opinion J Street and Main Street: The Israel Lobby We Need
When J Street’s supporters gather in Washington later this month for the dovish Israel advocacy group’s first national conference, they will have no shortage of things to celebrate. In the year and a half since its launch, the self-proclaimed “political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement” has made itself a major player in the Jewish…
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Opinion Why Antonin Scalia Was So Influential — and Bad for the Jews
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died suddenly at 79. His legacy is that of a staunch conservative and religious traditionalist. J.J. Goldberg explains in this 2009 piece why his views were so dangerous for Jews. Justice Antonin Scalia is rightly known as the most conservative member of the very conservative Supreme Court led by…
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Letters October 23, 2009
An Orthodox Exodus I was surprised and disappointed to see you print the old-school canard that the liberal streams of Judaism will inevitably disappear due to intermarriage, with only Orthodoxy thriving in the future (“The Jewish Future, in Black and White,” October 16). This outcome has been predicted for decades with no tangible proof that…
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Opinion What’s in a Name?
Before making his mark in the Jewish world by raising millions for summer camping, Jerry Silverman made his mark in the business world by selling blue jeans and sneakers. He’s now adapting those marketing smarts to one of the toughest sells in Jewish communal life — rescuing the federation system from irrelevancy. So, it’s no…
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Opinion The Boycott and Its Discontents, or How Not To Defend Israel
Every now and then, somebody you thought you knew does or says something so completely out of character that it catches you off-guard and forces you to look at things in new and surprising ways. Take, for example, the recent statement by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, calling on “international academic and labor…
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Opinion To Understand Obama’s Nobel, Think Not of America, but of America in the World
Just about the best analysis of Obama’s Nobel that I have yet seen is this op-ed essay by Alon Pinkas, former Israeli consul general in New York and a close ally of Ehud Barak (that’s more a compliment to Barak than to Alon). His main point is that, as I argued in an earlier blog…
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Opinion …And a Very Happy Whatchamacallit…
And to all dear readers, whatever your creed or background, a very happy and sweet Shemini Atzeret — or as a former editor of mine once referred to the festival, when I told him I had swapped shifts and would be out for yet another two days: You’re Making This One Up, Right? hag sameach,…
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Opinion Obama, the Double-edged Nobel Sword and that Little Blue Dress
The Nobel committee may not have done President Obama much of a favor in awarding him the Peace Prize. At best it’s a double-edged sword. As Yediot Ahronot’s Washington correspondent Yitzhak Ben-Horin points out in a smart news analysis on the paper’s Ynet Web site (in Hebrew — not yet translated into English as I…
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