In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
Opinion
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Opinion
Israel’s Got a New Plan. Gee, How Come No One Thought of This Before?
Israel is preparing to adopt a new diplomatic strategy that is nothing short of breathtaking in its originality, according to a new report in Ynet, the Yediot Ahronot Web site. It’s all spelled out in a document that was submitted yesterday (October 8) to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Ynet reports. The new strategy reportedly starts…
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Opinion In the Warsaw Ghetto: Varieties of Heroism
Let us speak of heroes. Not, mind you, the voguish kind, whether the super-powered sci-fi heroes of the NBC television show or the very nice people nominated for United Jewish Communities’ current folly, “Jewish Community Hero of the Year.” I mean the real kind, the kind before whom we stand in awe. I mean, for…
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Opinion Heed the Call
Rabbi Yitzhak Nates and four other religious activists walked into a Philadelphia gun shop in January, and told the owner they wouldn’t leave until he signed a code of conduct intended to reduce “straw purchases” — the sale of numerous firearms to a single buyer, an indirect way too many guns get into the hands…
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Opinion Horror From Hollywood
‘Why are female directors silent about Roman Polanski’s arrest?” asked Aviva Kempner in a post on the Forward’s Sisterhood blog. Excellent question. Kempner, a documentary film director herself, has plenty of admiration for Polanski’s artistry and, as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, sympathy for his horrible childhood fleeing Nazi terror. But in Kempner’s view —…
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Letters October 16, 2009
Desmond Tutu Was Not Right About Israel Desmond Tutu was wrong about Israel, and so is letter-writer Martin Hird (“Desmond Tutu Was Not Wrong About Israel,” October 2). Hird wrote: “I don’t believe anyone can argue that if not for the Holocaust the State of Israel would exist today.” A more accurate statement about the…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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